Advancing the cultural snow manually is a portmanteau metaphor of sorts. Years ago I wrote a blog, for about three years, called Whitebait in the City (no longer accessible online), mostly about cities and urban cultures (and me) – which I had been researching for a higher degree and which was a big part of who I was, what I was interested in as well as part of the general business of forging a career and life.

An early post on that blog, perhaps the first, was about language: an urban planner friend had just been telling me about  receiving a report which advised that the work crew had set about ‘advancing the hole manually’. Yeah, great way of saying it isn’t it? Clumsy and bureaucratic at one level at but also a bit avant-poetic depending on your tastes. A reminder of how hard it is sometimes to describe things that appear simple and the strange linguistic accidents and resonances that can result.

The second part of this blog title is the ‘cultural snow’ reference: that’s from the fabulous fiction writer Murakami Haruki. One of his characters – I think he is a freelance advertising copywriter – cynically talks about his job as ‘shovelling cultural snow’. That’s definitely part of what I do for a living as an academic though not just in a cynical mode as I’m also I hope playful, educational, ironic and even sincere in my shovelling. My work resides in a sometimes difficult to define disciplinary location that draws on media studies, cultural theory, geography, communication studies, urban studies and anything else that seems generative so the snow you get at least has the benefit of aspiring to be a bit varied.

OK, that’s a start. This blog begins now.