My guest post is up, over on Andhari’s blog. Andhari, the Insominac Lolita, DJ MASTER NDEESASTER.

Don’t judge me. If you’re a girl, you might like it. And if you’re a girl that looks/feels like a younger Lindsay Lohan, please contact me. We have some things to discuss.

The Faroes consist of 18 islands, some small, some large, and only one uninhabited. The population spread is also far from equal: about two thirds of the population live in or near the capital. For 1200 years the only way to get around would’ve been by boat. We’re not talking large distances – the archipelago is only 100 miles across – but by land, because of the mountainous topology, most villages would be, by today’s standards, totally isolated. Settlements in the Faroes are invariably placed in bays and inlets with mountains reaching up behind them. These plains are also very small – there’s almost no naturally-flat land in the Faroes! – and as a result there’s only one big town: Torshavn (Thor’s Harbour – cool name, eh?)

Anyway, along came the automobile and roads between towns on the same island begun to be carved out of the vertical-cliffed basalt mountains; ferries were used to go between islands – and more recently, to replace the ferries, tunnels! Lots and lots of tunnels.

I’m not some master civil engineer. I don’t know a whole lot about tunnel making (except for the Eurotunnel because it was in the media for a decade…) What I do know is that cutting your way through dense, metamorphic rock isn’t easy. In fact, it’s more a case of blowing things up with explosives. In a controlled fashion of course.

And that’s where this story takes place: in a Faroese under-sea tunnel. Not a nice, new, two-way well-lit tunnel – no. This takes place in one of the original, single-lane, pray-you-don’t-meet-someone-coming-the-other-way tunnels. They’re not lit. These tunnels are pitch-black except for your car’s lights. Years and years of carbon emissions mean the walls are lined with thick, light-absorbent soot. The only saving grace are the reflectors that illuminate the scars left by the dynamite: deeply-pocked, dirty-black holes.

Except for getting from A to B in the quickest way possible, there’s only one other thing that these tunnels are good for: racing. On the Faroe Islands, a country with no apparent social structure and limited space to build big houses, there’s only one real way to show off your wealth: fast cars. Fancy cars. Cars with spoilers and sexy skirts.

And in the case of my host in the Faroe Islands: nitrous oxide injection. I won’t bore you with the details, but put simply: it makes a car go quick – spine-fusing and eyebrow-ripping fast.

(This was meant to be someone sitting in a car with g-force/wind making their cheeks wobble…
But this was all I could find on Google.)

I’ve completely lost my train of thought. Damn Asian baby. Ah yes… So they race along these tunnels. A bit like a low-tech version of The Fast and the Furious without the flashy lights or the  hot girls in skintight plasticky clothing. You start at one end and finish at the other — the highest max speed at the end of the night wins! Wins what? The multi-tiered, golden and invisible cup of Pride of course! I suppose when you’ve been at sea for nine months bragging rights are about as exciting as things get: “Pass me the knife, Bjorn.” “REMEMBER THAT TIME I BEAT YOU IN THE TUNNEL?!” “Yeah… now pass the damn knife.”

I should tell you now that I’m a bit of a speed freak. So of course, last week, I found myself sitting in a super-charged hod and staring into the murky abyss.

“What if there’s a car coming but its lights are broken?

“Well… let’s hope that doesn’t happen Seb.”

“What if we hit a rock and collide with the wall, smearing our faces into a millimeter-thick laminate?”

“There’s always a chance of that… but it’s been a long time since it last happened.”

And with a cheesy, over-confident grin from the driver — a grin that betrayed his true nervousness — and with the drop of the clutch and the bang of the exhaust we accelerated into the tunnel.

A few seconds later, fully blanketed in black, there’s a rumble loud enough to be heard over the frantically-whirring engine. It’s my turn to grin nervously. It’s my turn to look towards the car’s flimsy roof and perform in the fraction of a second some thoroughly pointless calculations.

Out of the corner of his mouth he whispers tersely.

“Seb.” A second desperate and creaking roar from the dark surround. “Brake… or accelerate?”

Apparently artists need to be challenged. They need muses, they need inspiration. Without pushing boundaries an artist tends to wilt and wallow, churning out much of the same, day after day, year after year until… well, they die. Scant few become very, very famous, and the rest are forgotten.

So to combat that particular murky mire of artistic dullness, to stir things up, Abi (a talented friend of mine that paints and makes pretty dresses) and Sebastian (photographer and part-time purveyor of baked goods) will be doing a grand project entitled ‘52 Weeks‘.

There are very few rules to 52 Weeks — in fact the only real rule is that we must post one photo each every week for a year. In our case it will be every Monday from August 31st 2009 until whenever 52 Mondays have passed! Is that August 30th 2010? Somewhere around there.

We have no set theme and no limits on what we can submit, as long as it’s one photo, every week, every Monday. Our photos will be placed next to each other, perhaps with a little bit about the photo or what’s going on with our lives. We’ve also never met and live on opposite sides of the country, but might plan for some kind of ‘momentous meet-up’ (or ‘hideous break-up’ as the case may be) during the project.

The photos will be posted both to Flickr and to another blog I’ve set up: 52 Weeks by Abi & Sebastian. It has its own RSS feed so you won’t see my (or her) photos pop up on this feed or this page. If you’d rather follow it on Flickr, you’re more than welcome to — it will all be cross-linked together anyway.

Expect to see some kind of introductory statements from the both of us to pop up over the weekend. Now I’m going to go and work on some cheesy picture of us both together to serve as our ‘title image’… and also have a think about what the hell I’m going to do for Monday. Stay tuned — this could either be very, very good, or diabolical. Either way, it’ll be interesting.