Anyway, it's on for another ten days, so if you're in the area, pop in to have one of the nice brownies and a look at some nice photos!

Another of my photos was included in the recent book, This Is Not A Polaroid, which is for sale on Blurb. All the images were created with the Poladroid software, and there are some great pictures in the book, so check it out. Maybe even buy a copy.

Some of my photos and blog-posts have also been included in another book for sale on Blurb, The Little Book of Bookcamp, along with loads of other stuff from other people who attended January's Bookcamp and sister event, the inaugural Papercamp. There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around from both events, so the book looks like it's worth a read.

This is a good thing on two fronts. Like I said, I like goodies, and what could be nicer than a whole year's supply of them? Plus, it's pretty cool to actually have been one of the few people shortlisted out of the 1500 images that were submitted. I've been a big fan of the Innocent smoothies for years (though I have yet to try the new veg pots), and it's always nice when something you like also likes you in turn, isn't it?

Although I do have to take minor issue in the way that they told me I was shortlisted, which is to say that they didn't. At all. I only found out because Billy texted me to let me know, after he'd spotted it on Twitter. Annie Mole also got shortlisted, as did a couple of other people that I know. Thankfully, none of them were shortlisted in the same category as me, so I can tell you to go and vote for them all as well as voting for me!

This is the picture in question, shortlisted for the "best bunting" category:

You can place your votes over here; voting closes on Sunday night. In a fit of outright bribery, I will happily share the winnings with anyone who votes for me, so you'll get some goodies out of it, too. Who doesn't like goodies?

There were food stalls at the south end, featuring many of the usual suspects from nearby Borough Market, and a music stage at the north end. This year there were also piles of hay bales that slowly got destroyed in giant hay fights, with loose piles of hay covering about a third of the bridge, and giving off a lovely sweet smell. This smell was evocative enough to carry me off to childhood summers spent running around fields, sleeping in tents, sitting by campfires — an existence about as far removed from the City of London, and all it signifies, as one could get. The sense of dissonance was increased when I wandered past a stand where there was something cooking in cast iron cauldrons over an open embers, and again my nose was tantalised by smells which took me back to those childhood summers spent running around fields, sleeping in tents, sitting by campfires, to the days when we ate food that had been cooked over those campfires. It's a very old-fashioned smell, not in a twee nostalgic kind of way, but in the sense that for thousands of years, people cooked food in cast iron pots, over open fires. It's not a smell that's easily replicated by modern cooking devices, but it's a smell that always makes me hungry.

It turned out that it was pumpkin soup being cooked in the cauldrons, and that the cauldrons did indeed belong to a witch. She was doing a "deep soup ceremony" and I happened to be standing there when the ceremony started, to coincide with low tide at 18:53. Most people standing around were there like me, wondering what the heck a "deep soup ceremony" was, and whether there was any free food. The answer to the latter question was yes, as the distributing and sharing of soup was part of the ritual, which had been created to remind people of the cycle of life, and that food tastes better when it's home-grown and home-cooked. The speechifying was a little hippy-dippy, even by the standards of someone like me, who'd just been evoked into remembering childhood summers spent running around fields at hippy festivals, but the soup was quite tasty, and I enjoyed the social aspects of sharing food with strangers.

After that, I wandered northwards to the other end of the bridge, and watched Carlos & the Bandidos, a fun rock'n'roll covers band dressed as caballeros. Lots of people were dancing, including the ever-present, no-London-festival-would-be-complete-without-them east end Elvises. There was also a big hay fight still in progress, but I managed to come away unscathed, with no hay clinging to my nice cashmere cardigan — not everyone did! In fact, I spotted patches of hay which made it as far as the bus stop right outside St. Paul's, a good five minutes walk from Southwark Bridge.

Sunday's festival was quieter, but still busy. There didn't seem to be a lot going on as I wandered around, the bands had all obviously had a hard night on Saturday because they were all being quite sedate and a little too lacking in energy, in my opinion. Luckily, we found a fun band, Joe le Taxi & the Zydeco Band, way down near Tower Bridge, and they were putting on a rollicking good performance, with lots of people dancing and having fun. That made up for completely missing any sight at all of the carnival parade, which was totally obscured by the large numbers of people gridlocked around the parade route. Didn't even stay for the fireworks this year.

So, is anyone else using Vox for anything at all? I can't help but notice that, as a blogging platform, Vox didn't really take off, did it? This seems a shame, because after looking at it properly, it's actually not bad. It's much more useful than Livejournal in a lot of ways — I like how you can customise it to add recent books you've read, or CDs you're listening to (you can even upload mp3s¹), and I like that the comments aren't nested². It would be nice if I could find a way to make it look more like my actual website, though.

The other thing I was reminded of was Jaiku, as I finally got an account after requesting an invite months and months ago. To be honest, since it's still in beta, and accounts are taking forever to be distributed, I'm not sure it's even much use, though. Initially, I thought it would be a great alternative to Twitter when the latter's SMS service was no longer made available to UK phones. You can get Jaiku messages sent direct to your phone, and the nifty thing is that it seems to recognise when these are status updates, and when they are things pulled in from RSS feeds, as I don't receive the latter from anyone, which is nice, as it's not really much use getting updates from, say, Flickr, as an SMS. And you can comment on individual posts, which is also very nifty.

But if nobody is really using it, because no one can get an account (I get updates from only one person at the moment), then it's not really very useful. It is easier to find things, though. For example, I know that there are hundreds of channels in existence on Twitter, but no idea how to find such things. There's a whole directory of them on Jaiku, though. This is useful if you go to an event or something and want to find out what other people are saying about it, and you don't even need to actually know anyone else on Jaiku for it to be useful.

On the whole, though, I'm going to have to stick with Twitter, just because everyone else that I know is sticking with Twitter, and the main reason I use such a service is to stay in touch with my friends. But if anyone else is on Jaiku, let me know.

¹And here's the "Pop" part of this post.

²I hate nested comments. I can see how, in some cases on Livejournal especially, they might be useful, but the option to not have them would be great too.