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We left the martian landscapes of Mexican Hat with relief and drove the 350 plus miles to Taos in New Mexico. We were very excited about Taos, we had read a lot about the town and New Mexico was a new state which neither of us had visited before. Unfortunately Taos was a wash out – literally.

As we approached Taos we crossed a broad flat plain and could see the small town nestling at the foot of a range of mountains, we crossed the high bridge across the gobsmackingly deep canyon of the Rio Grande river and drove past the collection of very weird eco dwellings known as the Earth Ship community. Things were looking good even if it seemed a bit cloudy.

The bridge across the Rio Grande Gorge. Taos is on the horizon at the foot of the mountains.

Taos town was bigger, busier and there was more traffic than we had anticipated but there seemed to be a lot of quirky interesting looking shops and when we went for a stroll we found a great place to eat next to a fairly good bookshop so we felt pretty happy.

The next day we decided to drive out to the state park which straddled the Rio Grande Gorge and find a good walk, and we planned to drive the Enchanted Highway loop through the mountains the next day to try more mountain walks. After a fair bit of confusion when seeking advice on walks from the slightly deaf and very confused volunteer at the local visitors centre we set out on the trail to Arsenic Springs (enticing name). We expected this trail to descend some way into the gorge and then we planned to pick up the rim trail running parallel to the river as we didn’t fancy the 950 foot plus descent and ascent of a return trip to bottom of the gorge given the high temperatures and altitude. Because it was so hot we didn’t bother packing any water-proofs and just took a packed lunch, lots of water and some camera kit. In the end we decided to push on to the bottom of the gorge and spent a lovely couple of hours on the banks of the Rio Grande pottering about in the deep canyon.

Isabel descending into the Rio Grande Gorge

The Gorge of the Rio Grande

Isabel by the Rio Grande

By the time we started back up the very steep path up to the rim the clouds had started to gather which was at first a relief from the sun but then they rapidly darkened and we could hear thunder in the distance. As we slowly plodded upwards we decided that as Isabel’s ankle was playing up I would take both the backpacks and head up to the car and she would follow at her own pace. As I drew further and further ahead of her I could feel the first drops of rain from the very dark clouds now pressing in above us. The rain got steadily worse and Isabel disappeared from view below me. By the time I got to the car it was pissing down and the thunder and lightening was getting a bit intense. I dried off as best i could, slipped on a waterproof top and grabbing Isabel’s waterproofs I set of back down the gorge to find her.

Coming up had been very tiring, it was about as steep and hard as climbing a hundred flights of stairs continuously on rough ground, so I didn’t fancy going back down in the downpour but I thought I would meet up with Isabel pretty quickly before going too deep. As I negotiated each switch back and got further and further down into the gorge in the pouring rain I began to get more and more concerned that I could not see Isabel below. Maybe she had twisted an ankle and was now stuck down the gorge in the storm. I shouted her name but the noise of the storm just drowned my voice. Eventually after getting about halfway back down I reluctantly decided to head back up, but by now I was very keen to find her. Finally right at the top I heard her calling me from above. I finally reached her right at the rim by which time I was completely winded from my forced march back up the path driven by anxiety.

It turned out that isabel had been passed by a couple also coming up who were concerned about her being on her own in the storm and with no proper kit, so they had loaned her a waterproof top and kindly stayed with as they ascended. Unfortunately they had convinced her to strike off on a small side path not far from the top which led to their camp site and not the trail head we had started from. So Isabel and I had missed each other.

By the time we were reunited we were very wet and pretty pooped from the walk and the excitement and we were deeply irritated with ourselves for breaking just about every rule, no proper kit, separating etc.

The rain that arrived that day was unfortunately not a transitory phenomenon. The wet weather over Taos, and as we later realised over this whole part of the US, was a big static system and the day after our adventure in the Gorge it rained a fair bit and was overcast with low clouds so the mountain hikes were out. The weather continued to deteriorate and by our last day it settled in and we had over 24 hours of heavy rain falling from low and grey clouds. All a bit dispiriting, no hikes, no lovely vistas, and nothing much to do. The fiesta in the town was a wash out. In the end we visited the grave of Kit Carson and went to the movies to break up the tedium. We saw the film Inception which was really excellent – go and see it (in Crested Butte we went to see another movie “Day and Knight” – don’t see this movie, its so bad it will make your head hurt and your soul ache).

