I'm a doctoral researcher (MRes) at the London-Loughborough Centre for doctoral research in energy demand (based at University College London) and former commissioning editor at Earthscan (a publisher of books and journals on sustainability) for renewable energy and environmental technology. Please see my LoLo profile page for more information on my research.
This site is a hub for my interests, which include: energy, sustainability, books, making music, making beer, painting/drawing, printmaking and generally scheming.
Get in touch: mike at mikefell.co.uk
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I submitted the research proposal today. I’m going to be paying particular attention to the use of home energy monitors in energy education, holding focus groups at a couple of schools. Now for some reading…
The latest East London Printmakers exhibition (“The FishWick Papers”) kicked off last Thursday at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery and runs throughout September. Here is the piece which I submitted (a smoked woodcut print called “Preservation”):
The gallery is great — a really large, modern space which shows off all of the work to its best advantage. And as always, I was super-impressed by the quality of the work on display and it is constantly inspiring to see how different members of ELP respond to the challenges of their chosen printmaking method and subject matter.
The exhibition was one of Time Out’s five recommended First Thursday events and (perhaps naturally) I would also strongly suggest a trip out east.
My friend Rachel works for a charity called In Kind Direct. Businesses can donate surplus supplies or excess/end-of-line stock to them for resale to charities. In Kind sell it on at a super-cut price, basically covering their costs. I think it’s a great idea — finding a use for stuff which would likely otherwise be thrown away, and giving charities access to a wide range of useful goods at a price they can afford. If you have a load of stock to get rid of — whether it is office furniture, clothing, electrical goods, household products, or anything — follow the link to donate surplus goods to charity.
The next East London Printmakers exhibition is at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery in Hackney Wick (details here). I decided to try out smoking my prints (in the “smokehouse” rather than the “cigarette” sense…). Here are some photos of the process.
I used wood I cut from the plate to create the smoke:
I used our Cobb BBQ to generate the heat:
A tarpaulin keeps the smoke in, along with the plate from the print for the previous ELP exhibition:
Smoke:
So, was it worth the effort? The ink did darken a bit, and the prints certainly have a nice aroma, but next time I’d experiment with different paper and possibly with dampening the paper in advance of smoking to try to hold onto more of the smoke. But check out the exhibition to see for yourself!
I mentioned in a couple of posts below that I had recently become aware of the Beanery cafe and the Whirled Art Cinema, both in Loughborough Junction. I now go along to both pretty often; the Beanery to get out of the flat when I’m working at home, the cinema to catch up on films which I missed in the Ritzy (or which themselves missed the Ritzy). Both are excellent and highly recommended. The cinema especially — it’s great to sit watching interesting film with the occasional train rumbling overhead and cool beer in my hand (and in the knowledge that I can be home within five minutes of the end).
NB Try the pizza at the Beanery — highly recommended and very good value!
Well, if you live in south east London (for the moment anyway). My friends Rob and Karen have set up London Kettle Popcorn, to my knowledge the only place you can buy freshly made kettle popcorn in London and possibly the UK. It is cooked at over 400 degrees C over a raging flame in a huge cauldron — so good theatre (and more importantly is great tasting and very addictive). Check out the site to see where the stand will be cropping up next.
A woodcut of me playing the ukelele:
I’m taking part in the East London Printmakers annual exhibition this year. Details available on the Facebook page here. It is (surprisingly) in East London, and the private view is in the evening of 7 July (which coincides with the whole First Thursday thing that goes on around that area). I’ll try to upload and image of the woodcut I’ll be showing to my Flickr page at some point…
I saw plans/dreams for such a thing at the pop-up Warrior (part of the Seven Bridges Festival) this weekend gone. It would be in a railway arch, and have a beer, hop and barley garden on some abandoned platforms above. I have to admit — this would be amazing.
A new cafe has opened up at Loughborough Junction station called The Beanery. I don’t tend to buy coffee (prefer to make at home) but their pizza is meant to be excellent so definitely keen to check it out.
After over a year of living in Loughborough Junction, I just discovered that there is a cinema a couple of minutes walk from my flat. Whirled Art cinema shows world/art films every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening. Intriguing.
…which is just wrong. More from the BBC here, or check out Fixing Fuel Poverty by Brenda Boardman.
I heard this on the radio this morning, and there is more detail here. It really feels like a watershed. Ever since I was at primary school and people were talking about electronic comic books that would update automatically each week there has been this expectation that books will make the transition. At university I used primarily electronic resources for research, but still the standard trade market resisted. I’ve been reading books on my phone for a couple of years now. And now here with are… exciting times in publishing.
The random new brew is called Gundred’s Draught Excluder and contains toasted munich malt, carapils, and a decent amount of Hallertauer and Mount Hood hops. Last night it was fermenting so vigourously the bubbling from the airlock woke me up.
Almost like those salty Scandinavian liquorice sweets.
This is an interesting article about the potential for using Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) in maritime transport instead of (or alongside) traditional bunker fuel. The latter is a highly polluting low-grade, low-cost fuel which produces, among other things, high sulphur emissions. These emissions will be getting a much tighter cap from 2015, so a lot of work is being done into alternative fuels.
This caught my eye because I heard this new cap being used recently as a good example of unintentional geoengineering. Sulphur emissions lead to higher concentrations of aerosols (particulate matter) in the atmosphere, which in turn reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. The drastic reduction in sulphur emissions from shipping will reduce this “dimming” effect (explained here), with a concomitant increase in surface temperature. I can’t remember what this anticipated increase was, but it was roughly equivalent to front-loading several decades of the predicted warming due to anthropogenic carbon emissions.
The point was that as much as people may dislike the idea of geoengineering, it has been progressing on a massive (albeit unintended) scale for a long time and should be debated in this context.