Here is the Justice Gap team before setting off on the London Legal Walk on Monday evening (the photo is from Gary's photos on organiser Natalia Rymaszewska's album). I chose this photo - there are a few - because it reflects the fun atmostphere.  

Another blogger wrote that lawyers and others walking for a good cause was not exactly a physical challenge. This is true - particularly as it was a beautiful sunny evening after weeks of rain - and there was a festival atmosphere, with people in all sorts of costumes, including policemen on stilts and these people dressed as trees (hedges?)

As someone else wrote, the scale of the event demonstrated the solidarity of support within the sector for an important cause - free legal advice. Over 6,000 lawyers and others turned up to walk 10k around London raising £525,000 for London's free legal advice agencies.

I took this photo of the legal crowd on the Embankment - if you look closely, you can see some of the Justice Gap team!

It was a privilege to take part and to meet many outstanding members of the legal profession - including, of course, the Justice Gap team. Thanks are due to Amanda Bancroft and Kim Evans for organising the Justice Gap team. The post-walk drinks were sponsored by Allen & Overy.

 Jon Harman, also walking with the Justice Gap, made this video, which in just a few minutes, encapsulates the great atmosphere.

It may not have been an endurance test; and it was lovely to meet so many like-minded people - some of whom I had met virtually via twitter. But the fact that we had a fun time must not be allowed to detract from the success of the event and the importance of its cause.

Very unusually, I am looking for sponsorship. I am joining The Justice Gap team on the London Legal Walk 2012 on 21 May 2012.  We are walking with the Lord Chief Justice and thousands of lawyers to raise funds for the London Legal Support Trust which funds Law Centres and pro bono agencies in and around London.

Here is an extract from the 'about us' section of the London Legal Support Trust website, which provides a brief explanation of the important work it does.

http://londonlegalsupporttrust.org.uk/

Access to justice should be equally available to everyone, regardless of their financial situation. This principle is at the cornerstone of the legal justice system in England and Wales. In reality that is sadly not the case.

Advice Agencies and Citizens Advice Bureaux work very hard to try to ensure that vulnerable people do have a way of accessing justice through a mixture of Legal Aid (publically funded work), funding from local authorities and charitable donations and by using pro bono volunteers.

Receiving the legal advice they need makes a huge difference to these people's lives.

The Justice Gap www.thejusticegap.com is an online magazine that promotes access to justice.

Here is the link to our team sponsorship site http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=JusticeGap&isTeam=true

I hope you can help this very worthwhile cause.

An out of the blue invitation to an art gallery from Keivan who I met on my MBA course and is the most highly educated person I know. A former engineer, IT consultant and management consultant, he is working towards his fifth masters degree and fourth career - in sculpture.

The venue was Kensington and Chelsea College and when performance manager, fine art, Matthew Kolakowski introduced the exhibition, he said that he felt that the purpose of art was to challenge - and if we felt challenged by a particular piece, we should ask the artist about their inspiration and motivation. To my mind, art appreciation is a combination of the artist's self-expression and the viewer's reaction, which is intensely subjective. Like music, art means different things to different people. It moves and inspires each of us in different ways. My companion observed that he was looking to be delighted and enthralled rather than challenged - and he had a particular space in mind to fill. Already we had identified three expectations of the artist: to produce something challenging, moving/inspiring and potentially furnishing.  

Keivan's colourful installation 'Trinity' reminded me a little of a Meccano construction and the pattern of the different elements reflected his engineering and mathematics background, although it was inspired by the tripartite philosophy of Vedic culture.

There was a lot of variety.

This gargoyle - part of a series - is called 'Fucking Chicken', a title that some may find challenging. 

Only a couple of days ago, a software supplier reading my Twitter posts objected to my lighthearted reference to a TV weather forecaster's inadvertant faux pas. There are a lot of shocking things on the internet and on television. In fact, anyone who watches the news who claims to be shocked by 'bad language' is surely posturing. And I believe in calling a Fucking Chicken a Fucking Chicken. But unlike their title, these sculptures are attractive. My photo doesn't do justice to their clever design - when you look at them from different angles, you see a different set of animal faces.

