I'm not going to do a poker year in review since that's amply covered by my other blog entries. Anyway, 2009 was more interesting for a couple of other things I've been up to.

In September I took part in a public art work called "One and Other". There are four plinths in London's Trafalgar Square and 3 of them have statues on them, whilst the fourth plinth is empty (something about the funds running out before the statue that was meant to go there got built). Over the past few years there has been a new artwork put there every 6 months, and earlier this year Anthony Gormley was selected as the next artist. He decided to offer up 1-hour slots to the public to stand on the plinth, supposedly to capture a cross-section of contemporary British society. Seems more like pandering to the celeb/reality TV cult to me, however for whatever reason I put my name down in the draw and got the 6pm slot on Friday 4th September. Ok, the only problem was then I needed to decide what to do for the hour. Of course, you don't actually have to do anything, and indeed some people just took a comfy chair and read a book, but it seemed like I should at least give it some thought.

After discounting taking a laptop and playing poker for an hour(!) I decided on the following scheme. I got a whole bunch of t-shirts printed up with a mixture of pieces of information I thought should be more generally known (state of current educational system and all that) or were somewhat thought provoking, or were somehow "art" related. I then took those up with me and put a new one over the top every couple of minutes, so that I got fatter and fatter as the hour progressed.

Here are some pictures. Firstly, it was quite a way up:



Here's a comment on the surveillance society we live in in Britain (most CCTV cameras per head of population anywhere in the world!):



And here are a couple of quotes linking a famous Andy Warhol saying to the hour I was on the plinth:



The whole thing was streamed live over the internet and is archived at www.oneandother.co.uk and my stint can be found here http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Mat196

The other "different" thing I've done this year is partake in a trial of an electric car (see www.electricmini.co.uk). I haven't had it too long yet but it's great fun to drive (nice flat torque graph!), although we've had some cold weather recently and it doesn't like sub-zero temperatures (it wouldn't charge for a few days). Still, it has warmed up now so it's back to normal.

Finally, here's a seasonal picture of a snowman (well, snow Dalek really) we built over Christmas: