I need your help. And I am counting on you and the power of the Internet to fix an issue dear to my heart.

I have a gorgeous 1966 split-screen VW camper van. And rather cruelly I have left it on its own for basically a year at my mother-in-law’s house because the practicality of having it in the heart of San Francisco is not great (plus we never use our other car anyway).

To cut a long story short, I was starting up the van every few weeks, and asking my mother-in-law’s husband to do the same. But, inevitably, the frequent start-ups lapsed for about three months and when I next tried to start her up, she refused. I thought it was the battery, so I got a man from AAA out to start her up – he said the battery was fine and drove off. The van hasn’t started since.

So today – finally – I decided to have a big stab at getting the van started. I bought some petrol/gasoline to top up the tank (it was low); I connected my portable jumpstarter to the battery to get it to kick in; I even give the top of the carburetor a tap in case the float valve was stuck. To no avail, the van won’t start.

I recall once when this happened when I was living in LA, a wise old mechanic turned up and told me about a trick to add a small amount of gasoline to the top of the engine (where, I don’t know) and that would help it kickstart itself. I have searched online for this tip and found nothing.

This is where you come in. I recorded my efforts to start the van. And I’ve posted the file here. What you can hear is me turning it on next to the engine, leaving the device (my iPhone), going to the van, starting it up, turning it off, starting it up, turning it off, a car driving by and me returning to the engine.

I just know that there are plenty of people out there that will know *exactly* what this sounds means. And I am trying to find just one of them. So please help me out and link, post, whatever this to anyone who has some VW know-how. And you will get a very appreciative Kieren.

Why not just go to a garage?

1. I’ve got to get the van there
2. Most garages these days have no idea about old vehicles like this
3. I want to fix the issue myself – a big part of why I have the van in the first place

So come on social media / Internet / humankind – help me out.

You can download the MP3 here.

I have just send a complaint – or “negative feedback” as the website wishes to call it – to the Crown Prosecution Service in South Yorkshire for its prosecution of Paul Chambers for making a (stupid) joke on Twitter. I reproduce it below:

If you also wish to complain, you can do so at: http://www.cps.gov.uk/contact/feedback_and_complaints/index.html

No doubt you have received numerous complaints about the prosecution of Paul Chambers for a joke he made on Twitter regarding Robin Hood airport.

I would like to add my name to that list.

This was a severely misguided prosecution and raises serious questions about the CPS’ ability to manage cases.

I understand you feel obliged to investigate complaints, even when the complainants feel similarly obliged to lodge a complaint for any form of threat made against them.

But as soon as it became clear that this was never taken seriously as a threat and if you had applied some basic commonsense, you would given the person in question a warning.

But to proceed to prosecution on a clearly light-hearted comment on a social network site beggars belief.

If Paul Chambers does appeal – and I hope he finds a lawyer that will allow him to do just that – it is inevitable that the CPS will not only lose this prosecution but be undermined in the eyes of the public.

I sincerely hope this case is being reviewed high up in your chain of command, and I hope that whoever makes the call recognises the ridiculous and insidious nature of this prosecution and issues a formal apology to Mr Chambers.

I also hope this sparks a review of your systems for deciding whether to go ahead with a prosecution. And I hope the whole CPS is also given some basic training on modern social media so you don’t make similar mistakes in future.

Yours sincerely

Kieren McCarthy

Academic and Internet activist Lawrence Lessig has an idea that he thinks will help the United States fix the current bind that Congress is in: a convention called by State legislatures that would propose amendments to the Constitution.

Apparently, Article V of the Constitution can require Congress to call a convention if 34 state legislatures (out of 50) demand it, and any proposed amendment would then have to be ratified by both houses of 38 state legislatures.

Such a convention and amendments would enable “the people” to make changes to the way Congress currently operates, since Congress is clearly not in a good position to change itself. Lessig has set up a new site to sell this idea and try to pick up support and momentum: Call A Convention.org.