I found some of the installations challenging - such as this one, made of pills, but I was not inclined to explore its motivation

- and others beautiful. This was created by Isabelle Ashe-Taylor.

I was particularly drawn to 'Spectral Re-Fraction', the artist's torso cast in shards of broken glass -

 Under the bright studio lighting, it looked delicate, pretty and ethereal. Modelled on the body, it conveyed some elements of fashion design or jewellery. The artist, Dorothea Magonet, was standing beside her work, so I decided to take up Matthew's challenge and ask her what inspired her to create this piece.

"Women view their bodies in a fragmented way," she said. "We look critically at ourselves as a collection of flawed elements." But when she cast parts of herself and covered the casting in shards of glass, she realised she could appreciate the shape of a hip or an upper arm and see the beauty of a curve without a subjective or judgmental perspective. 

Speaking to the artist did indeed make me think about her work differently. Dorothea had covered fragments of herself in shattered glass to convey how women commonly see ourselves in broken images. Yet the result is pleasing. Spectral Re-Fraction met our expectations: the concept is challenging; the result is moving and inspiring - an interesting perspective with infinite creative potential; and the sculpture itself is enthralling - and certainly decorative. But it is also fragile. Balanced on its wires, it trembled as we walked away.

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am not so sure about that, so I have created a Flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/joannagoodman/

This is not for storage. It is not an exhibition. It is a record, perhaps for posterity. Some random images of the places I have seen and a few observations in an attempt to address the efforts of certain individuals who, for reasons of their own, are attempting to portray me differently.

The photos are not in chronological order because I uploaded them all at once and haven't worked out how to swap them around yet.

Social media during the holidays brings tweet treats!

Twitter had a different atmostphere over Christmas. There was a tendancy for people to post photos of their culinary achievements. A blogger who I follow for his astute observations on the legal sector posted a photo of beautiful home-made biscuits. When I complimented him on these, he sent me the recipe - from an Italian cookery course - in several installments of 140 characters. I baked the biscuits, which were as good as they looked, and posted a photo!

And last week, a publisher and author resolved to write more letters, in a bid to revive the endangered art of letter writing. He offered to send a postcard to any of his followers who wanted one. As one who regrets the demise of the postcard as part of the collateral damage of online and mobile communication, of course I did. I thought it would be just a postcard: I did not anticipate the effort that went into the words and images that he sent me. An exquisite card depicting a retro-style cover illustration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby -  I wrote on my profile that I am fascinated by the blend of style and sadness - with a beautifully written account of the writer's four encounters with another of my all-time favourite authors, Haruki Murakami. I was (temporarily) lost for words; now I am writing back.

One of the many things that fascinates me about blogging - and micro-blogging - is that, unlike the professional writing I do, where I am commissioned to write for a specific readership, you never know who will read and respond to your words and where they will take you. Or put more simply, there are some amazing people on Twitter.

I eventually went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Columbia Pictures' latest adaptation of Stieg Larsson's literary blockbuster. I cannot comment on how closely the film follows the book, which has sold 50 milion copies in 46 countries, as I have not read it, but as readers of this blog will be aware, I am fascinated by Scandinavia and Larsson's horrific and compelling - albeit slightly predictable - plot line certainly held my attention effectively for nearly two and a half hours, even though I had worked out whodunnit about halfway through.

A stellar cast - featuring Rooney Mara as  disturbed and tortured punk-goth anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig as disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist - did an excellent job portraying Larsson's dark and damaged characters. As many have pointed out, the Swedish accents - especially Craig's - were inconsistent and not always accurate. As someone who has visited Sweden several times and heard a lot of 'Swinglish' I agree, although I did not find this distracting. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been reviewed many times, so I won't rehearse the story, and I can only recommend it. I am also interested in seeing the original Swedish film interpretation, as Sweden's landscape and history are intrinsic to the plot and the atmosphere.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is visually spectacular throughout, from the opening sequence to Karen O, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross' stunning cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" to the final shots of Stockholm's streets at night.

