Failing to plan is planning to fail.

There are many people for whom RCA secret is just a welcome distraction from their day to day life.  For them they go along to one of the viewing days, maybe buy some raffle tickets, will sometimes pitch up at the sale should depending on their schedule, the weather, whether they liked many of the cards etc.  Sometimes I kinda wish I was in that camp.

Because I will happily admit that I am a little bit obsessional about RCA secret.  About this time of year I can barely wait for it to start, I am, literally, counting down the days both in my head and out loud in conversations with anyone who is prepared to listen.  I need distractions and I love art so I put two and two together and start to prepare for the sale in earnest starting now.  And this is what I do:

1)  I go through all the cards on the RCA website from last year, reminding myself of the cards I loved, the cards I hated, the ones that got away, the surprise "sleepers" that I hadn't even noticed until some time after the sale, the ones that friends loved or bought.  It would be wrong to say that every card provokes a memory but many do. 

2)  I go see as much art as I can.  Actually this pretty much happens all year round anyway but coincidentally October is a great month for seeing art what with all the numerous art fairs going on in London and all the shows and auctions designed to coincide with those fairs.   So October sees me immersed in art.

3) The embarrassment of riches in the London art scene is such that you simply cannot see all the shows, or go to all of the fairs.  So the internet is a wonderful tool to enable us all to enjoy the things we love in a way that wasn't imaginable even at the turn of the century, when I first started going to RCA Secret.

4) Come November the press interest for RCA secret really hots up.  But of course it isn't just the written media, it's TV, it's blogs, it's twitter.  I will keep any eye on it all for you and report all of the articles I find on here.  And it is all the articles, I don't keep any good ones back for myself, or hide any tidbits I find out about the sale.  I make sure it is all here for you to read.

Right I'm off to do all that.  Starting with (1).  Don't forget the college has warned us that the 2009 cards will disappear from the website by the end of September.