So, is this a good idea and does it have any chance of success? Well, as an outsider to the US who has been here now for three years and who follows US politics and political history but not in a professional capacity, this is my brief analysis:

1. Yes, Congress really is a mess. The endlessly heralded “special interests” do indeed distort democracy and that means alot of things that should get done do not get done. But to my amateur eyes I think the bigger issue is the accepted level of partisanship and the entrenched two-party system that makes it them-and-us in Washington. The only way of actually getting things done, it appears, is horsetrading. And I think it is this that most Americans view as corrupt.

Would a convention be in a position to fix that? I’m not sure. It may force Congress to adopt some changes. But as I understand it, the US Congress has functioned in pretty much the same way since its inception, although the truly mindless partisanship and the unpleasantness appears to have started with Clinton (Lanny Davis wrote an interesting book Scandal broadly about this).

In my wildest dreams, the incredible possibilities that the Internet has made available would be used to break up the two-party system and instead allow for focus on issues. But we’re not there yet – you have to wean an entire generation off the status quo first.

2. Hosting a convention and actually making amendments to the Constitution despite Congress sounds like a foolish pipe-dream. But I continue to be amazed at what the American people will do when roused. For a country that is so fiercely individually independent, there are two peculiar and persistent traits: people will buckle down under the rules; and they will band together and act with alarming speed if they feel that their country needs them to.

If this convention idea was raised in the UK, it wouldn’t stand a chance. But instead someone would run an alternative convention and that would get plenty of coverage and one of two ideas from it would trickle down through MPs into Parliament. In the US though – where people love a bold political move – it’s all too possible that this might happen.

Although one of the problems of course is that a huge number of Americans don’t really realise how their country is governed and don’t recognise that it is Congress that holds the power. The cult of the President is so high that it may be difficult to persuade people to get behind a convention. And of course it would be exceptionally difficult to make changes to the Constitution with the crazed, frothing-at-the-mouth media that the US suffers from at the moment.

But here is my biggest concern:

3. It all seems a little too much Lawrence Lessig. I have been following Change-Congress.org (which is now Fix Congress First.org) since it was set up by Lessig a few years ago. I’ve not been overwhelmed with what has come out of it. It all seems a little too angry and finger-pointy to me. Maybe that’s the way to rouse Americans, but it turned me off so I just watch passively out of interest.

This whole movement need to be that – a movement – before anything can begin to happen. And so far I’ve not seen much beyond Lessig himself. I mean I’m sure there are many supporters on email and the like but I’ve not had a single discussion with others in this country where they have raised Change Congress. It has none of the wave that everyone could feel when the Obama campaign started to rise – you couldn’t stop people talking about it.

So, yes, the graphics are great, the sentiment is good, the technology is there ready to be used, but where is the movement? Despite his best efforts to be open and collaborative I fear that Lessig – like most academics – is individualistic in his approach and doesn’t have the temperament or the skills to do what politicians can do: wow people and get them to follow them.

For Congress to change, you need an Obama-type who is willing to take an all-on-red gamble on his career by attacking the system itself. I’m not sure you’re going to find that for a long while.

So if I was to take a bet, I’d say that this Convention isn’t going anywhere in its current form. Although with enough support, it may be possible to create a powerful event that had a strong impact.

As happens so many times in large political movements, change comes on the next wave. So what comes from this drive, if it takes off, may set off something in the heads of the next generation who find a way to fix what is a pretty poor political setup at the moment in the US.

Internet thinker and political operator David Weinberger has posed an interesting question: how do we design a question-and-answer format for politicians that is truly democratic?

Weinberger’s blog post was noted by Andrew McLaughlin on his Facebook page – Andrew is the White House Deputy CTO and the man more than any other that could make a democratic Q&A system a reality.

