If there's one thing that reading 1984 taught me it was the benefits re-writing history. This section is where I will dump the irregular diary entries from the main page once they get too old and tired. I'll also take the opportunity to remove those I've come to find too embarrassing, re-work those that which didn't quite make the grade first time around, and generally use the benefit of hindsight to make the history of this site seem far better than it actually ever was.

[03/04/05] Quartet I've been making a real effort in 2005 to get along to more exhibitions. Too often I give in to my lethargy and, to be honest, a few too many trips to galleries in recent years have left me wondering why I bothered. This year though I've been on a good run with You Are Here at the Design Museum, Tomoko Takahashi at the Serpentine and today the two displays at the Barbican; Tina Barney's 'The Europeans' and a Christian Marclay. I enjoyed both, but the latter contained probably the best piece of video art I've seen in a very long time. When I first walked round I completely missed the curtain leading into the room where Quartet was being shown, it was only when I went upstairs to see The Europeans that I noticed the closed off space in the centre of the floor from which various snatches of music were coming from. The installation comprised of four video projections showing brief clips from films, cut together so they created a seamless piece of music; a clip of Jack Nicholson hitting a piano key from 'Five Easy Pieces', Kirk Douglas blowing on a trumpet (from what film - 'Young Man with a Horn' presumably?), a brief glimpse of Audrey Hepburn singing 'Moonriver', Michael J Fox punishing an electric guitar from 'Back to the Future', all seamlessly accompanying each other. It's the kind of art that makes you want to rush home and try creating something similar yourself.

[26/03/05] Postcode Tectonics Walking through Crouch End this morning I noticed a long tear in the pavement, a rupture that ran for several feet as though the concrete I was walking over had been pushed apart by some force from below. I had heard how parts of Kilburn were increasingly described by estate agents as now being part of West Hampstead. Could it be that London is shaped by the same forces that pulled the continents apart and squeezed out mountain ranges from between them? Was Muswell Hill drifting apart from Crouch End and if so, what filled the gaps in between - mobile phone shops?

[20/03/05] Just discovered how to write in Japanese script in OSX, now I can name folders on my desktop in Hiragana and Kanji.

It always used to puzzle me how Japanese keyboards would work when they used a system of symbolic characters, Kanji, which numbered in the thousands. Obviously you couldn't have a key for each symbol. The way it works in OSX is that you type in Romaji (the Japanese name for western script) the phonetics which represent their own phonetic alphabet Hiragana (or Katakana for foreign words) and it converts them on screen as you go along. These phonetics also make up Kanji and by pressing the space bar after typing, say, the Japanese for Japan nihon it converts the onscreen Hiragana to Kanji. I'm not sure how it differentiates between Kanji which have the same phonetic sounds yet. All very clever, but before word processors that could make these conversions, how did Japanese typewriters work? A quick search on Google and I found a great video of one in action. The internet truly is a wonderful thing. There's more information at another site I found.

[26/10/04] So farewell then John Peel. It was genuinely a shock today to hear John Peel had passed away, particularly as it seemed so unexpected. He regularly held a top-five in my imaginary list of celebrities I'd like to go for a beer with. I was never a regular listener, but his show was always the place I turned to when I felt myself getting bored with music and it usually only took a couple of shows before he's thrown up something to get me interested in buying music again. Looking at my collection, he's had a disproportionate influence on the music I think of as my music - that's the stuff I feel I discovered rather than grew to like through continual mainstream airplay - those bands that if I hadn't been listening on a particular night I may never have come across; Gallon Drunk, Fridge, Richard Buckner, Mogwai, Calexico, Saloon and most recently David Jack. Too have been so influential across his career and still have come across as one of the most down-to-earth, amiable people in broadcasting is quite a feat.

[22/9/04] Notes from Rome II. I can't find the hotel breakfast room, so I head out early instead. It's cloudy, overcast - the city's glow has gone, replaced by a feeling that there's work to do. Shutters being pulled up on shops, men in suits hurrying to work chewing on slices of pizza, a small army of uniformed street cleaners. Workers are relaying large areas of cobblestones where I had been standing only the night before [.].

This is a city built around religion. It might be most visible in the architecture of the churches, but it is crossing the roads that displays the real acts of faith. Looking out across what seems to be about a dozen lanes of traffic that is the Via di San Marco on the Piazza Venezia I saw a couple (tourist uniform - baseball cap, shorts, ankle socks with shoes) hesitating on the other side. By now I had learnt the trick - follow the natives. A pair of Romans strolled up and without glancing across from their conversation stepped into the road. I'm not a religious person, but I crossed myself and slipped in behind them. Cars and scooters screeched to a halt beside us, whilst the rest of the traffic continued to speed in front and behind, until we were completely enveloped in its flow. Arriving untouched on the other side felt like cheating the laws of probability - God it seems doesn't play dice. I thanked Him and my two minders and continued on to the Forum, leaving the tourist couple still looking nervously out across the chaos.

