Monday 9 November 2009

The REAL Wall

My fantastic partner Julie, who works at Roehampton University, came back a few days ago talking about a really nice guy she works with, Andy Hoang, who had been having a lot of hassles - thanks to his blog, of all things. His REAL wall is a replacement for the unreal Wall on his previous Facebook account, now abandoned (you can never really delete the bugger - just blank out all your fields). I hate, loathe and despise Facebook, so he was already winning in my book. His idea is for people to send him postcards and letters by REAL mail, and he regularly photographs the current REAL wall and posts it on the blog. I love this idea: it ends up being far more personal than any number of so-called social networking sites, and feels far more authentic, probably because it is ever so slightly messy.

Now all this is great: he gets hundreds of pieces of mail regularly sent to him, and everybody's happy. Everybody, except Hammersmith and Fulham council, who spookily find out (somehow) that he has been sent all this mail, and bizarrely conclude from this that he is running some sort of business from Goldhawk Road. The next thing he knows, he has received a £5000 bill from the council to pay for the disposal of his dangerous festering piles of card and paper.

This is all very silly, and I just can't believe that with the fuss and reaction to this already, they won't back down. However, it's just worth being sure. I would ask anybody who thinks that this is bleeding outrageous to help out and send a postcard, or even a sanely written letter for Andy to pass on to the council.

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