And so I figured I’d have a stab at designing something since this is an area where I have a fair amount of knowledge and experience both as a journalist and as ICANN’s general manager of public participation. Here then is a rundown of a system that I think would broadly work:

Let’s start with some assumptions about what this system would need to do and how it would work. It would have to:

1. Be online – the Internet’s gift for communication and computers’ ability to parse information is the only reason we are even considering a fully democratic Q&A.
2. Be open and scalable, with limited need to register to use the service. Otherwise it will never get off the ground
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results – which would be inevitable in a political environment – on both sides
4. Produce useful results that could be built upon – otherwise, what’s the point?
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective – get the balance right between resources expended and useful results or the process will eventually be dropped as a “useful experiment”

This the idea I have come up with, presented from the perspective of the user, which I’ll then dig into.

To: kieren@kierenmccarthy.com
From: democracy@whitehouse.gov

Subject: An answer to your question

Thankyou for your recent question to the White House about the Economy.

A response has now been posted on the White House website, where you will also be able to see responses to other questions on the same subject and from people in your state.

If you are interested in learning more about this aspect of the economy, we have also provided links to those individuals in the administration that have day-to-day responsibility for these areas, and you will be able to follow them as they work through the issues.

To see the response to your questions, please click on the link below:

http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/2010/02/08/answers.html#3

Thank you,

The White House

You click the link:

Monday 8 February 2008

Q&A: ECONOMY

Click on the plus [+] sign to expand the question box to provide the answer

[+] Q1: Why does America have such a large deficit?

[+] Q2: What does it mean that China owns a huge number of US Treasury bills?

[-] Q3: What are you doing to get the country out of recession?

We are doing a number of things.

Firstly, there was the Stimulus Package that was approved in February 2009. That package provided $787 billion in funds to get the economy back on track. Roughly one third each was spent on the following three things: tax cuts and benefits; education and healthcare; and federal contracts, grants and loans.

You can follow how all of this money is being spent online at: http://www.recovery.gov/.

Secondly, the President announced a freeze on federal budgets for three years so we spend less as a government. This is not a simple task and will require significant assistance from Congress to make it happen.

If you are interested in following debates on the subject of the Federal Budget Freeze, please go to: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/budget-freeze.html.

Thirdly, we are working on a Jobs Bill that will be designed specifically with the aim of creating more jobs and getting people back into jobs. The Bill was passed in the House of Representatives in December 2009. It will now pass to the Senate through the normal procedures before appearing before the President to sign.

We hope this process will be completed in the first half of 2010. To follow progress of this Bill, please go to: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/bills/jobs.html.

To find out more:

One of the President’s main economic advisers is Cecilia Rouse. She often contributes to the White House’s economy blog at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/issues/Economy

You can find out more about Cecilia and other members of the Council of Economic Advisors at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/about/members.

[+] Q4: How do decisions get made over the economy?

Sign up here to be emailed with a link to future questions.
Or ask another question yourself at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/ask.html
You can also find this service on Facebook and Twitter.

The most popular ten questions asked about the Economy can be found at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/top-ten.html

So that’s the user experience. You’ll note that the answer above is answered by an anonymous, albeit friendly, third party, rather than by the President of the United States himself.

That is because of a number of aspects that I think would have to form part of any realistic system. Some of these below, along with what I think would be likely wrong approaches and assumptions in making such a system.

1. The bulk of the Q&A system would be done by and presented by staff. The reality is that the President is too busy and that if you only answers questions through one person, you are creating a system that will always disappoint the majority of the users.

You could have a rule of thumb for actual Presidential responses: minimum of three responses. One to cover events of the day (read: political fight); one a broader, larger topic (try to get above party politics); and one lighthearted to stop process from being dull.

2. Keep responses short. Under 250 words each time. Nothing is gained and much is lost with longer responses.

3. Always provide a link for further information on each separate topic. And if a suitable page doesn’t exist, it points to the fact that one needs to be built.

4. Avoid the sexy. Day-to-day governing is pretty dry and time-consuming. The key is to keep it light and short. Chasing the sexy aspects in the hope that will make it interesting will create a skewed system that worries more about perception than information, ultimately undermining the idea of a democratic Q&A. One example of the sexy is: the inevitable drive to find the perfect person to ask the perfect question. Say, a good-looking widowed black army mother who has lost her health insurance but will be saved through a clause in a new Bill going through Congress.