The Palatine. I'm suffering from the heat, breaking cover when the sun goes behind a cloud. Continuing this cat-and-mouse I make slow progress around the Roman ruins of the Palatine Hill. The Stadium. Artefacts laid out like the fossil of some skeletal remains, fallen columns for ribs, an ovular ring of stones the pelvis, broken fragments become teeth around a semi-circle smile.

[21/9/04] Notes from Rome I. A party of thirty-five English pensioners shepherded by a middle-aged man in dog-collar 'on a pilgrimage'. Amongst this cabin of Babel one accent muscles through, an American couple further back. My instinct is to cringe, but he's just being chatty, friendly with the strangers around him. I travel the world in silence, leave no echo.

The miracle of flight has brought us across nations to Fiumicino Airport, but step out of the plane onto concrete, we have to make the final few yards to passport arrivals by bus.

I'm edgy about crime. Advice to keep an eye open from family who have been here before. I feel vulnerable carrying all this dead weight. I convince myself that a man beside me on the platform is eyeing my backpack. I in turn had been eyeing a pretty woman standing with her mother. I decide to move further down the platform,

Palm trees, explosions of foliage, green fireworks, line the route from the airport providing a fanfare to my arrival. Skeletons of buildings ­ new offices, apartments, a decaying railway station. The air is hot, almost thick. There is no air-conditioning. Two Australian women complain about the cold. She seems to be regretting the weight of books she has brought with her on her visit. I scribble down notes: cacti, highrises all with balconies filled with pot plants. On their roofs dead forests of television aerials. Striped blinds. Satellite dishes - we all live under the same sun, we can all tune into the same Sky. Buildings seem energised by the sun: terracottas, yellows, pinks, contrast with the dull concrete of London which seems to shrug off the light, indifferent to the warmth.

Piazza da Rotunda. The Pantheon. Looking up at the dome [.], scaffolding corrupts the circle. The sky is visible through the opening. A seagull drifts into view ­ its wings are still almost as though it were not moving and instead the opening ­ pupil of a giant eye ­ had turned to look at it.

I explore by instinct, walking in right-angles; I see something of interest in the distance, but each side street throws up a new distraction and a change of course. Through this random zig-zagging I aim to explore the enigmatic side streets but still end up hitting the tourist spots. Rome is suddenly my new infatuation. In this slightly giddy frame-of-mind I convince myself this is the most beautiful city I have ever visited.

Drinking tourist-priced beer in a bar on the Piazza Rotunda watching women walk by (they always walk by). The air is suddenly filled with the chiming of church bells. I check my watch; it's 6:50. Is Rome on a different time zone, out of step by ten minutes?

My hotel room is small, taller than it is wide, but clean and all I'm interested in when I get back from exploring is that it has a bed and a shower. I flick through the channels on the television. There's a strange advert where a woman counts out large slabs of gelatinous fat as places them on a set of scales; uno kili, due kili, tre kili, quattro kili... her voice betrays her growing astonishment... cinque kili. There's a logo at the bottom of the screen which reads The American Diet.

[4/9/04] Grilled Lamb with Tsatziki. I spent this afternoon enjoying the sunshine. London had finally been treated to a reprise of the year's earlier sunny weather. Tzatziki, a cucumber and yoghurt dip, sounded an appropriately cool accompaniment to a balmy day. I left it to chill in the fridge as I strolled over to Kenwood House, backpack containing the usual essentials; book, camera, iPod, notebook and assorted pens. On days like this my usual spot is a hill overlooking the Highgate Ponds, sitting amongst the long grass and listening to the sound of crickets as I watch the carousel of London's parklife slowly turning.

Today though my plan was to take my underused sketchbook and attempt a drawing of Kenwood House. A few minutes of drawing reminded me how difficult sketching could be. The building's dimensions seemed to be shifting as I worked to capture them, the solid geometry of the Georgian design becoming a cubist tangle of tentative lines and attempted re-workings during the transfer to paper. My best intentions of lightly marking in the general proportions soon gave way to minor entanglements with the detail of a window or a balustrade. When my hand, greasy with sunscreen, began to smudge the lines I used this as an excuse to stop and retreated into a book instead.