Swedish design was an important part of the setting, notably the use of monochrome and minimalism as well as the more traditional elements - the beautiful simple lines that are set off so well by Sweden's bleak, elegant landscape, which itself turns monochrome in the winter.

It seemed appropriate to watch a designer film in a designer cinema.The Screen on the Green in Islington is a truly elegant cinematic experience.

http://www.everymancinema.com/cinemas/screen-on-the-green/find-us

There is a trend in London for cinemas with sofas and bars (I love this) and this is one of the best. There are a lot of sofas, all with footstools as well, so it feels like a massive living room. There is bar service, so your drinks and snacks are delivered to you as you relax on the sofa (or in my case scuffle through my oversized handbag searching for my specs!). It's worth booking online as you can choose whether to go for a sofa in the middle of the room, which I like as you get the most accurate projection of the film, or one at the side which would feel more cosy and intimate for a special date.

Finally, one thing that struck me afterwards - I hope it isn't a spoiler and I guess this observation is a consequence of mixing wine and cinema - is how much work must go into creating a designer torture chamber. Last year I had some renovation works done to my house and recall having to set out some fairly precise instructions for the builders. Imagine having to go through this process for a torture chamber - a secret remote-controlled entrance, effective soundproofing, floor and wall tiles you can hose down easily, grout that doesn't get stained, the positioning of the gas vents in the ceiling, a remote-controlled electric winch that can hold a person's weight, a bespoke cabinet for 'special' equipment... the list would be endless. And imagine your average builder's reaction to these bizarre and sinister requests - worse, getting some quotes in might just alert people to the fact that things in this house could get out of hand, making the mystery a lot easier to solve. Perhaps there are 'special' builders. Or do designer serial killers need to be really, really good at DIY?

Thank you to all my readers - I hope you like this blog enough to come back to my tech, travel and creative musings. Here are some creative reflections and some background to this blog.

Although I started blogging in July, I chose the theme Dance like nobody's watching for my 2010 Christmas card. It is my mantra for creative expression and is from a poem that has been attributed to Mark Twain:

"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."

The quote and the illustration encapsulate how I feel about dancing and also about writing and creativity generally: the magic beyond the discipline and technique; the joy rather than the performance. I am an amateur dancer, but participating in a dance class involves some aspects of performance, and hitting the dance floor socially usually means that people are watching, albeit that both these activities hopefully involve a safe and friendly audience.

Beyond the dance analogy, the poem is a motivational mantra for creativity: expressing yourself freely; having an open heart and mind; realising your full potential; and understanding that creativity is a dynamic process and every moment counts.

As a professional writer, this philosophy is apposite in theory and frequently difficult in practice. Because creativity involves putting so much of yourself into your work, it is easy to become downcast by comparisons, criticisms and judgements, even when they are harsh, unfair or badly motivated.

It's crucial to recognise - and I am not the best at this - that being introspective and self-conscious and worrying too much about what other people think can become a barrier to creativity and originality.

As management guru Tom Peters observed, less poetically, "If no one is pissed off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured it out yet."

And original/imaginative thinking regularly attracts criticism and hostility.

The flip-side is that an engaged readership, positive and thoughtful comments and unsought support and appreciation are equally personal and vindicate the choice to take the risk of putting your creative self on the line (online!). It's like getting a round of applause and sometimes more. It makes everything worthwhile. 

The creative challenge - and its reward - is to stay fresh, original and compelling and continually to come up with something new and different.

So happy Christmas - dance like nobody's watching!

Who am I? Am I sociable? On the threshold; at the museum.

Following my Pinkberry and Pepperberry posts, here's Raspberry Pi - I had been hoping for a product called Raspberry to continue my occasional series featuring products with fruity names that are not phones.