5. Don’t diss journalism. Both Weinberger and McLaughlin have a critical view of journalists. This is a very common habit among people on the inside of organizations trying to get things done, and it’s because journalists don’t care about difficult things are, and they don’t care about the hard work put in – they just want to know the end result and then get it out to people who care even less than the journalists.

Why is taking a critical view a bad idea? Because the process of journalism, for all its flaws, is the end product of a long history of the struggle for providing information. You shouldn’t seek to *replace* or reach over journalism. You should understand that it is the edifice shaped by years of weather. Understand it and then seek to shape it. So to design a democratic process without embracing and building on the current process is a surefire way to fail.

So while a particularly irritating habit of political journalism at the moment is to be “balanced” to the extent that bad ideas are propagated, and back-and-forth criticism takes the place of rational analysis, you can expect the exact same pressures to exert themselves on a democratic Q&A.

Likewise, chasing headlines, rather than providing a more in-depth perspective, is exactly what will entice people into a democratic Q&A system. Very few people are interested in all the work that goes into something – unless they are an intrinsic part of that process.

The ultimate success of this theoretical democratic Q&A would be to see the broader media report on its results.

Pragmatics

So the five assumptions:

1. Be online
2. Be open and scalable
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results
4. Produce useful results
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective

You allow people to send in questions in as many ways as possible. Online, Facebook, Twitter and possibly an iPhone app.

What you need to do is get people to tag questions themselves. And limit questions to a workable length (140-200 characters). That way you can break up the questions and provide their analysis to different people – cutting down on the overall time taken and reducing the gap between question and expert.

People typically overdo categories online. Any more than five and people start getting lost. That doesn’t mean though that you can’t have five options within five (although you would probably need to make the second five optional).

So, using the question above: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession?”

In a browser you would type this questions and then be prodded to put it into one of the five categories: Economy / Healthcare and Education / Security / Technology / Other. Under Economy, you are presented with a further five options: Budget / Jobs / Legislation / Recovery / Taxes.

The same menu and sub-menus can be repeated (and changed) across all platforms and also be used in the presentation of responses.

So, for example, using Twitter, a questioner would send to @whitehouseqa: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession? #economy #recovery”

You also get people to provide their email address or Facebook name or Twitter name to allow for responses and interaction.

And you get them to say which state they are from – which enables you to reflect back to people what people in their state are asking, and also helps provides a breakdown of issues by state, flagging up what may be regional issues.

Analysis

Now, here’s the crucial part – how do you process all this information?

My thoughts: you work on a weekly basis and expect a week turnaround. You have one person dedicated to each of the five main areas. They triage the questions as they come in: delete nonsense; add secondary subject tags; attach internal tags (answered previously; repeat question; current; broad; light-hearted).

Then you have a different person working on each sub-category. They should be able to discern the threads of questions coming in – and start clumping them together e.g. What are you doing to get the country out of recession? would be the accumulation of 20 questions all broadly asking the same thing: where is the stimulus money?; what are you doing about unemployment?; I’ve lost my job – what are you doing to fix the economy?

If you have an ID for each question, you can start putting the questions into different boxes, or appending different tags (like how Google does with Gmail).

Then the sub-category person can present a number of headline summarizing questions, with the actual questions asked produced underneath and then send them back up to the main category editor who goes through, makes edits where needed and sends them back down.

The sub-category editor then starts approaching people within government to get answers. Over time, they should start building a pretty good compendium of people who can answer questions on the basis of who gives the best answers; clearest answers; fastest answers. That way you factor in human intelligence at the right level – and at a sufficiently low level that the fears and perceptions of political minds don’t touch the process at the crucial information-gathering point.