Reading now though comes with its own irritation. A speck which drifts within my vision, tugged behind my line of sight, but coyly avoiding my attempts to bring it into focus, slipping away to the periphery when before it had been happy to take centre stage. I've been telling myself it's too insignificant yet to take to a doctor, but I've already been looking on the web. Floaters is the technical term for them apparently, usually harmless aberrations in the aqueous humor of the eyeball. That usually strikes me as a get-out clause. A one-in-a-million chance perhaps, but then my numbers didn't come up in the lottery today so maybe this will be my turn to be picked by the laws of chance instead. The diagram on the website easily becomes reality in my imagination, I know what aqueous humor looks life, I've touched it. At the age of eleven my teacher brought into class a bag of cow's eyeballs supplied by her butcher for us to dissect. At first I think we felt it may turn out to be a joke. When she revealed them to the class I remember them still attached to small chunks of flesh. I had expected to be horrified by the whole experience, but instead found it fascinating ­ in later years one of the reasons I took biology as an a-level was because of how interesting I found dissection. Slicing up eyeballs. The infamous opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou, Bunuel and Dali's short film collaboration, features an eye being sliced with a razor blade, the illusion created by a cut to the incision of an animal's eye. The Pixies, my favourite band at college, referenced this scene in their signature tune Debaser. Quiet verse, loud chorus. It seems a fairly obvious formula now, but then there was no doubt a lot of forehead slapping going on the day after the wheel was first rolled-out. Kurt Cobain took this idea and reinvented US rock for a generation. The imagery crops up again on the artwork for the Pixie's Planet of Sound EP, a broken glass eye, rim of a small dish in orbit around it. Broken eyes, shattered sight. But Francis was about to become Frank, the brutal imagery replaced by melody and, to the disquiet of the critics, real singing. It had been coming. When confronted in an interview for Select magazine about the mellower moments on the band's Bossanova album, Black Francis explained he had a girlfriend now and you couldn't stay angry forever. Maybe this was the idea Kurt should have lifted. Instead he's ended up a t-shirt icon on a hundred Camden market stalls, trying to retain what dignity he can amongst the I Like The Pope, The Pope Smokes Dope t-shirts (and I wonder how much in royalties the Catholic Church could claim from that perennial favourite, enough to bankroll a fair few anti-condom / HIV genocide campaigns would be my guess).

[27/7/04] The bus takes a detour around the spreading epidemic of road works afflicting North London, the roads open gashes, layers of tarmac pulled back to expose the viscera of decrepit piping. With the city's arteries blocked, transportat is sluggish.

It doesn't take much to distract me from my book ('London Orbital'); unfamiliar buildings, familiar buildings (church steeples, tower blocks) glanced from a fresh angle, rubbing shoulders with a different crowd. A brief excursion into the unknown before our detour deposits us back onto Kentish Town High Street, back into the usual routine. Another piece of my mental map of London can be mapped in. A new line can be drawn between two points. It's testament to how good Iain Sinclair's book is that I manage to read any at all. I find bus journeys so distracting. Sitting on the top deck, you see the strata above the cheap plastic signs and tacked on commercial space of a London high street, you're face to face with the original facades, the ghosts of painted shop signs, the souls of previous lives never put to rest. For high street archaeology you look up, you don't dig down.

[19/7/04] Tricolor Salad. I spent Sunday feeling under the weather, as the murky grey skies which have pressed down on Highgate making even being outdoors feel claustrophobic. I rallied myself at the start of the day to go swimming and at the end to see Belle & Sebastian, who finally managed to break the clouds - a real feel-good gig. This was Today, I feel brighter and the weather has cheered up too. My current summer meal is a tricolor salad, so called as its ingredients tomato, basil and mozzarella represent the three colours of the Italian flag. It's so simple; simply slice the tomatoes and mazzarella - ideally you should use buffalo mozzarella which has a stronger flavour, throw on some torn basil leaves, squeeze half a lemon over it all and add a little olive oil and ground pepper. It looks so bright and fresh compared to the usual variations on sludge with rice that I usually knock-up.

[14/7/04] Sausage with Lentils and Peppers (reprise). Cooking enough for two days is a favourite trick. I take advantage of the time freed from preparation to sit down and read. I've not been reading enough recently and I feel I have to create moments to sit with a book, rather than using them to fill time.

The book I am currently trying to complete is 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' by Italo Calvino. I enjoyed this passage:

'The kitchen is the part of the house that can tell the most things about you: whether you cook or not (one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself, but with care, as if you were cooking also for others; and sometimes also for others, but nonchalantly, as if you were cooking only for yourself), whether you tend towards the bare minimum or toward gastronomy (your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions; you may not necessarily be greedy, but the idea of a couple of fried eggs for supper would probably depress you) ... A glance into the refrigerator allows other valuable data to be gathered: in the egg slots only one egg remains; of lemons there is only a half and that half-dried. On the other hand, there is chestnut puree, black olives, a little jar of salsify or horseradish: it is clear that when shopping you succumb to the lure of the goods on display and don't bear in mind what is lacking at home.'

So what does my kitchen say about me?

[13/7/04] Sausages with Lentils and Peppers. A friend of mine cooked this for me a few days ago. I envy his ordered way of cooking; how he can calmly prepare all the vegetables first, dicing them and leaving them in neat piles. Only once everything is in place does he begin cooking. I usually prepare as I go along, mentally juggling the jobs I need to do with the spaces left open by the recipe; slicing while I'm browning, peeling as I boil.

The recipe is borrowed from a big hardback book on Spanish Cookery I picked up at Marks and Spencers as a Christmas present. It was cheap and cheerful, but what really appealed was that it had no connection to any celebrity chef or hyped television series. My own Spanish cookery book is 'Spain on a Plate' by Maria Jose Sevilla: a small, yellowed paperback, which I again bought as a reaction against the flashy, colourful food-porn cook books. It's a great book, with interesting chapters talking about the history and culture of Spanish cuisine, but the recipes are almost entirely impractical for day-to-day cooking for just myself.

