Seeing Aphex Twin is one of those ‘big ticks’ from my gotta-see-it-live music list. A gigantic influence on my taste in music - and no doubt countless musicians over the last years and well into the future. So here’s a little snippet of the 4 or 5 videos i took - conveniently running into each other so you can see the way the set progressed - from dub-step, to electro, his classics and finally ending in that genre-defying breakcore/glitch/gabba style. And yet all of it still somehow sounds like Aphex Twin.

The man’s a genius.

So i have a friend, Yanna, who once told me of this pizza dinner she had one night with a friend - they were both gigantic AND incredibly tasty. It was a few weeks ago, and i vaguely remember her saying the place was called “Cucina” something-or-other, and it was behind the HMS Belfast.

So based on that information, i met up with my friends (ironically, at Pizza East on Bethnal Green Rd) and we walked down to London Bridge and along the river to take advantage of the “warm” night. The venerable google maps pointed our destination to Holyrood Rd - and I figure even if it’s a take-away place, at the very least they’ll have a counter. We waledk down the street itself - dimly lit, next to the railway tracks, with broken cobblestones matched only by an equal amount of broken bottles. It must be wrong - but the glorious smell of pizza dough baking in an oven hung in the air… we must be close.

Their 4-page website features their phone number, so i phone them up, and in broken English, the Italian man gives me directions - yes, we were on the right road, no there isn’t a sign, and yes, we can order with him. “Come through garage doors with motorbikes”.

Right.

We literally did walk past it - there’s no sign, nothing - this place is purely delivery. It’s nothing more than a kitchen, a garage of motorbikes and signs with various rules stating that if you break them, you lose one week of wages. I had no idea these places could even exist. So we order two massive 17″ pizzas, and the man behind the counter is so happy and friendly that we made the special journey all the way down - he gives us 20% off, and free Chinotto’s. We take them back to Southbank and sit opposite the Tower of London / Tower Bridge and people watch.

We learn a lot of valuable lessons - like no one does animal print quite like the Russians, and that anyone who has the confidence to wear a lime green vest and is surrounded by dainty little models-to-be is probably a millionaire.

And that awesome pizza can be found in the oddest of locations.

Pizzecucina.co.uk - 020 7407 1515, and we had:
Piccante - tomato & home made chilli paste base, mozzarella, salame piccante, roasted peppers, garnished with balsamic roasted tomatoes
Rustica - tomato & green pesto base with mozzarella, tuscan sausage, sun-dried tomatoes and fresh fennel, finished with wild rocket.

For those not in the know about what Spaced is, it’s a British TV series starring Simon Pegg which reached cult status pretty quickly. There’s a scene in it where the characters have a gun fight, using only their hands, kinda like when you were a kid, playing. And a Flash Mob is a bunch of people doing something at the same time, usually something pretty wacky without the general public knowing.

Watch it below

And if anyone’s interested in the techy side - it was the Canon 5D Mk II and 17-40mm lens at 17mm, propped up high on my tripod. I had no idea what the framing was like, and try as I did to keep it steady, as expected, I kept getting knocked by people, hence the shakiness.

This is the first time i’ve written a travel diary entirely in retrospect. It’s an odd sensation - I took just over 1,000 photos on the 6 day trip, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to link in the feelings and sensations between these moments. But it’s still odd - it’s like looking back and doing a running commentary. It isn’t good or bad - it’s just different, and isn’t that what doing new things is all about?

So here’s the first few paragraphs - i’ll post this as a bit of a preview for where things are headed…

It was the day before we were scheduled to leave for our 6 day adventure into the Celtic Hinterlands of Wales. As i’m cleaning my camera lenses, I get a phone call from Nikola - “Mate, you won’t believe it. I busted my foot playing netball, was carried off court, cabbed home and now can’t even stand up”. It’s exactly what you don’t want to hear when you’ve been planning something for weeks, inspecting Flickr photos until 2am each night, and trying to decipher town names such as Aberystwyth. So like a true Designer I umm’d and arr’d and delayed things until the morning. And like a true Account Director - Nikola went to the hospital, got himself a crutch and said “Let’s go”.

We caught the tube to Ealing and picked up our Hybrid, a gutless little thing which had one single outstanding feature - seat warmers which gave a similar sensation to that of wetting yourself, without the social embarrassment. We hurtled out of London, a day before Good Friday, expecting to get relatively easy traffic. However, the morning’s events put us back somewhat. In fact, our whole schedule had been turned on its head - Nikola wasn’t going hiking on his swollen foot. So we thought to surround ourselves in Welsh culture since we’d be spending much of it in and around our car. As we adorned the interior with pictures of Catherine Zeta Jones we realised how little we knew about Wales itself.

And what better way to learn than go exchange knowledge on the 4 hour drive to Cardiff? Human Traffic. Celts. Castles. Dr Who. Tom Jones. I admitted my pathetic attempt at trying to grasp the landscape by watching Braveheart. Nikola gently reminds me to not get the Scots and the Welsh mixed up while in Wales. Or in Scotland. In fact, better just not mention the Braveheart thing again. So we turned up the 10-hour long 90’s music mix, and watched the city peel away and be replaced - surprisingly quickly - by vivid green fields, Lidl supermarkets and the finest bitumen the M4 has to offer.

After about 3 hours, our first goal was to stop at Tintern Abbey. Not realising exactly how small Wales was, Nikola’s navigational skills were quickly put to the test. We took a few turns and convinced we were lost - why would we pay for a toll bridge when there was a perfectly good one less than a mile away? We meandered through the tiny town of Chepstow, a gentle wash of rain creating the kind of mood reserved for movies set in medieval times. We pointed at the dual English/Welsh names (Araf means “slow” in Welsh), and as we wound our way along what could surely not be a main road, convinced we were lost, the Abbey reared it’s frail frame through the mist. Grey skies claimed the tree line in the distance, giving the feeling of arriving somewhere not entirely on this planet.

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Stay tuned for more!

It’s a strange time at the moment - just as I begin thinking about where i want to be at the end of this year, people around me are doing the same. It seems to be the topic of conversation - notice how it rears it’s head every few months?

And yet i take a certain peace from it all - that people are thinking about their lives, rather than just letting them wash away. It’s important to surround yourself in people who inspire you, challenge you and better you. It’s something i’ve taken for granted in the past. But mistakes are only bad if you don’t learn from them.

Your heart is free - have the courage to follow it.

And on a slightly less emotional note - Yes, i’m the only person who goes to Wales, takes a hundred photos of castles, come back to London and the first photo uploaded is that of a pier

Taking this was fun - i jumped down onto the sand as the tide was splashing and rising around me. One wave came in and nearly drenched me and all my gear mid-shot, much to the amusement of the locals.

View large on black.

ISO50, 68mm, ƒ22, 125sec using an ND1000 filter

Taken in Aberystwyth, Wales.