Table tennis championships

Spring has sprung in London and I've been celebrating this week by doing some wood work in our back yard among the daffodils. I built a full-sized circular ping pong table for a workshop I helped organise yesterday in a gallery/project space called The Two Johnny's in East London. It works perfectly but its harder than normal table tennis cos there's less table, and every time we've played it seems to descend into a kind of general squash game using every surface of the room. I had to donate the table to the guys who run the gallery though, I could see the look of panic in my housemates eyes when they thought it was going to stay in our living room.

The workshop involved four visiting artists who were invited to discuss their work, a screening of some films we had made, a bookbinding session, some epic table tennis and a massive authentic Korean lunch cooked by my friend Gaeun. It was mostly a success but incredibly stressful to organise, I feel like I've been holding my breath for about a month. Afterwards someone force-fed me about fifteen tequilas and I ended up at a jazz bar in Dalston til 4am, then crashed on a friends couch, so I'm now feeling rancid with only three days til my thesis presentation is due. PANIC.
The only thing thats cheering me up is this plastic sailor hat my housemates friend Blair gave me. He's been staying on our couch for a week, but I've got no complaints since he's a model and likes to wander around in a towel. The cap is from one of his shoots. No offence to Sam but it doesn't look quite as good on him:
Why do I always end up talking about hats? I think my life has become very small. In the hope of extending my range of interests, my new hobby will be photographing odd skywriting instances. I'm pretty happy about this perfect bit of alignment:

The Rat King's Birthday

Its been a month of birthday parties in London, these are the seventy rat-shaped biscuits I made for my friend Lawrence's 25th last week. They're supposed to look like a rat king, all tied together at the tail, but it didn't quite go as planned. I had to take them to school, which was embarrassing, and I ended up being mobbed by academic staff stuffing their pockets with chocolate rats for their kids at home. One university cleaner was so pleased he took me into his little cupboard and showed me his wall of cat photos. Its amazing how many friends you can make when you carry sugar. Lawrence was less thrilled, I've never seen anyone go quite so red.

This month I also:
1) Tore my skirt up to the waist at a crazy Scottish Ceilidh dance for my housemates birthday, at which the dancing was so violent we all had huge black bruises on our upper arms and went home drenched in sweat.
2) Went to Norwich for three days and experimented with a diet of straight whisky and mushy peas (delicious in the short term, disastrous by the fourth day). I went with a friend for an opening at Outpost gallery, where he used to work, and we ended up on an epic drinking and op-shopping binge from which I still don't think I've quite recovered. It was an educational trip really; I learnt that if you put mint sauce on mushy peas they congeal like snot, the best topping for hot chips is apparently a combination of mayonnaise and peanut butter, and if you steal a security guard's walkie talkie and throw it into a canal at 4am it will make a noise like a dying whale.
3) Tried to steal a variety of other people's pets, and learnt that cats (also) enjoy peanut butter, but not olives. This is me trying to lure a neighbours dog into my bedroom. Shortly after this photo was taken it peed on my floor, yawned, and made a wise dash for freedom.
I also went to my friend Sharma's birthday, for which I made her this hat, which is entirely collaged from pictures of rainbow synthesizers. Other than this I have been doing nothing except procrastinating over schoolwork (classes end in two weeks!) and going to conferences. Tomorrow is the beginning of a three day mega-conference with Alain Badiou, Jaques Ranciere, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoj Zizek, which I'm pretty psyched about. I'm debating whether or not to wear the hat, I think it makes me look more academic.