[12/7/04] Devilled Kidneys. I have always loved kidneys, ever since my Mum would include them as part of our Sunday morning fry-up. I cook with them infrequently, as I'm a supermarket shopper and you very rarely see them on the shelves. I always feel they should be more popular, but am then reminded as I'm cutting the core from the kidneys that there is no hiding from the fact you are handling the viscera of something that once lived. Their slick, smooth mass feels so much more organic than the cuts of meat I usually handle. Dark, ruby coloured blood oozes out as I use the knife to slice them into halves. Cutting away the white, pithy core inside is tricky, and best done from my experience with a good pair of kitchen scissors to snip away the tethers that bind it to the organ. What do you call the body of a kidney? You can't use flesh, so what word can describe their substance?

There was a really disappointing pop-science programme on BBC1 last night, which managed to combine some quite impressive recreations of the way our physical geography is shaped over time with a depressingly low-brow commentary. One interesting thing I did learn was that the entire Yellowstone National Park, famous for the Old Faithful geyser, is located within the caldera of what scientists term a super-volcano. Horizon great documentaries on Mega Tsunami - and more recently how the Gulf Stream halting could cause a new ice-age (which more recently I think has since been popularised by the film The Day After Tomorrow)

The subject of devils reminded me of an article I read in Saturday's Guardian about Alesteir Crowley which claimed 'it was Crowley who gave Churchill his famous victory sign'. This seemed a very bizarre claim. A quick google and the claim was taken further by Jordan Maxwell 'the godfather of Secret Societies" that Crowley also invented the Nazi salute and the American thumbs up sign ! A little more sanity is restored here though [http://www.angelfire.com/comics/eroomnala/12.html] 'The relevant passage about the V sign comes on pgs 386-387 of Lawrence Sutin's Do What thou Wilt biography...'Crowley also claimed to have originated the popular V for Victory hand gesture employed by Churchill. According to Crowley, the letter V was suited to the task of bringing victory due to its numerous esoteric correspondences. Crowley's claims have never been accepted; David Ritchie of the British Broadcasting Corporation is widely credited as having suggested it to Churchill.' http://home.luna.nl/~arjan-muil/radio/history/ww-2/v-campaign.html (Douglas Ritchie NOT David)

[8/7/04] Smothered Beef (Labdhara Gosht). Another recipe from Quick and Easy Indian Cooking. Cooking this with the idea of sitting down in front of an evening of BBC4 art programmes - Art and the Sixties on the St. Martin's sculptors, then a bit of nostalgia with Shock of the New - a programme that opened my eyes to modern art when I started at art college and still forms the bedrock of most of my views on classic modernism.

Annoyingly my freeview reception is currently awful - the screen keeps breaking up or freezing and the sound has deteriorated into a sequence of chkks and snkks - in fact it looks like some annoying piece of video art, and makes watching Shock of the New all but impossible.

The recent New Shock of the New which heralded these repeats was disappointing - what attracted me to the original was the strangeness of much of the work and his clear explanation of why it looked that way. Hughes seems pretty down on everything post-Warhol, and his pick of what was good today seemed ultra-conservative. His thesis seemed to be that we need to reject the cult of the new and return to beautiful more contemplative art. I love Paula Rego's work her claustrophobic paintings packed full of narrative tensions and repressed desires. A lot of contemporary art is superficial but surely it's as a product of our times it serves a deeper critical analysis than a mere dismissive wave of the hand; that analysis may be negative but I was hoping for --- I was about to criticise him for the fact Rego, Hockney and Freud. Hardly represented anything new, but then I realised that's his point. Perhaps too much contemporary art is judged on novelty alone. But not all.

[5/7/04] Pasta with Stilton Sauce. A simple rule to live by: never use metal implements with non-stick pans. The metal can scratch the non-stick surface (and I read the other day that non-stick surfaces are fairly unpleasant substances to ingest). However, I use a wooden spoon that is a health hazard in itself - who knows how long I've had it but it's stained and split. That split bothers me; it's probably a breeding ground for germs. This uneasiness, which I'm only ever reminded of whenever I pick the spoon up, is never enough to inspire me to replace it.

I'm making a standard white sauce with Stilton and cheddar crumbled into it. I never measure anything; I judge it all by instinct and this time it worked out. The real secret to a white sauce is stir, stir, stir.

[29/6/04] Lamb Madras and Tumeric Rice. It seems to me that however many jars I have of spices and herbs I am always exactly one short for any recipe I decide to make unplanned. As I look down at the multitude of little round lids in my store cupboard, I can see they have multiplied like streptococci to invade every free space around them, slowly pushing other bulkier ingredients down onto a lower shelf. It's survival of the fittest on this shelf and that Vanilla coffee syrup's days, for one, are numbered.

