Hey
my REAL wall fans I have an urgent mailart/postcard petition call that I need a quick response for, and I need your help!
As many of you know, recently I received a
very strange demand letter from the local council, who seem to think that
my REAL wall is a
business, and have demanded that I send them some paperwork proving that I get my waste disposed of properly, or face a potential £5000 fine!
On the advice of
Postmuse and with the support of my REAL fans, I decided not to bother to answer them straight away, but decided instead to send the story on to my local paper, the
Hammersmith and Kensington Times, who sent around a photographer and put the story on page 3 of the
print edition and headline on their
website.
Another local magazine,
Westside magazine caught a sniff of this story and sent me an email to send them more details and I got in touch with them. They emailed today to say that, instead of running it as the same story that HKtimes ran with, they wanted to print a ‘what’s happened since’ story in the news page of the December edition, and they asked me if I paid the fine.
Of course I haven't paid the fine, I have no intention of doing so as I've done nothing wrong, but I've been planning to send the council an intricate mailart postcard as they have demanded that I send them "paperwork related to the business" and the "business" I run produces large amounts of pretty paper and cool postcards, so I thought it was the most appropriate thing.
When I told the editor that this was my intention, she was delighted
"Send the intricate postcard to us please and I’ll use it as an image for the December issue!"
Sounds like a mailart call to me if I ever heard one!
So the call is this. Write the coolest, funniest prettiest piece of mailart or send a postcard of support to my REAL wall at the usual address to arrive by November 15th (please allow time for the
postal strikes, so post early please), and I will put together a package for the council and send it on to them, via
Westside Magazine, who will print your mailart as my official letter to the council.
Nothing horrible please, this isn't a nasty one, it's a friendly jab showing the ridiculousness of their demand, so please don't get mad, let's just get even! Grrrr!
Hopefully we'll wind em up a bit and they'll fine me or something.
The address for those of you who don't know it by heart is...
Andy Hoang
Manager
my REAL wall
PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK
If you need to see the letters and paperwork, they are on my flickr site,
here,
here and
here
Feel free to use these in whatever way you want, use whatever medium you like.
On Friday, I got a call from my mortgage advisor telling me that the Sunday Times had been in touch with him. They wanted to interview a young couple who had recently taken out a mortgage, and so he thought of me and Elena, and gave me a call.
The paper arranged for a photographer to be around in an hour and interviewed me on the phone as to why I chose the mortgage I did and next thing you know, me and Elena were on the front page of the Sunday Times money section!
I could hardly believe my eyes on Sunday, when I picked up the paper and saw our thumbnail on the front page in the top left hand corner, the very first thing you see when you turn to the money pages, and all my friends have remarked how little sense it makes that I, who care not a jot about the stuff, should be there looking like some money guru! As Jason says "...it just doesn't compute"
Amusingly, the paper reported my name as Anthony Hoang, the second time that my name has been spelt wrong in the papers. And yes everyone I know has ripped the piss out me for that already, so feel free to add yours below...
For REAL wall fans, me and Elena tried our very hardest to get your mail in.
The picture on the front page, which is also featured on the online version of the story was taken with the official REAL wall as the white background. The photographer was looking for a white background and said "Could you take those postcards down and we'll take the picture over there"
D'oh!
Inside the paper, on page 4 me and Elena are pictured on the stairs. After clearing the place up a little, Elena slyly draped Okadascat's knitted banner across the top of a table in front of us, and I set up a postcard from Richard Canard at our feet on the staircase.
Desperately we tried to maneuvre ourselves so that the photographer would take a pic of a postcard, but to no avail. Shucks. Maybe next time.