Wet weather in Taos New Mexico

Finally it was time to leave Taos and move onto Sedona in Arizona but on the way out of town we stopped off at the eco house community spread out across the plateau and collectively known as the Earth Ship Community. Lots of strange and oddly beautiful dwellings made from tires, bottles, tin cans and all completely self sufficient in terms of energy, water etc. It was very entertaining but I find green ideology tedious in the extreme and feel the Earth Ship community is little more than a novelty. I think that in 50 years if the community is still there it will be a just tourist attraction showing an odd turn of the century folly.

Part of the water recycling system in an Eco House

The Eco houses are partially made from old tire and tin cans embedded in cement

The journey to Sedona was a longish 450 miles on the Interstate, equivalent to our motorways, which meant fast speed but we knew it would be tedious and a bit stressful with more traffic and more big trucks than our usual two lane blacktop highways. We decided to break our journey overnight in the town of Gallup which is a sort of capital city for native americans, mostly Navajo but also Ute and Apache. The Interstate we were taking for almost the whole journey to Sedona was I40 which replaced and mostly obliterated the old famous Route 66 which linked Chicago to Loa Angeles.

Route 66

We tried driving some of the way on the remaining parts of Route 66 that run parallel to the Interstate but they are just fragments of this once great highway lined with poor little settlements and derelict buildings that once made a living from the passing traffic. Gallup itself was a bit depressing, both the highway and people traffic on the railroad line passing through town from the east to west coast have all but vanished and its was just an ugly strip town full of motels and native american craft shops. If you have ever seen Robert Crumb’s cartoon critiques of the ugliness of much of american highway urban sprawl you will get a fair idea of what Gallup looked like. We did manage to visit the native american museum but managed to miss the evening medicine man dance.

The next day we pushed on to Sedona but with two great stops en route. The first was at the beautiful Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park where we managed a short walk out into the badlands of the painted Desert itself. At times the texture of the landscape reminded me of the film of astronauts walking on the surface of the moon. It was very hot.

Isabel walking in the painted desert

Isabel finds some shade in the Painted Desert

The beautiful petrified wood in the Painted Desert

Tony walking across the lunar landscape

Later we stopped at Meteor Crater which is somewhere I have always wanted to visit. The impact crater is huge and the best preserved large meteor crater on earth. In the middle it is deeper than the Eiffel Tower. We walked a bit of the rim, gawped, visited the museum and then pushed on arriving in the wonderfully weird and wacky Sedona by early evening

Isabel on the outside rim of Meteor Crater

Meteor Crater

Tony on the rim of Meteor Crater

We arrived in Moab in Utah after our eventful journey from Crested Butte in Colorado during which we had managed to shred a tire deep in the Gunnison Canyon.

We had visited Moab once before for a few days back in 2005 and liked the place and the stunning landscape surrounding it. Moab lies at the heart of red rock canyon lands and there are two nearby National Parks, Arches and Canyonlands itself, both reasonably close to the town. The problem with the landscape here is that you can go and look at a lot of lovely vistas but the actual hiking is very limited, limited by both by the very hot 100+ degree daytime temperatures and the sheer scale and roughness of the terrain.

Moab itself is an OK sort of place, it’s dominated by outdoor activities of one sort or another: rafting, mountain biking, off-road jeeping, climbing. It’s full of tanned and fit looking young people. Both Isabel and I agreed we wished we had done more of that sort of stuff when we were young instead of taking so many drugs and and spending our youth trying to overthrow the state.

Moab had a reasonably good bookshop, the really nice one we remembered from our last trip had unfortunately closed and the range of the new bookshop was a bit limited. I did manage to buy the recently published autobiography of Mark Rudd who was an SDS student leader at Columbia in 1968 who then helped found the Weathermen and spent many years underground before surfacing and eventually becoming a maths teacher in Albuquerque. I thought his memoir was a very worth while read full of what felt like honesty and it offered a fascinating insight to how a small bunch of radicals could end up going so crazy. It stirred a lot of feelings within about my own past and I had lots of interesting dreams each night as I read it.

We did a couple of visits to Arches and I took the ranger tour of a closed part of the park called Fiery Furnace on my birthday which was pretty fantastic but did involve a fair bit of scrabbling and manoeuvring through narrow rock slots etc.