So tonight's meal is a compromise. I used to worry that leaving out a single ingredient would cause the whole recipe to fall apart - only the perfect blend would work, rather as if you were to take away the red, green or blue from the reproduction of a photograph. But cooking seems much more tolerant. Hell, last week I even cooked Fijian goat curry without the goat. Alright, I substituted lamb, so technically it was Fijian lamb curry, but it tasted fine.

The lamb madras I'm cooking tonight is, I confess, just made with a madras powder straight from a jar. The recipe suggestion on the side of the label called for passata. The word momentarily threw me, it seemed familiar but out of context. Was that some type of Mediterranean spirit? It took me a while to recall that it was Italian tomato sauce. I had none around so a tin of chopped tomatoes went in instead. So this madras is collaboration between myself and the good folks at Sainsburys who mixed up the spices. The tumeric rice is taken from 'Quick and Easy Indian Cookery'. This is my attempt to break away from plain long-grain rice, which is my stock accompaniment for pretty much anything I cook. The recipe calls for cloves and some finely sliced chives, neither of which I have, but hell, the day I shun cooking something for want of sliced chives is the day I give up cooking completely.

As it was I think I used a bit too much tumeric as instead of a 'yellow, slightly seasoned rice' it had the appearance of shredded carrots. The garlic too, which was meant to go a golden-brown in the oil that had been brought to a 'medium-high heat', instantly burnt on impact with the pan.

Oh, and I was so busy writing this that the Basmati rice overcooked.

[17/6/04] Read that people were wearing Mozfather t-shirts to the recent Meltdown Morrissey gigs. What I thought was interesting was that this is an example of a pun twice-removed. It doesn't work as a pun on the original source, The Godfather. In fact it's playing on The Modfather - a common Nineties moniker for Paul Weller. How far will this chain go before it loses any resemblance to the original source I wonder?

[14/4/04] Guilty Pleasures no. 2: M&S Blackcurrant Flap Jacks - as addictive as crack-cocaine but with more roughage. Pretty much just solid blocks of butter-enhanced sugar, with a smattering of oats thrown in to placate any flapjack purists, they really do melt in your mouth. Which I suspect is what my teeth must also be doing now that I eat these five working-days a week. I recall standing at the empty space on the shelf where they should have been and not knowing quite what to do. Then after standing there a short while, checking and rechecking that none had been accidentally nudged behind the products either side, I noticed that there was another man behind me staring at the empty shelf in an equally forlorn way.

[14/4/04] Guilty Pleasures no.1: Genesis - I'd really like to pretend that during my teenage years I was a huge Smiths fan or a New Order completist, in truth around 1985 I became obsessed with Genesis. It started with a a liking for the chart hits they were having at the time, but rapidly descended into their prog-rock past. Of course as I grew older my music tastes developed - I don't want to be disloyal and say improved - but even now the sight of a grown-man singing about goblins and dressed as a giant flower is enough to get me feeling all nostalgic.

Scientifically proven several years back to be the most deeply unfashionable band of all time, it does cheers me up when I come across one of their songs covered by a more credible artist.

To be fair, it doesn't actually happen very often. In fact, up until today the only example I could think of was Jeff Buckley's home demo of 'Back in NY City'.

Today I discovered another. I'd been checking out a 4AD fansite, getting nostalgic about all those bands I used to love in my old art school days and suddenly got a hankering for some Red House Painters. A quick search online and I spotted: Red House Painters 'Follow You, Follow Me' - yes, Genesis' radio-friendly chart hit of 1977. Suddenly my mission was clear - create a compilation of all the other A quick look at this website though pretty much scuppers those plans

[25/3/04] Wow, can it really be two months since I last updated this site? I'd like to say that it was my hectic metropolitan lifestyle that has led to the neglect of my webpage but the truth is simply my mind has been elsewhere. I always find it odd how artificial landmarks, such as a new year, can inspire me and how hard it is to keep that enthusiasm going.

I've finally completed reading 'Don Quixote', a book I'd been meaning to read for years and initially enjoyed, but the sheer length of it began to wear me down.

[28/1/04] It's snowing! Everyone in the office was pressed up against the window this evening to watch as a picture-book perfect layer of snow settled over the urine stained pavements and junk food detritus of Camden Town. If the snow could bring out the charm of here, I thought as I shuffled home, a childlike smile on my face, imagine how beautiful it's going to look round Highgate. So I did it. I forced myself to go back out after I'd arrived home, rather than collapsing in front of the hi-fi with a glass of red wine and a crossword. I wrapped up warm in my never-used woolly hat, scarf and gloves - somehow these items never feel justified unless there's a good inch of snow on the ground - picked up my camera and went out for a moonlit stroll. Kids were having snowball fights with their fathers. There were snowmen on the pavements. People in large, fuel-heavy cars were stuck in the road unable to move. Hell, all it was missing was a gaggle of out-of-season carol singers and this would be the perfect winter's night. It was beautiful. The reflection of the snow creates unusual light effects and I love the sculpted forms objects take on muffled by a layer of snow. Typically I'd forgotten to load a new role of film in my camera.

