Image by Bernadette Russell/ The White Rabbit

Last summer, I eavesdropped on some exceedingly good deeds being done by a creative and kindly Londoner, one Bernadette Russell. I won a commission for the PRX Global Story Project run by the American Public Radio Exchange, so turned the audio into a documentary featurette. It’s since been bought by the NPR stations KUT in Austin, Texas and KHSU in Arcata, California and just in time for Valentine’s, it led to Bernadette being invited onto BBC Radio 4′s Saturday Live as a guest- alongside the Milkman of Human Kindness himself, Mr. Billy Bragg. Please read on for the full spiel, or better still take a listen to the 6 minute, 15 second sound story here.

Image by Bernadette Russell/ The White Rabbit

During the leap year of 2012, Bernadette Russell embarked on a mission to complete 366 Days of Kindness. Her efforts were prompted by the riots that spread through her adopted home town of London and across English towns and cities, between 6th and 10th August 2011.

Bernadette has left sweets in phone boxes, books on trains, £5 notes on buses. She has given away balloons, cakes, flowers and lottery tickets, written letters to a soldier returned from Afghanistan and offered her socks to the homeless. She practiced ‘targeted’ rather than ‘random’ acts of kindness but she says she ‘expected nothing in return.’

Bernadette is now turning her 366 philanthropic experiences into a stage play, in collaboration with Jacksons Lane Theatre in London and with support from Birmingham Rep and Forkbeard Fantasy.

In May, my debut documentary went out on Radio 1 and lives on via the Radio 1 profile on Soundcloud. It’s a 60 minute spoken word documentary on disabled access to live music, featuring The Mystery Jets, Ghostpoet and Emily Eavis. Presenter Nihal investigates live music access and finds it’s much more than ramps and wristbands. He goes backstage and in the mosh pit with gig-goers and artists across the disability spectrum, to find out what equal access means- and why it should matter to everyone.

It is part dream come true, part cliché come-down to find yourself doing exactly what people would expect of you (attending an ironic-liberal-digital-dance-off in an attic above an art house cinema in east London, say) and then find yourself being interviewed about it for your all-time favourite paper. Luckily, I later found myself being ever so slightly misquoted and sounding rather more morose than most people who know me would expect, so I managed to override my programming after all, albeit by proxy. Oh and I got to see Grace Petrie perform, which was at once so plaintive and impassioned that I forgot who was Tweeting what about who and lost myself in her ‘Emily Davison Blues’. Which is probably just what you’d expect, isn’t it?

Burning Down the Haus: Arthaus Bonfire Lounge

Burn baby, burn.

It doesn’t get more ‘on message’ for this blog than an independent music festival staged on and around the East London Line. This week I met up with Amanda Lwin, 50% of the creative and organisational force behind Soundtracks, for my latest Londonist preview.

Scrap Club in action

Art meets rage meets destruction meets catharsis meets clubbing- in a car park.

I talked to artist Joel Cahen for my Londonist preview of Scrap Club‘s first outing to Hackney Wick, just a sledgehammer’s throw from the Olympic Stadium,  on 9/11.

The aftermath

Debris/ exhibit

Locked Room Scenario – Ryan Gander

Photographer Julian Abrams

Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of Londonewcastle and the Lisson Gallery

Read how I bravely conquer my NIMBYism over a bowl of nourishing oats, under cover for The London Review of Breakfasts in Dalston’s pioneer cafe- Mouse and de Lotz.