The Balanced Rock in Arches – its over 200 feet tall

We also visited the Island in the Sky in Canyonlands a couple of times. This is a large mesa uplifted plateau that juts out into and above the extraordinary complex of canyons carved by the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. We did a really great short walk at the end of the Island right along the rim and out to the point of the Island (we had done this walk once before in 2005). The evening light on the strange rocks and plants of the high mesa was often very beautiful but during the whole visit to Moab I was a bit frustrated because on several evenings the clouds gathered and shut out the evening light and this really frustrated my photographic ambitions.

Trees along the canyon rim on the Island in the Sky

Isabel on the canyon rim walk on the Island in the Sky

At the end of the Rim walk

Our days were punctuated by our visits to see Mr Chip at Chips Tires to see if our replacement tire had arrived: it never did and we left town without it but with a temporary spare which meant we were less likely to be stranded in the event of a blow out in some isolated back country spot.

We found a few things we had missed on our first trip, a really nice waterfall and a lovely walk up a fantastic canyon called Negro Bills Canyon which criss-crossed a small stream and ended at the third larger rock arch in the US, it was such a nice trail that we did it twice. Both times we got to the huge rock arch at the end of the trail and watched people doing the terrifying abseiling and descents by rope from the arch 200 feet above.

The waterfall outside Moab

Isabel resting under the huge rock arch at the end of Negro Bills Canyon

The only near adventure we had was when we decided to try to drive up onto Island in Sky via Pucker Pass. The name should have been a bit of a giveaway. We knew it was going to be a dirt road and that it would switchback up a big altitude gain onto the mesa but the road turned out to be of poorer quality than we expected and like a lot of land in this neck of the woods as soon as you go off the beaten track you begin to feel very isolated in a very harsh and unforgiving landscape. We worked our way many miles up the road higher and higher and then we hit the “Pucker” that gives the road its name. This turned out to be a stretch of road where the road becomes single track and is enclosed between two steep and high rock walls and the upward incline steepens alarmingly, at the same time the road surface turned to a mixture of very soft deep sand intermixed with some large sharp boulders. As we entered the Pucker I could feel the jeeps wheels beginning to spin and lose grip and then smashing into the large boulders, and after our previous shredded tire I really didn’t want to lose another, certainly not this far from civilisation. We stopped and discussed the situation and decided to turn back. At that point we thought we had just enough room to turn around but we could see the slot of the pucker getting steadily tighter ahead and thought a few more yards and we may not be able to turn around. I wasn’t even really sure we could turn around where had stopped given how tightly we were caught between the canyon walls but eventually I managed a sort of thirty point turn, inch by inch with Isabel outside telling when to stop. We managed to turn around and get home. The next day we drove into the Island in the Sky via the regular route and then then onto the top half of Pucker Pass road and drove in the other way, we stopped where the road suddenly descended and deteriorated and walked down to an overlook over the Pucker itself and discovered that if we had only gone on for another 150 yards or so the previous day we would have been out of the worse of it. But we could have got stuck.

On the Pucker Pass drive – shortly after this we nearly got stuck and turned back

After Moab it was onto the minute settlement of Mexican Hat. We had passed through Mexican Hat, named after a nearby giant sombrero shaped rock atop a large rock pinnacle, once before on a trip in 2005 so were knew what to expect. Not a lot – in terms of civilization that is. This part of southern Utah looks a bit like the surface of Mars and seems almost as empty and harsh. But it does feature some stunning landscape, so the plan was to go out early in the morning and in the evening towards sunset to catch the best of the light and avoid the oven like midday temperatures, and spend the middle part of the day snoozing in our air-conditioned motel room. Our plan was frustrated by the weather. The days were as hot as expected but each morning and evening clouds gathered ruining the light so the two days and three nights we spent in Mexican Hat turned out to be mostly boring with a few moments of terror (see below).

We drove out to the Goosnecks State Park the first night and got some good light on the overlook gazing into the vast twisting canyons (known as entrenched meanders) of the San Juan River. The next day we drove to high and fairly remote Muley Point, we which had been told offered a fantastic view out across this strange landscape. Unfortunately the drive there from Mexican Hat involved driving up a stretch of road called the Moki Dugway (Google it). This is a a narrow and rough dirt road that winds up a series of very steep switchbacks across the face of a very high cliff for several miles before cresting the plateau. For some reason I find driving such narrow roads with no guard rails alongside precipitous drop offs very terrifying. As I drove further and further up and kept glimpsing the view over the edge which looked more and more like the view you get from an airplane as it descends to land I could feel the sweat trickling, my heart pounding and my breathing getting pretty intense. Finally we got to the top where the inevitable native American jewellery seller was waiting to try to flog us some necklaces. As I drove I kept thinking how much my friend Ilse would love to drive this road

Muley Point turned out to be as spectacular as we had hoped as well as being empty and peaceful and a bit cooler than the canyon floors below.