You would need 30 people in this process – five of them more senior. But not dedicated staff, an add-on to existing staff or interns. Why would they do it? Because they get to speak to everyone in their area, across government – an enormously valuable opportunity to network and get to know people.

The experts – from wherever they are in government – could be encouraged to produce in-depth answers and post them elsewhere (on their own blog for example) knowing that the question is going to be highlighted in a formal White House Q&A. That way you start building a depth of information on giving subjects, allowing people to dig in deeper themselves, but without putting all the editing and decision-making on the shoulders on a few people.

The sub-category editor then sends up the information to the category editor, and then when it is all compiled, the category editors send the results to someone high up in the chain, who can then pick through the result to see which questions could be given specific Presidential attention i.e. a personal address.

All the other questions still get answered, and all the information is built up, but extra attention is then given at the top to a few hand-picked questions.

If there is sufficient effort put into answering a particular question by a number of experts across government, then the ability to adjust the question itself would be limited. Likewise, the category and sub-category editors would have an incentive to make the questions themselves as fair and straight as possible as they would be sending them out to lots of people. The idea is that this process would limit the ability for the Q&A to be bent significantly at the top, so limiting political interference.

Response

And then – the absolutely crucial part of the whole system – feedback to those that asked the questions.

They need to know that their question was read, and they need to be given an answer. The likelihood is that their exact question will not receive an exact answer, but if you have intelligent editors in the process, they should be content with the broader response.

If someone isn’t happy, then could ask the same question again. With luck, the editors would see if the same sort of questions kept coming in week after week and would be in a position to work on an answer.

What would be very important in feedback to the question-asker is that the response is written in plain language, free of jargon. And that links are given to further resources. The answer should assist people in finding out more information; the assumption should be in every case that the person has a right to ask the question and that they have a genuine interest in the answer.

And the last piece of the jigsaw is to allow people to give feedback on the feedback. Allow people to rate the usefulness of the answer they received – and then have that overall feedback summed together and sent to category editors so they can evaluate their sub-category editors.

You also allow people that have sent in questions and received answers to login and rate questions and answers – using those votes to produce a top ten of all questions and of category questions. Since you are asking people to rate questions that have been through the process, there is limited usefulness in people gaming the system.

Over time, this whole approach should help build valuable and threaded information about the process of government and the work being put in to solve various issues.

It uses Internet technology; it contains almost no barriers to entry; it is scalable; it is broadly resistant to fixing and gaming; it should produce useful results (so long as category editors strive to be clear and straightforward); and it spreads the work so should prove manageable.

So there you go – my idea for the democratic Q&A system.

ICANN’s 35th meeting in Sydney finished on Friday and I am now off on a two-week holiday with Sapna checking out this great country.

I’d love to say I’m going to blog about the trip but frankly I don’t want to even see a computer for the next fortnight. Plus, we’ll be spending a chunk of time in the rainforest in the very north of the country – where, I have just found out – mobile phones don’t work. Double delight.

Anyway, if you are wondering why you don’t hear from me until mid-July, now you know.

So one of the many questions rolling around my head, particularly since living in the United States, has been: why is American beer so bad?

It really is bad. I know Brits get mocked for flat, warm beer (I love it – the taste is terrific), but American beer – your Buds and Millers – really is absolutely dreadful. Tastes of nothing at all, doesn’t refresh or quench or present any of the pleasurable qualities that beer has brought to me many, many times over the past 20 years. In fact, just about the only thing American beer does do is get you drunk – if you can stand to drink enough of it.

Well, I have found out the answer. There was a History Channel documentary on US brewing history at the weekend and it was pretty easy to divine the historical and cultural reasons behind this peculiarity that an entire nation loves drinking rat’s piss while everyone else in the world has spent centuries savouring their beer.