Raspberry Pi sounds like a seasonal cocktail, or an novel expression of the mathematical constant, but it is actually a piece of hardware designed to help kids learn computer hacking. This is not a misprint or an innovative educational development based on recent stories involving the British press. As Chris Williams explains in The Register (see link below) the idea is based on 'the old sense of the word hacking, that is, to ingeniously cobble stuff together to make cool new things'. Or a kind of IT mixology. However, it does have something in common with what we now think of as hacking, as it is designed to get young people involved in computing. 

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which is developing products that aim to promote the study of computer science, especially in schools, and to put the fun back into learning computing http://www.raspberrypi.org/

To this end, its first product is a low-power credit-card size computer designed to plug into a TV or  be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 - or just over £20 - which is not much more than the price of a cocktail in a smart London venue, for a fully-configured system. You can find the full spec, including photos and an explanation of how it works here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/28/raspberry_pi/

Delayed by deadlines - a belated account of my visit to Copenhagen a few weeks ago, for business and leisure. I had meetings arranged; I wanted to step away from my stressy life, and Copenhagen is one of my favourite places. I didn't do much sightseeing, but I stayed in the centre and walked everywhere, breathing the fresh air and the atmosphere. Since The Killing has sparked an interest in all things Danish, I thought I'd share my impressions, reflections - and photos.

I start with a random flashback. One unlikely star of The Killing is Sarah Lund's Faroese sweater, which can be found here http://shop.gudrungudrun.com/ The sweater takes me back to my childhood, and the Danish shop in London's Brompton road which sold authentic Faroese sweaters and smørrebrød (Danish open sandwiches - not something else fashionable to wear) both of which are lovely, but surprisingly heavy. 

Getting around - and three clichés

The Copenhagen Metro, which is currently being extended, is modern, inexpensive and easy to navigate. It's only about 15 minutes from Kastrup airport, to Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen's largest city square. You can buy metro and train tickets in the arrivals area of the airport. Taxis are relatively expensive, but they are metered, the drivers generally speak English and you can pay by credit card.

I got out of the metro at Kongens Nytorv, struggled up the escalator with my suitcase to find a cliché - Danish pastries! They smell as good as they look!

I stayed at Hotel Skt Petri, a boutique hotel in the Italian quarter, near the university. It was clean and comfortable and featured another cliché:  Danish designer furniture - including Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs

However, Copenhagen has plenty of boutique hotels, and although the Skt Petri was conveniently located, next time I'm in Copenhagen - and there will be a next time - I shall probably stay near the harbour. The last time I visited, I stayed at the Scandic Front, where my room had a sea view. It is worth having a walk around the picturesque harbour area, where you can also see Copenhagen's famous Little Mermaid. I took this photo on the way to one of my meetings.

Strøget, which starts at Kongens Nytorv, is the world's longest pedestrian street. I like this kind of thing - in Hong Kong I spent some considerable time riding up and down the world's longest escalator. Strøget is rightly described as 'the shopping street' and that's another of Copenhagen's main attractions - a terrific selection of designer and other shops.

Walking along Strøget from Kongens Nytorv, I was rare brunette in a sea of Scandinavian blondes - a third cliché brought to life!

Strøget has a massive selection of shops selling just about everything. One must-see for anyone interestested in design, and particularly Scandinavian style, is Danish interior design and accessory store Illums Bolighus  http://www.illumsbolighus.dk/uk/main.asp which sells classic and new Scandinavian designer products.

Five minutes away, the Illum department store is a cross between Harvey Nichols and Selfridges, selling Scandinavian and international brands. Although Scandinavia is having a fashion moment, I particularly liked the homeware and stationery departments and spent some time looking at multicoloured Moleskine notebooks (as you would expect, Scandinavia gets all the new colours first) and ORDNINGANDREDA accessories http://www.ordning-reda.com/pages/?dom=1037

Like Sweden, Denmark has superb coffee, and coffee breaks are an essential part of any shopping trip. Cafe Europa, opposite Illums Bolighus serves a great-looking brunch. I like sitting in a window seat, writing on my iPad2 and people watching.