Gazing out from Muley point

Unfortunately I never got any decent light to photograph the nearby Valley of the Gods which we visited twice, once just after dawn and once just before sunset to be met with grey cloud cover both times.

A few moments of good light in the Valley of the Gods

Generally being in Mexican Hat felt a bit tedious and tiring. The land there is so empty and hot that I sometimes felt like a space traveller visiting Mars. We would open the pod door from our air-conditioned motel room to be met with a heat that felt like the heat you get when you open the door to check a roast, stumble to our car the inside of which was too hot to touch and sit panting while the cars air-conditioning struggled to bring its interior temperature down. Once when I went out on my own during the midday heat to photograph the actual Mexican Hat rock I drove up a deserted dirt track and climbed a small nearby hill for a better view. The land felt lifeless and baked and I could feel the moisture leaving my body. Without being too melodramatic I could sense that this landscape could kill you real quick.

Eventually with relief we left Mexican Hat and drove the three hundred miles plus to Taos in New Mexico. On the way we finally got our replacement wheel which was relief. We also stopped at the Four Corners, which is the only point in the US where four states (Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico) all touch at single point. We were quite excited about walking around the pole marking the four corner’s point (we had been cooped pin the car for hours) but as we pulled up we saw the sign saying “Fours Corners closed due to building work”. There was a small crowd of other disappointed tourists clustered outside the locked gates so we consoled ourselves by taking each others photos and then we pushed on towards Taos.

Four Corners is closed

2500 miles and 20+ days and about halfway through our road trip.

We arrived in Denver at the end of June, picked up the hired car, spent a night in an airport hotel and then set off for our first stop which was Estes Park high in the Rockies. The car by the way was a Chevy Jeep SUV that was so big that it was a bit like driving a small bungalow. I tried to wipe the windscreen by hand but I couldn’t reach the middle, the hood comes up to my upper chest level.

As soon as we arrived we felt like shit. The motel we had booked turned out to be not very nice and the combined jet lag and mild altitude sickness really hit us. Headaches, disrupted sleep, mood swings, moments of dizziness and general fatigue. Made us both feel ancient and little depressed. But it slowly passed.

Estes Park was a nice enough little town, fairly touristy but the Rocky Mountain National Park was just a few miles up the road and it had a great little bookshop. Isabel and I both really love American independent bookshops and American books in general. The physical quality of the books here just delights us and we happily while away time in bookshops discussing and comparing the leading in the US books (leading is the space between lines of text and it is much more generous and therefore better than in Europe, even smaller fonts look delightful with more leading), the slightly larger formats used for paperbacks and the lovely matt coating they use for their covers (I often get odd stares from other customers who spot me running my hands over the book covers and purring a little as I feel its subtle stippled texture).

We managed a couple of hikes in in the Rockies, including one up to Emerald Lake, before moving on but the altitude meant the walking and especially the climbing was hard work. Above 10,000 feet we both ran out of puff alarmingly quickly on the uphill sections (i.e. 90% of the walk) and had to stop often to recover.

Emerald Lake at the end of our hike

One of the many waterfalls in the Rocky Mountain National Park

Isabel crosses a snow field on the way to Emerald Lake

From Estes Park we headed up and over the Rockies through the National Park and across the continental divide on one of the highest paved roads in America topping out around 12,500 feet. There was still a lot of snow around and we went part of the way up via the old dirt highway past lots of lovely vistas and a great waterfall all done at a sedate 15 miles an hour through the switchbacks.