[24/1/04] One of the frustrating things about living in London is not being able to see the stars properly. Walking home from Highbury this evening, in a good mood after a convincing Arsenal win, I was impressed by how clear the moon was. It was a narrow crescent, but the section in shadow (I'm sure there's a technical name for that) was visible against the early evening sky behind and you could really sense its spherical form. Reading John Gribbin's 'Science: A History' reawakened my interest in the stars - so much of the history of science has been focussed on interpreting the night sky. I found a great site which creates star maps for you, but identifying them is another matter. The light pollution in London obscures most of the stars, and the closeness of its buildings cut down the amount of visible sky. I should really make the effort and get up to Alexandra Palace - I imagine the view's pretty good from up there - but hey, it's cold out.

[19/1/04] I've long been a sucker for the kind of deals you always get with new CD releases. You know the sort of thing; special limited edition with bonus free disc or fancy packaging. I've never seen this type of marketing used on book though until today. Popping into Waterstones I thought I'd check out the new Will Self book only to find that it came not only as a signed first edition but also included a free CD. What made it all the more curious was that the CD contained Self reading one of the very stories included in the book. It all seemed a little bit pointless. Maybe they think the average Will Self fan finds actually reading his books a little too much effort, or maybe the idea is that it leaves you free to flick through the dictionary to find out the meanings of the obscure words that he likes to scatter through his prose? [25/11/03] Five One to the Arsenal

Sometimes sport throws up results that would stretch the credibility of fiction. Two games ago, Arsenal were bottom of their group in the Champions League; short on form, short on points and facing the prospect of having to win their next three games to reach the next stage. The way we were playing it didn't look likely - particularly as we had to travel to Italy to beat an Inter Milan team that had demolished us 3-0 at home.

But here I sit after watching us score three goals in the last few minutes to defeat them five-one. Henry played with an elegance that elevated him above the people around him, I actually found myself laughing after one of his goals so audacious was his skill.

[13/10/03] Gothic - Art for England 1400-1547, V&A

As this exhibition had only opened a few days earlier and it had all the hallmarks of a blockbuster exhibition, I'd been expecting long queues and crowded galleries. As it was the exhibition was strangely empty.

I often find myself marvelling at the presentation of these exhibitions as much as some of the exhibits these days. As with the RA's Aztecs show earlier in the year, the sculpure here was dramatically lit. Despite the lack of crowds it was still an effort to squeeze in close enough to view some of the illuminated books.

One of my favourrite exhibits was the Boar and Bear Hunt tapestry - which was in fact taken from the V&A's permanent collection. In fact after I had completed the exhibition I wandered up to the tapestry collection. There on display were the other three vast Devonshire tapestries, amongst others. The room was completely empty of people, except on security guard who rushed through heading someewhere else, for the entire time I wandered round making notes and sketches. This is the irony of these greatest hits exhibitions - people go and see them, buy the book and t-shirt and leave, but pay no attention to exhibits which are just as good but are free to go and see.

I also checked out the Japanese rooms while I was there. Disappointingly there's never many prints on display - although I wasn't familiar with the artists of the few on show; Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

I think what I enjoy about medieval art and Japanese art is there flattened design, the use of large flat patterned areas and simplifed designs. Neither concern themselves with perspective - taking liberties with viewpoint if it fits the design better. They both seem far more interesting than the Renaissance view of the world of over muscled men and idealised women standing in over dramatic poses on showy perspective stages.

[05/10/03] Chilli Diary no.10

An unusually warm and sunny September has meant that at the beginning of October most of my chilli plants look as healthy and vigerous as at any time this year. The one exception is the Hungarian hot wax which gave up the ghost a fortnight back. I only got two chillis out of the plant but they were the most impressive looking of this year's crop.

The Thai dragons have all produced a second crop after I picked the first batch for drying. The habanaeros and jalapenos, which whilst healthy looking plants and producing large numbers of flowers, I had begun to fear would never fruit, have finally begun to produce chillis. My only hope is that they ripen before the cold weather and shorter hours of sunlight really strart to set in.

I've just started Japanese lessons. I've never been very good at languages, but this is the third I've tried learning and by it will be by far the hardest.

At the moment just learning one of the alphabets seems daunting enough. At the moment I'm trying to learn Hiragana. I can still only recognise how a handful of the characters are pronounced, but they look so cool written down in my notebook.

[5/9/03] Another Historic Building Reduced to Dust

It was depressing to hear the fate of the Dunlop Semtex factory in Brynmawr, south Wales. When it was built in 1946 it was a truly revolutionary design, and it has been desccribed as the most important Twentieth Century building in Wales. At least it was. They demolished it a few years ago. It had become an eyesore, and quite rightly the local population wanted new facilities and shops rather than a historic ruin. I know its easy for me to bemoan the building's loss when I'm sat here in London and don't have to live with it, but surely a scheme could have been devised to provide all that the community needed whilst incorporating some or all of the original design?