Designer capuccino at Europa

Lagkagehuset, also in Strøget, had terrific cappuccino and home made Danish pastries - and incredibly cheerful and friendly service! http://www.lagkagehuset.dk/butikker/42

A traditional brasserie and two destination restaurants

I'm afraid the rest of this post is going to sound like a restaurant guide. This is because Copenhagen has become something of a restaurant Mecca with a reputation for creating some of the world's best and most original cuisine.

My visit started with lunch at Café Victor http://www.cafevictor.dk/en a classy French-style brasserie just off the square. I was meeting my oldest friend in Copenhagen and one of his colleagues (to clarify: he is certainly not old in years; he was the first person I met outside of a meeting when I first visited Copenhagen). Although Café Victor is perennially fashionable, the cuisine is straightforward - perfect after a long journey. The waiter made a huge fuss of us. I have a feeling that my friend is a regular here...

I was taken to two very different destination restaurants. The first was Era Ora - a glamorous Italian restaurant that lives up to its Michelin star and fabulous reputation http://www.era-ora.dk/restaurant 

The portions are tiny delicious morsels - but each course is accompanied by a full-size perfectly matched glass of wine. The Danish wine menu is legendary, and as has happened before, defeated me after the first couple of dishes. Impressively, although it took rather longer to achieve this, it also defeated my dining companion - despite his elegant lifestyle - and we ended up having a rather fuzzy conversation and giggling a lot.

Era Ora is perfect for dîner à deux or a celebratory dinner for half a dozen people. Notwithstanding its Michelin star, the atmosphere is relaxed; the tables are spaced well apart and the acoustics are good, so the room is condusive to proper conversation, so long as you have a lot of self-control when it comes to the wine menu.. but it's also completely brilliant if you don't take it too seriously...

Later in the week, I met up with two people I have seen relatively recently - a Danish friend who travels to London regularly and his gorgeous colleague who divides her time between London and Copenhagen, which strikes me as a perfect arrangement in many ways. She knows all the best places to go out in both cities! 

We went to Geist, an achingly fashionable bar and restaurant in Kongens Nytorv that attracts a hip media crowd http://restaurantgeist.dk/ On a Thursday night, it was kicking. It's owner, Bo Bech, is apparently the Danish equivalent of Gordon Ramsay. If you sit the bar - as we did - you can watch what goes on in the kitchen. And everythng was perfectly coordinated - a bit like a modern ballet. There was music, but fortunately no drama. The food is a gastronomic oxymoron - deceptively simple, with touches of originality - innovative and arty-looking combinations like the candy floss that arrived with our coffee! It was delicious and delivered a delightful post-dinner sugar rush.

Geist is eclectic. It is definitely worth a visit and be sure to make reservations. We had booked a table, but still had to queue for the cloarkroom and to get seated!

Designer everything! 

I can hardly believe that my waistline has survived being royally entertained by my lovely Danish friends - not all of whom I mention here - who transformed my business trip into a memorable and wonderful few days. And time to reflect - here I am in a hall of mirrors outside one of my meetings.

Interior design is a theme that runs through Copenhagen like the stripes in a stick of rock, or Calais on the heart of Mary, Queen of Scots. The arrivals hall at Kastrup is full of egg chairs. Every cafe and office I visited combined classic elegance with different quirky touches to make it stand out from the rest. Here's a staircase reminiscent of the Guggenheim museum.

Even the flowers sold on the street are colour coordinated.

Into the light

It occurs to me that Scandinavian design is about throwing shapes (a bit like dancing the focus is on finding a pure and compelling line) - objects that change, and change the shape of their surroundings - as the light falls on them in different ways. I'm signing off with another attempt at an arty photograph on the way back to the airport. I took this as the train emerged from a tunnel into the light - you can just about see me reflected in the window. 

There is something cool and refreshing about Scandinavia - and something special about the light there. I returned feeling renewed in some way. But that was before things set me back again... I seem to have got into escaping to cold places to find clarity and direction...