Pink Sauce

Picture illustrating the paper version of this article in the Guardian. In a fast-changing digital world in which most traditional media are struggling to adapt, BBC Radio 4 has bucked the trend, posting its highest listener numbers for a decade over the summer months. [...] Today – which has refreshed its presenter line-up over the last 18 months with Evan Davis and Justin Webb joining the breakfast programme team – gained 95,000 listeners on the previous quarter to reach 6.6m an average each week, an increase of nearly 500,000 on the same time last year. Today's 16.8% share was its highest ever. [...] With Moyles losing 679,000 listeners over the same period, his audience of 7.04m put him 718,000 adrift of Wogan compared with a 213,000 gap in the second quarter. Chris Moyles, who presents the morning show on BBC Radio 1, has made several homophobic comments on air. Evans Davies is the gay presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

On Friday 25th September 2009, Ian Baynham, 62, and his friend were subjected to homophobic abuse in Trafalgar Square, London. When Ian challenged this unacceptable behaviour he was assaulted by three youths: two women and a man. He later died of his injuries on 13th October. On Sunday 25 Ocotber, James Parkes, 22, an off-duty trainee police officer, was set upon by a group of up to 20 teenagers in the heart of the gay quarter of Liverpool. James was with his partner, another man and a woman when he was attacked. One of his companions was punched in the face. James is now fighting for his life with multiple skull fractures and other injuries. Ian and James are sadly not alone; They are two among thousands of people who have been victims of hate crime. In London alone , 1,192 homophobic offences were reported in the year to September 09, up from 1,008 the previous year - a rise of 18.3%. That's an average of almost 3 per day! People from all communities are invited to come together...

It's all a bit hazy now but as far as I can remember, sometimes in the late 1990s, after I finally got an Internet connection (pay as go dial up, no doubt) at my parents' house in the middle of nowhere, I started looking at building my own website. Using publisher I put together a couple of pages both in French and in English and looked at a way to put them online. Lots of animated GIFs ensued... I quickly came across Geocities and Angelfire which offered webhosting for free. I am not even sure those few webpages made it online and there have been several attempt at creating my own site. In August 2001 when I took over as moderator of my newly founded reading group, I decided that a website would be useful and once again I turned towards Geocities. The site has been online ever since, though it underwent a much needed redesign in 2005, loosing the black background and the GIFs that had been the canons of amateur webdesign a few years before. For over a decade, Geocities were ne...

I spent the last two days in a computer room on the second floor of the London College of Communication (LCC), at the Elephant and Castle, a good 10 minutes walk from my garret. Having started a new job a couple of weeks ago, I am being sent to various training courses (amazingly all within walking distance of what I call home). This week's was entitled "InDesign, the fundamental". Unexpectedly I found myself seated next to one of my former colleagues at VisitBritain. Small world and all! We learnt how to create shapes, apply all sorts of rather amateurish (in our hands at least) effects (shadows, glows and embossing) to our documents, create business cards, master pages and style sheets, tables, lay out some text and insert images in the desktop publishing software that seems to have become the new professional tool (replacing Quark). We were made to collate our efforts into a sort of booklet which we then turned into a pdf file. The results of my own efforts (albeit sli...

Yesterday and for the second time this week (the first time had to do with Trafigura, and the PR-illiterate law firm Carter-Ruck trying to gag The Guardian and then Parliament (no less) around the publication of the Minton Report), Twitter and other social networking sites flexed their cyber-muscles and ostensibly made a difference in British public life. It all start with a despicable article by Daily Mail hack Jan Moir about the recent death of Stephen Gately. The article was originally titled "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death". Within half a day, a Facebook group had been created (counting close to 23,000 members at the time of this update; that's more in three days than in the past five years!), the article was retitled "A strange, lonely and troubling death..." at the same time that all adverts were removed from the page, the Press Complaint Commission's website had crashed from receiving over 21,000 complaints,...

just uploaded: my 3000th picture on flickr! View the rest of this set (an art installation in a former tram tunnel) on flickr here .