This was my waking view this morning after a wind disrupted slumber. When they said that stormy weather would hit the UK today, they really weren’t joking.

If The Smiths had settled with the first recording of their breakthrough single ‘This Charming Man‘, would the world, and especially the music industry, be the same as it is now? Would the song still have launched their careers? If you have heard the original version of the song, which is on the 1984 album Hatful of Hollow, you will agree that it is very different to the version that was released as a single, the version that everybody knows. [...]

Some photography to get the year started on a good note. FlickR photopage I took this on the bank of the Brooklyn side of the East River in New York in January 2005. It was constructed by stitching together 8 photographs taken from left to right so it appears to be really wide angled.