Tuesday 31 March 2009

Colour Blind Interviews on Colourful Radio
http://ping.fm/bWZqP http://ping.fm/57xIT

Saturday 28 March 2009

Blog title...

Lambeth Council Stole My Car….. Part 1

There are good days, bad days and disasterous days, but this one was catastrophic.

It began first thing in the morning.

I had a radio interview at Colourful Radio to promote my latest film “Colour Blind”. The radio station is based in Vauxhall and would normally be a 20-minute walk to get there from my flat in Waterloo.

Only thing is, I’m not currently in my flat in Waterloo, I am in fact homeless and staying with my friend David in Tring, Hertfordshire (the reasons for this will be left to a different Blog).

Tring is only 27 miles away from central London, so I thought if I left at 07:30 I’d have ample time to arrive at the studio for 09:00. Boy, how wrong was I.

Rush hour traffic on the M25, road-works on the A40 and Ken Livingstones screwed up traffic light timings (that Boris Johnson has still not sorted out) meant the Journey took me just under 2 hours.

As the panic and realisation set in that I was unlikely to make it on time I decided to text to let Henry Bonsu (the presenter of the Breakfast Show) know the situation.

His response added insult to injury to a rapidly deteriorating situation, whilst he could accommodate my late arrival, I discovered he’d been unable to download the film from my website due to a technical problem and therefore had been unable to watch it.

I finally arrived at the Radio station at 09:20, discovered a parking spot but it was on a cash only meter, I normally pay for my parking by text and had no small change. Without the time to go and discover I accepted that I was probably going to get landed with a parking ticket.

I rushed into the station, grabbed a well-needed pee, picked up some water and ran into the studio whilst opening my computer to show my hosts a clip from the film, at 09:30 I was on air.

The interview went well (with exception that my host kept referring to Colour Blind as a documentary rather than a film) and my points about how damaging Political Correctness is to Black Communities prompted an interesting debate, which covered why certain Black people see racism everywhere, why words should be kept in context and not deemed offensive if they’re not and why we shouldn’t be afraid to offend people in a country with free-speech.

After the show, I left with the hosts Henry and Juju to get a coffee and went to check on my car.

It had gone!

My immediate reaction was it must have been stolen. I’d only been gone an hour. But there was no glass on the road or any evidence of a break in. It’s a new mini convertible so not an easy steal and the alarm would have gone off, surely.

Then a dawning realisation, I hadn’t paid for my parking, could they have towed it?

It was difficult to comprehend, a car parked off-road in a parking meter bay, not causing any obstruction and only having been there an hour – why on Gods earth would it have been towed.

But how the hell do you find out, there was no note where my car once was, telling me that’s what happened and the only number on the parking meter was for Lambeth Council.

There was nothing else for it, we went to the café and I called Lambeth Council.

Friday 27 March 2009

is organising a press campaign to get Colour Blind talked about. Next week discussing racism on British Forces Radio.