Saturday morning gave me a good opportunity to clear my head from alcohol, so I grabbed my camera and headed in to Brixton, hiding in the market from the world outside. Wandering amongst the Caribbean clothes stalls and fish-mongers, Columbian butchers, shoe stalls and other exotic dens is a real wonder. It's parts of London like this that make it special, a real mix of cultures and oddities that are a stark contrast to Oxford Street and other generic parts of the city.

The smell of jerk chicken cooking in a big drum helped too.

Later on, with a clear head and a new crop of photos, I went for another back treatment, before we finished up the day in a Polish restaurant in Hammersmith eating saurkraut and kielbasa 'til closing time.

I spent yesterday preparing a bunch of photos for the web, and installing putty to get back into recoil. All will soon be revealed...

I have started integrating the blogger page into the rest of the recoil site. So far, this means the links in the site map point to the relevant pages, but right now those pages have not been updated, so the reverse links are dead ends at best.

Further updates will keep happening all week, including... some new colours (Oh my god! Who put this idiot in charge?)

It's been a long time since I did anything with the photo page, and in the meantime I've taken quite a few shots. So the section is undergoing a revamp, and soon I'll have a load more pics up on the site.

In the meantime I have collected a few photography links that are worth the proverbial butchers hook...

Digital Photography Review
Megapixel
DCViews

And of course, who could live without the photography section of Dreads awesome Urban75?

I spent most of yesterday feeling pretty strange. My head has been pretty messed up lately, and I get dizzy and have this crazy sensation in my head, a bit like something is pulling my brain up in the air. I also have pins and needles in my hands and feet, and feel like I am going to be sick.

It's pretty scary.

Funny thing is, that when the doctor told me it was anxiety, well frankly that was a relief. I half expected him to send me for a scan or something.

Going to the gym helps, and I feel better afterwards, so I have been every lunchtime during the week for over 5 weeks now. This has also helped my back out a lot, and as well as my usual back exercises, a friend of Anjali's has been learning The Bowen Technique and has used me for practise. This thing is mental, it's like a manipulation, but it's so delicate and short that frankly if I had paid good money for it, after the first session I would have thought I was getting taken for a ride.

All he does is touch my back a little, and then leave the room for a bit, then he comes back, does something else, and leaves. After about seven or eight trips, we're done. After the first week I was really aching the next day, incredible. This time round I have been in heaven, no lower back pain at all. It's the maddest thing, he practically does nothing, and yet it seems to work better than any physio I have ever been to. If it keeps up like this he'll have a client for life.

Anyway, I guess in the meantime my main problem is still some kind of stress, it seems worse in the week, so it must be work related. Time for another holiday already.

Thankfully, at the end of the day, I decided that maybe the Knorr Chicken Biriani I have in the cupboard was not quite romantic enough for the evenings meal, and so I squeezed us in at Ferndales for some peculiarly french pizza. If ever there was stress relief then it's good food.

However... looking back on a post in which I discussed my anxiety issue, I guess I should be slightly concerned that I subconsiously used the words crazy, mad, and mental.

Okay it looks like I have got this working. I had some log-in issues and extremely slow updates, but am now back in business, talking of which...

For the past couple of months, Rob and I have been proud owners of the Cog. Buisness was pretty slow on my part to begin with, but we are finally building up some clients, and the work we have done for them has helped them a lot, so if you know of anyone needing help, spread the word.

In the meantime, me and the missus just booked up for a weekend in Paris, and then another in Venice, so any tips are welcome. Hopefully while we are there, I'll get to take something decent with my new camera.

This blog is giving me a hard time, can't login properly, can't update. Maybe I need to move on already...

Due to technical problems at recoil HQ, I climbed up a rusty drain pipe, in through a broken window, and set up residence in blogger.com...

It's been so long since the recoil blog started it's overhaul that I can't go over all the things that have happend, but here are the highlights of the last few months, in order, and I'll try to detail some of it in the coming bloggs. I will also update relevent photos now that, shock horror, I have a web connection at home again...

Okay:

1: Set up a web design company
2: Bought some Yahoo and nVidia shares
3: Went on holiday to Sri Lanka about a month before the tsunami disaster.
4: Moved house again.
5: Ran the Nike 10K, all of it, no stopping. Doosh!
6: Got a Cannon EOS 20D for Christmas.
7: Started getting anxiety attacks.
8: Managed to pay the tax man with help of share sale. Sweet! (...and hopefully part of the solution to 7)
9: Discovered a new type of muslcular therpay that beats the hell out of the osteopath
10: Still going to the gym, Anil has slacked off, I rest my case.

Okay, after flogging myself in the gym and finishing up a hefty python script I have been working on for a week, I'm off the The Ivy for dinner with the missus, so no doubt we'll be surrounded by a bunch of b-listers who were not invited to tonights Brit Awards.