The top of the pass over the Rocky Mountains on the way to Leadville

Once over the mountains we dipped down and then up again to reach our next stop which was Leadville, the highest town in Colorado. On the way we passed through the delightfully named town of Climax. We had stopped in Leadville once for lunch on a previous road trip during a snow storm and really liked the look of the place and so decided to come back and take a closer look. It’s an old mining town with many wonderful original buildings from the late 19th century and an odd population of tanned mountain folk with a lot of fairly weird and wonderful refugees from the rest of America who have washed up here. One can’t help but feel that some people who made their money from the drugs trade back in the sixties and seventies chose to retire to Leadville. It claims to have the highest (by altitude) head shop in America which we visited. We were there for the 4th July parade and we both got absurdly excited. Its was a great small town community event, a parade which included  pretty much anyone who wanted to join in, the cops and local firemen (hitting their sirens), anybody with a horse or slightly odd vehicle (and there were a lot of them), the Scouts, a float promoting the campaign against domestic violence, etc etc. Many of the participants carried banners promoting candidates for local office. Everybody on the parade was chucking sweets and small plastic toys out of their cars by the handful and the local kids were running about in state of great excitement picking them, eventually even Isabel got carried away and grabbed some. Later that evening there was a truly stupendous fireworks display which we later discovered had cost an astonishing $10,000, all raised locally.

The 4th of July in Leadville

We stayed in Leadville for a happy four days pottering about.This was long enough to really encounter the odd and slightly overwhelming experience of American western conversation. Everywhere you go people say “hi,” “how are you?”, “how’s it going?” and as soon as we reply back comes the inevitable “you folks are not from around here?” opening gambit and then you know you are lost and soon you will be deep in often intimate conversation with complete strangers. One night in Leadville we sat down in a diner and bar and ordered our meals and noticed the elderly couple with a very hyperactive young boy on the adjacent table. The inevitable exchange of pleasantries and then Isabel was deep in conversation with the older lady.

Above the background of the diner noise I could only get snippets and within seconds of the conversation starting I knew this one was juicy. I heard the old lady’s indistinct voice “murmur, murmur – we are his legal guardians – murmur, murmur – his mom went of the rails – murmur, murmur – his father is serving two years with good behavour – murmur, murmur – technically he is a pedophile as she was only fourteen murmur, murmur – then he got involved with the Hells Angels and disappeared into the desert two years ago and nobody has seen him since – murmur, murmur”. On and on it went right through our dinner arriving and us eating it. Later Isabel said the reference to the Hells Angles seemed to refer to the women’s dentist.

Once when we were in Crested Butte (see below) we were walking down from the mountain and a mountain biker came down behind us, we stepped aside to let him pass and he said “thanks” and we said “no problem” and he said “have a great day” and we said “you too”. Then he stopped a little way down the track and we knew we were in for a conversation. As we approached he looked at me and said ” Australian?” – “no I’m from London” I said (lots of people have mistaken my accent for Australian in the US and in Europe). The mountain biker was suited up in the latest high tech and colourful biking kit with wrap around mirror shades, he was our age, maybe a little older, with a white goatee and large moustache. Within three minutes of the conversation starting we knew that he carried the flag in the 4th of July parade, that his only son had been killed in a car crash in Vegas a few years before, that he had lost his mother to cancer shortly after, that he was over that and enjoying life again, that he worked for a guy in town who owned lots of property in the area and that he spent time in Costa Rica also working on this guys property. I am not kidding – we got all this and more that I cannot remember in less than five minutes.

At one point I wanted to shoot some photos of the old buildings in Leadville and I left Isabel with the laptop in the coffee shop where she planned to write some emails. When I returned I discovered that she had abandoned the emails in the face of the relentless conversation with her two new best friends sitting at the table who were called Ernest and Joseph. It turned out that Ernest, who was sixty and who looked like a left over from Grateful Dead concert and Joseph, who was extraordinarily intense and never stopped talking unless you actually interrupted him and who was a very youthful looking 70, had themselves just met each other in the coffee shop and discovered they had something in common – they both ran in 100 mile road races. There are several such 100 mile events in that part of Colorado. As they chatted away sharing there intimate secrets with Isabel I strolled in and soon the conversation had shifted to photography which took some of the pressure off of Isabel. An hour and half later we tore ourselves away after the inevitable exchange of email addresses.