Instead the site was demolished to make way for a no doubt much desired but architecturally uninspiring superstore. The irony is that the building contractors went bust two weeks after the factory was demolished. The site is still empty. So the locals still don't have their new facilities, and they don't have a unique piece of architectural history either. This sounds suspiciously like everyone losing to me. It cost 6 million pounds to destroy the factory.

What really confuses me though is how they can demolish a grade II* listed building? Surely being listed prevents this happening?

Closer to home I see the Battersea Power Station slips further into disrepair. Plans to regenerate it have been talked about for years now - most are depressingly unrealistic. Every few years another flashy website appears promising a dazzling future for the building, but as each new promise arrives the real structure deterioarates a little more.

[27/8/03] The Life and Death of Bees

Not for the first time, I've found a huge bumblebee dying beside my bed. It appears to be dead, but if you you return to the room a while later it's moved a few inches. This occured last year too. Has my room been adopted as some bumblebee graveyard - was this house built of sacred bumblebee ground ?

[25/8/03] Chile Diary no.9

I finally harvested the largest of my two Hungarian hot waxes today. It had grown to just over 11cm in length and ripened to a deep red. What to do with it though ? It seemed a shame to simply chop it up and throw it into some recipe where it would be lost. I found a posting on a messageboard that suggested stuffing them with cream cheese and basil and frying them - this seemed a suitable way for it to go.

So I went out and bought some mascarpone, chopped some basil, heated up the olive oil and cast the stuffed chile to the frying pan. All seemed well until I noticed the cheese was melting and running out into the oil. Months of careful nurturing for one warm chile and pan of runny soft cheese.

Bugger.

[14/8/03] What Ever Happened to Peter Greenaway ?

A couple of months ago an American colleague was visiting our office, and in a drunken chat in the pub one evening the subject got onto films. She was telling me about some art film showing at the Guggenheim, which led on to favourite films, which itself led on to Peter Greenaway. I was astounded that she'd even heard of him, let alone he was one of her favourite directors, as I'd presumed him to be a quintessentially European phenomenon and an obscure and unfashionable one at that.

What had become of him I wondered? He seemed to have disappeared without trace.

Then, in the way these things tend to happen, the ICA suddenly releases a new print of The Draughtsman's Contract and hold a series of his early films. A quick scan of the web also unearths a new work waiting in the wings.

I discovered Greenaway through a friend when I was on Foundation course at the end on the Eighties. To me he seems stuck in that era. Not that his films, other than The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover with its flashy, nouveau riche gangster, deal with the Eighties. It's hard to imagine people today watching anything quite so brazenly arty as my personal favourite Drowning by Numbers.

As English film-making descended into Mockney gangster hell during the Britpop Nineties, Greenaway seemed to appear ever more anachronistic. How unfair it must have seemed. He biggest hit, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife etc with its mix of food and gangsters preempted both the Nineties mockney gangster obsession and Jamie Oliver in one go. When everyone 'discovered' Michael Nyman with the soundtrack to The Piano I imagine him sitting at home, his eyes rolling back in his head and a weary sigh acknowledging the injustice of it all.

A favourite Greenaway moment: it's a television documentary about him and he's showing the interviewer how he does his storyboards. He's holding a sheet of paper covered in small blank frames. He takes a huge paintbrush and covers one of the frames with a couple of vigorous, chaotic splodges which look like nothing which could ever be transferred to the screen. There's not much response from the interviewer.

That may not have happened by the way; the documentary was a long time ago.

The Hayward Gallery did an exhibition in the mid-Nineties bringing together specially created works by famous film-makers and artists on the subject of films. The film-makers efforts seemed particularly half-hearted - Terry Gilliam's seemed little more than a plug for his movie of the time, whilst Ridley Scott simply projected up some storyboards from one of his films. Greenaway's installation was by far the most inventive and creative in its interpretation of film-making. Far better than anything either the other directors or any of the artists had done (although I did like the Paula Rego pastel drawings too, I just couldn't see they said much about films).

How to do a Greenaway. The Late Show once showed a guide to creating a Greenaway masterpeice yourself. First it ran an extremely dull panning shot of a river somewhere English looking, it then replayed the clip again but this time accompanied by a piece of Michael Nyman music. Voila, a sophisticated piece of arthouse film-making. I think I spotted a Greenaway parody in a BBC2 sitcom about a pub a couple of years back - the style of music, the slow panning - I remember wondering at the time whether it was really a parody or I had simply imagined it, and if it had been a parody whether anyone else out there in the world other than myself would have picked up on it. I suddenly felt very alone.

[9/8/03] Chilli Ristras

I've been stringing up my chillis to dry in a fairly randon manner up to now. However, as always, a few minutes on the web brought me the instructions as to how to create an authentic chilli ristra.

Of course, nothing is a straight forward as that. I can follow he instructions right to the end, then they tell you to braid the string you've tied them to. How the hell do you braid ...?