And this is the three-part answer:

1. It wasn’t always like this. Americans used to love decent tasting beer. But during World War One, there was a massive backlash against the Germans in the US. At the time, most of the breweries were German or based on German beers or called German names. They took a massive hit and new “American” brewing companies appeared and prospered amid the patriotic fervour.
2. Before this had time to shake itself out, Prohibition kicked in. From 1920 to 1933, it was illegal to produce alcoholic drinks. So the brewing industry used its factories to produce other sorts of goods instead. Not only did this cause serious brewers to up and leave the country but it effectively hit reset on the nation’s palate. After Prohibition ended, all that was left was a few giant American breweries able to effectively shape a nation’s taste.
3. Before great beer was able to make its inevitable way back into people’s lives, America went through the Second World War and then, crucially, entered the great modern era of advertising. The best example was Miller Lite – which was originally a diet beer aimed at women. The ads – with the still-used tagline “Great Taste…Less Filling!” – were hugely successful and showed working men enjoying Miller. It became one of the first lifestyle approaches to advertising. And, in the way that the greatest ads flip reality, it sold a dreadful tasteless liquid as possessing a “great taste”. Miller Lite and Bud Lite continue to be advertised with unbelievable logic-altering force to this day.

But there is good news.

Micro-brewers save the day

Over the past 15 years or so, there has been the Great Rise of the microbrewery with the United States. With no calamities in between, the American public slowly began to realise its palate and good beer began to find more and more of a market.

Although the light beers still take the majority of the market, the microbreweries are growing in strength and you can find a lot of decent beers in the US these days. Although you may have to seek them out.

I can recommend Anchor Steam from San Francisco. I also tried Brooklyn Beer last weekend in New York, which was pretty good. Sierra Nevada is widely available in Los Angeles and is very enjoyable. And my new favourite is Arrogant Bastard which I had at Baby Blues BBQ on Lincoln the other day. The writing on the label was worth the cost itself. Another good location is Father’s Office in Santa Monica and Culver City which specialises in very, very good beers from the US and elsewhere.

More importantly there are beer festivals across the year. I just missed the Los Angeles one. And there is a Great American Beer Festival. Also, according to one local, who was listening in to my explanation of the above at the LA Galaxy match on Saturday and turned around and told me he was pleased I recognised the microbrewing industry, there is a beer festival coming up near Los Angeles in the next month (may have to track it down).

Anyway, so there you go: an explanation of why American beer is so bad, plus an optimistic ending.

So after 18 months of retaining my UK phone while living in the US, I finally got tired of paying £30 a month for absolutely nothing and killed the contract. It ends next week.

Why did I keep it for so long? Well, for one, I didn’t expect to stay in the States all that long. I figured ICANN would drive me nuts within a year and I’d move back to Blighty. Plus I didn’t want to rely on just a work phone for contact with friends and family. And lastly I didn’t want to lose my telephone number – 07932 783686 – which I have had for over a decade.

Well, I am still at ICANN and so still in the States and I didn’t use my UK phone because to use it over here was prohibitively expensive. I don’t rely on just my work phone for contact – I mostly use Skype to contact friends and family (it’s free and it comes with moving pictures). And as for losing the number… Well I am the proud owner of a .tel domain name.

In fact, due to my name being slightly unusual, I have kieren.tel.

TLD innovation

The .tel top-level domain is a novel and interesting use of the domain name system (DNS) in that it stores information directly in the DNS i.e there is no website associated with it. You go through a special admin system that .tel runs and stick up your contact details – phone numbers, addresses, websites etc – and it sticks it directly into the Internet’s infrastructure.

The beauty of this is that I can update my contact details very simply, it updates very quickly, and all the details can be accessed by anything whatsoever that can connect to the DNS (which is basically every modern electronic device). What’s more, the download is very, very small so it is very, very fast.

And so that’s how I plan to keep in touch and how I hope everyone will be able to keep in touch with me. Just go to http://kieren.tel and you’ll see all my contact information.

Problems

All that said, I do foresee some potential problems with .tel in the future. For one, I’m not sure what impact having my details out there will have. Because it’s in the DNS, it is searchable and scrapeable. I am monitoring to see if I am swamped with spam (or the mobile phone variety).