Isabel deep in conversation with Ernest and Joseph in a Leadville coffee shop

There is of course an entirely different form of western conversation practised by some we have met which consists mostly of silence. When we shredded our tire deep in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (see below) we managed to flag down a park ranger who did indeed help me change the tire, in fact he did most of the work, and during the whole exercise (during which we had to jointly solve several tricky technical problems like the jack being too small) he only actually uttered about five words. I thought at one point I would be forced to use sign language. Later we met Chip of “Chip’s Tires” in Moab where we spent several days popping in to see if the replacement wheel he had ordered for our jeep had arrived. Chip was a man of few words. “Hi” I would say “how are you” (the necessary preface to all transactions out here) “is the tire here?”. Chip wouldn’t even acknowledge by word or expression that he had heard what I had said. After a while he would wander off, seemingly to deal with several other unrelated issues in his team of workers at the tire shop, then wander back. “Nope”

After we left Leadville we headed over Independence Pass (12,500 plus and the second highest paved road in the US – fantastic views across the alpine tundra and large snow pockets at the summit) to the small mountain town of Crested Butte. On the way we stopped for lunch in Aspen, ghastly place, don’t go there. Crested Butte on the other hand turned out to be a very pleasant place, surrounded by mountains, the wild flower capital of Colorado and full of award winning restaurants. So we ate and we walked and we had a very nice time indeed. It even had a passably good book shop.

At the top of Independence Pass

Isabel walking above Crested Butte

At the summit of Mount Crested Butte, 12,500, puffed but happy

One night we went to the monthly civic forum meeting. Crested Butte attracts a lot of well connected and intellectual retirees, and the topic on the night we went was the USA’s response to Iran. The speaker was an ex-diplomat who had spent a lot of time in the communist block, spoke fluent Russian, had all sorts of academic and government connections and I thought had ex-spook written all over him. What he had been working on for several years was building informal links to the leadership in Teheran and trying to convince the US government to have a more nuanced and subtle approach to Iran. His talk was excellent, full of useful information and insight and the Q&A after also produced lots of interesting debate. A great evening.

After Crested Butte we headed off for Moab and Utah’s red rock country. We had been to Moab before but I wanted to go back to photograph the fantastic and wild canyon landscape although we knew that with daily temperatures mostly over 100 degrees the hiking would be limited. On the way we planned to spend a couple of hours having a look at the huge and deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The canyon itself is 2000 feet deep and after taking in the rim views and suffering a bit in the heat we decided to take the switchback road to the bottom of the canyon before resuming our journey to Moab. Unfortunately almost at the bottom the Jeep’s front wheel came of the road and into a deep gully full of sharp rocks and dead tree timber. We managed to pull the jeep out before hitting the canyon wall but by then we had a large piece of timber embedded in the shredded tire and the aluminium wheel rim was also chewed up. As we stopped the tire just deflated. We were a bit stuck. We had no phone signal and when I checked for a spare tire I couldn’t even locate it. Luckily with the help of a passing driver we managed to locate the spare which in Jeeps is slung under the car but neither of us could work out how to release it. Eventually the verbally challenged ranger stopped and we were were soon on our way again.

The 2000 foot deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison, We managed to shred our tire at the bottom,

We wasted a couple or hours in nearby Montrose trying unsuccessfully to sort out the tire and then set off for Moab again several hours behind schedule. We drove for three hours through a lot of very pretty nothingness (a bit nervous given we now had no spare tire) and passed the tiny town of Paradox before getting to Moab just before dusk where we were met by a glorious sunset sky, a very nice large motel room and a couple of cold beers.

Outside of Paradox in Utah on the way to Moab

To be continued……………………..

A depressing evening watching a depressing game. At least the pizza and beer tasted good. The photos are here.

My family gathered at our place to watch England play their opening game against the USA, the usual mixture of subdued excitement, hope, occasional boredom and ultimate disappointment, all conducted to the wall of sound we produce when we are all in the same room. The star of the night was of course little  Zena. The photos are here.

We held a small gathering at our house to watch the election results, gossip, drink and eat lots of comfort food. In the end the night was not the disaster we all feared and there was even the chance for a few laughs – plus of course the chance to spend some time with with some old friends. The photos are here.

My dear friend Andrew held a small gathering to celebrate his 60th birthday a few days ago and a fine time was had by all. I was particularly pleased to meet up again with Mike, Andrew’s younger brother, with whom I shared a flat back in the late seventies and who I hadn’t seen for a very long time. The photos are here.

Here is a photo of Andrew and I on the Mayday demo in Regent’s Street in 1974 and here is a photo of the two of us from the party. As far as I can see the only thing that has changed is that we no longer have a red flag and I seemed to have mislaid my favourite striped tanktop.

Isabel and I visited the ‘Decode: Digital Design Sensations‘ exhibition at the V&A – highly recommended and lots of slightly strange interactive fun.

A snap from the trip back