Hi, my name is Jamie Carmichael, and I live in Canterbury, which is in South East England. I've known about Wikipedia for a while, but didn't realise exactly what it was for untill a few months after I found it. When I did finally find out that it was a free contributing service thing, I joined immediatley. I'm 19 years old and I'm a National Diploma and Foundation student at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury.

My Contributions

Articles that I have written so far

Articles that I have contributed to

My Interests

Change Ringing

I've been a bellringer in Canterbury for seven years, as of December 2004, and it's one of the most self-fulfilling aspects of my life at the moment, even though it's a voluntary profession and you don't get paid. I'm not really good at maths and I'm not really into sport, but the great thing about bellringing is that you don't need either brains or brawn, not at first anyway, although nearly eight years of non-stop ringing has made me pretty strong, and developed my reflexes incredibly, and it's cheaper than going to the gym three times a week :-). I'm currently a member of three churches in Canterbury, the Company of St Stephen's church, St Dunstan's church and the Change Ringing Company of Canterbury Cathedral.

I was made a memeber of St Stephens in 1998, the same year that I became a member of my County Association, the Kent County Accosiation of Change Ringers (KCACR). St Stephen's is Canterbury's training tower, and nearly every new ringer in the local city area comes there to learn. I'm still a regular ringer there, although I've had to waylay my involvement in the tower occasionally over the last couple of years.

In February 2005, I conducted my first Quarter Peal at St Stephen's, in my opinion one of the most difficult things I've had to do with my skills at ringing since I began. I was awarded my Gold Badge for Change Ringing at St Stephen's in March 2004, just before my 18th birthday, and I had a Quarter Peal rung in my honour!

In January 2001 I willingly ended my ringing on Sunday's at St Stephen's, since I was told that there was a greater need for my services on Sunday at the tower of Canterbury Cathedral. I had already been ringing there irregularly for about five months, so I accepted, gladly, since the starting time of ringing on Sunday morning at the Cathedral was 10:15am, while the starting time at St Stephen's was 9:45am, which gave me an extra half-hour sleep in on Sunday!

In January the next year, 2002, I was invited to the Cathedral's Annual General Meeting (CAGM), and I was made an Associate Member, meaning that I was officially on the Company register, but not acnowledged as a competant Member. I continued to ring regularly at the Cathedral for practices on Thursday evening and Sunday morning. I contributed in the ringing for the enthronement of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in 2003, and I helped in the Cathedral Open Evenings in November each year, the only day in the year that the Cathedral Bell Towers are open to the public. In January of 2005, I was again invited to the CAGM, and since I had succesfully learned the ringing method Grandsire Caters, a method rung on nine bells and a requirement for membership at the Cathedral, I was made a full member of the Company without opposition.

I have been ringing at St Dunstan's Church regularly since December 2002, when I was forced to stop ringing at St Stephen's alltogether, after I joined the AS-Level Textiles class at school, which was at the same time as practice at St Stephen's.

Since it was a six bell tower, St Stephen's having eight bells and the Cathedral 12, it allowed me to learn the easier methods that I had had to bypass during my training at St Stephen's. After ringing there for three years, apparently becoming 'a great contributer' to the tower, ringing-wise anyway, and learning my first conducting skills for Plain Bob Doubles there, I was made a member of the tower in February 2005, again without opposition.

As well as these three towers I ring almost regularly at St Nicholas's Church in Sturry, a village less than a mile East of Canterbury City, and have just begun ringing at the redundant tower of St Mary's at Chislet, a hamlet on the outskirts of the Canterbury District.

Art and Design

I've been very interested in Art since I was very young, since my Uncle was an artist, and both my aunts on my Dad's side were amateur artists. My art medium is mostly with graphite pencil or fineliner pens. I also tend to draw in a technical style, like architectural or design concept drawings. I was admitted to the Kent Institute of Art and Design (KIAD) in Canterbury in May 2004 and I enrolled in September of the same year as a student in the National Diploma course. My first year at KIAD has taught me a lot about art, design, textiles, and several types of art I didn't even know about, and I have passed every term assesment so far with decent grades. At the end of my first course year (10th June 2005), I still have one year of study left to go, during which I will hopefully specialise in a specific area of art or design, after which I will have to decide whether or not to take on the degree course at KIAD, go to a university elsewhere, or simply take up a starter career in art and design.

Lord of the Rings

I've been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkein and Lord of the Rings since long before the movies came out. When my dad was at college in Oxford he actully met Tolkein and had lunch with him. I saw the animated version of the books for the first time when I was 5, which is a pretty good representation spliced together into one long movie. I first watched it at my Nan's house, and remeber it scared both me and my cousin, Hannah, to death, after which she refused to ever watch it again. I, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of it, and watched it at least twice a month for the next year or so, after which i got bored of it, and my dad suggested that I read the books, but being roughly six years old at the time, the sight of the three, two-inch thick novels didn't really appeal to me.
My dad then read the books to me the about a year later, when I was 7-8, reading one chapter per night of Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers, which took about 18 months! After this, I took over at about age 9.5, reading The Return of the King myself, which took me longer then it took my dad to read me the first two!
Later on, when I was about 13, in 1999, I asked my dad to read them to me again while we were in the Lake District for two weeks. Since this was holiday time, and not during the school term like before, reading the Fellowship of the Ring only took the first two weeks of the summer holiday, and then we continued to read the Two Towers, and Return of the King between then and Christmas.
That Spring the next year, the Spring of 2000, my parents finally relented to the call of the new Millennium and purchased a new computer, complete with the Internet, something I had only used about twice before at Secondary School, where I wasn't allowed to look at things other than schoolwork. Now I used our new computer to surf the net for things concerning Lord of the Rings, among other things, which is where I first saw the artwork that people like John Howe and Alan Lee had made for the books, which is also probably where my growing interest in art and design was first born. I also learned some small details about the history of Middle-earth from timelines taked from the Appendices made by Tolkein.
I first saw Peter Jackson's version of Fellowship of the Rings in 2002, during the movie's third premiere week in Canterbury's Odeon Cinema. It became one of my favourite movies ever, next to Titanic and Gladiator (you can see my love of Epics!). I saw the Two Towers eqaully fast the next year, but, due to my A-Level exam studies, I was unable to see the Return of the King in the Cinema, and was reduced to watching it along on DVD a few months later.

Since then, I've become almost an expert on Lord of the Rings, both the Tolkein and Jackson versions, and the special features of the DVDs have opened up the possibility of stage or set design as a possible later career after I finish college.

Arthur Ransome

Like Lord of the Rings, my interest in the Swallows and Amazons novels by Arthur Ransome was begun by my dad, who had read the books since he was 10, and read all twelve books to me between when I was 4 and 12, when I started reading them myself.
Unlike most childrens books I've read, like those by Enid Blyton and C.S. Lewis, the Swallows and Amazons books have never really got past me age wise, the language never becoming irritating and boring, and the stories never seeming too repetitive, and I'm still reading them at age 19, going on 20, and they haven't yet lost their appeal. When I was 15, my parents took me and my brother to the Lake District, where most of the Swallows and Amazons books are set, where we stayed in a small cottage at the foot of Lake Windermere which is also where I first learned to sail a small boat (though not very well) at that point. Even though my enthusiasm in Lord of the Rings was in its prime at this time, I still read the Arthur Ransome books in my spare time, and while we were driving around from place to place.