I wonder if it will make my websites a target for automated spamming and so on. There may be some issues with privacy. But so far it’s worked well and I am confident I’ll figure something out.

Another problem while I’m here was that Vodafone – my UK mobile provider – was an unbelievable pain in the arse while I was trying to end my contract. It took me literally two weeks, six emails and three phonecalls to end my contract. And even then they kept insisting that I might want to reconsider. I don’t know whether their system has broken down, or if management is purposefully turning a blind eye to a system breakdown (or not fixing it) because it means profits in hard times, but I am not happy about it.

Incidentally, Vodafone also accidentally forgets to take things off your bill with remarkable consistency. Add-ons are something that is charged and then automatically refunded on your bill if you don’t want them i.e. there is the implicit assumption of being charged for services unless you actively say no.

Anyway, that gripe aside – go to kieren.tel And ponder if you want to get a .tel domain too. They are more expensive than a dotcom – typically around $20 where as dotcoms are usually half that (if you can find one you want). And not every registrar sells .tel domins (around 150 or the 950 or so registrars do – full list here).

But you don’t have the hassle and expense of building a website, and it serves a useful purpose. Plus, if this takes off, I can foresee people building apps for it that link into iPhones etc. We shall see.

So I was in Palm Springs this weekend in an effort to get out of Los Angeles and relax a little. We stayed at The Riviera – which was apparently where Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe etc used to hang out when Palm Springs was full of young Hollywood stars rather than old gay couples.

The Riviera was great. Palm Springs was great. But the highlight of the weekend was an art show on a patch of grass that we stumbled across while having a stroll on Sunday. This is no doubt a famous show and I’m showing my ignorance, but I have to say I was impressed – the quality was very high and the prices very reasonable.

There was an artist called Greg Clarke who did some great work, using different chemicals to stain a huge piece of copper according to this designs. Mostly he drew women – faces and forms – but filled the outline with lots of other faces and people. You could spend hours looking at it – very precise and neat. Unfortunately they were also huge pieces of copper and cost a few thousand dollars each so I took his name and decided that if his pieces kept playing in my mind, I might have to do something about it.

So we wandered around some other work – lots of pictures printed on canvas, some nice landscapes, some bright and colourful cartoon-like pieces. And then I turn the corner of one of the lines of stalls and was struck dumb by a number of walls of striking beautiful Asian art. I’ve very glad they were priced reasonably as I have no doubt I would have walked away with one of these pieces, no matter what.

In fact, I most wanted a gorgeous blue lotus flower on a white background for $600 but it had already been sold. And then I got the strange sense of panic that I get when I come across something I love – I got a unreasonable and irrational fear that I had to buy one now in case they were all suddenly bought by someone else. In fact, I nearly bought several but then my brain kicked in and told me to calm down. Anyway, fortunately there were another two I particularly liked – one had also been sold already – so I snapped up the other.

And that’s how I met Andy Anh ha – a very nice American bloke who told me a bit about his work and where it is displayed and he gave Sapna a postcard with examples of his work and his website. I bought the piece for $250, he wrapped for me and I left unbelievably satisfied with my purchase.

It’s now been on my wall for five days and I love it. So I took some pictures today and have stuck them below. I’ve also offered to do Andy a better website. I hope he takes me up on the offer. I can highly recommend his work. My photographs were only quick so I’ve not really captured the work’s beauty but if you are looking for a piece of artwork, check out http://andyanhha.com/.

Here is the third and final part of a favourite childhood story of mine, The Magic Paintbrush, adapted by Fran Hunia from the traditional Chinese tale in 1979, and illustrated by Martin Aitchison.

The first part can be found here and the second part here.

That’s all folks.

Here is the second part of one of my favourite two childhood stories, The Magic Paintbrush, adapted by Fran Hunia from the traditional Chinese tale in 1979, and wonderfully illustrated by Martin Aitchison.

The first part came be found here. And the third and final part is here. Enjoy.

The third and final part…