[4/8/03] Chilli Diary no.8

The Thai dragons seem to have finished their fruiting season as there seem to be no new flowers appearing. Most of the larger chillis have ripened now too, so today I decided to pick the first crop. I've strung up six of the largest in front of the window in an attempt to dry them that way. Last year I tried drying some Habaneros in the oven and storing them in a glass jars - it turned out to be a distaer though as by the winter they had all gone mouldy. Maybe this method will be more successful.

As for the other plants the Jalapeno and Habaneros have the first flower buds appearing now. The largest of the two chillis on the Hungarian hot wax is still a yellow/green colour, but according to photographs I've seen on the web it should ripen to an orangey red. After two weeks of grey miserable weather we seem finally to have hit a warm, sunny spell which looks set to continue for some time.

[1/8/03] Work Summer Party

Another lavish affair this year. We returned to the Kensington Roof Gardens and this year they added a Hawaiian theme too.

[21/7/03] Chilli Diary no.7

The first of the Thai dragons chillies have started to ripen now - they're a very striking bright red colour. I'm torn between picking them, which in turn may encourage new growth, or leaving them on the plant as they look so attractive.

[19/7/03] Cool Gift from Japan

My friend Richard got back from a holiday in Japan recently. I'd asked him to look out for cheap but typically eccentric hi-tech gadgets while he was out there. It's never as easy as you might imagine picking up that sort of stuff in Japan, but this time he certainly came up trumps.

He brought me back an earpiece with a tiny digital counter on it. It looks suitably hi-tech, but hardly discrete, being about 5 cm long and fairly chunky. What could it be - a talking clock maybe ? A minitiature radio possibly ? Bizarrely it is simply an alarm, which beeps in an irritating manner after you've set a time. Think this picture from the packaging sums it up...

[16/7/03] Chilli Diary no.6

During my recent lethargy I've been neglecting to record the fantastic progress of my chilli plants. They've been growing well and as the only room I have for them is perched on top of the box my iMac came in next to the kitchen window, I've been forced to give several away to several worthy recipients.

So how are they progressing ?

Well I've three Thai dragons left and they're all around 50cm tall, and between them I have 30 chillis so far. The chillis are quite small, mostly 5 or 6cm long and have yet to ripen from their original green colour. There are only a few flowers remaining so I guess that's the end of this year's crop.

The one Hungarian hot wax banana plant that actually germinated has turned out to be fairly successful too. The white flowers, slightly larger than the flowers on the Thai dragons, have begun to develop into monster chillis. There are only three chillis, but the largest is now 10.5 cm long. The plant itself is around 43cm tall.

Of the other plants, the largest of my two Jalapenos has the first signs of buds appearing - the plant I gave away to someone at work has already flowered and has chillis growing. I have one unidentified plant that I grew from a batch of mixed seeds which is going strong but has yet to flower. The three Habaneros have suffered from lack of room as I simply don't have the space to repot them and as I grew them successfully last year the new species have taken precedence.

[16/7/03] So Where Have I Been ?

I've been neglecting this site for a long, long time now. I've a whole slew of excuses though.

Back pain - for three weeks it seemed there was no comfortable position for my body to be in other than laid flat on my back with a cushion wedged under the base of my spine. During that time wrestling with my website seemed less important than how I was going to put my socks on in the morning.

Summer lethargy - it's been hot and sunny, and the last thing I've wanted to after getting home from work has been to stare at anothe rcomputer screen.

[29/5/03] Chilli Diary no.5

The first buds have appeared on this year's crop. The Thai Dragons have been the real success of the seeds I planted - five of them germinated and they've shot up in comparison to the other varieties.

[28/5/03] Sore throat

I've finally emerged from three weeks suffering with a sore throat that refused to shift - somehow I can't help feeling if I'd had one of these it would have all seemed a little better. I wonder if they have a SARS one in production ?

[18/5/03] OS X

I only switched my Mac to OS X because I wanted to get an iPod and the newest versions are nolonger compatible with OS 9. Initially I was excited - getting a new OS almost feels like getting a new computer, and there's no doubting it looks great. Now being a Mac fan I'm easily swayed by looks, however after a few days of using it I keep finding little things which always defined the Mac for me (and made it different to the godawful Windows machine I have to use at work) - little things which for no apparent reason have gone.

First up - double clicking the window bar so it remains on the desktop simply as a bar. The new docking bar is nice, but I'd have prefered it to be additional functionality and not to have simply replaced the old functionality. There is a download to bring this back though.

Now I discover I can't label my files anymore. In all previous versions of the Mac OS you could colour a folder - invaluable for someone as disorganised as me - particularly for updating this site as I can never remember which files I've uploaded and which I haven't. Once again, this was something I loved about the Mac which you didn't have in Windows. Why remove it ? Luckily, once again there's a download.

[15/5/03] Four Tet, Icarus and Assembly 3, Scala, London

I remember reading how electronica pioneers Kraftwerk would sometimes leave the stage and joing the audience during their gigs - leaving their machines to continue on without them. I was reminded of this watching Four Tet on thursday night - on stage Kieran Hebden stood behind his laptop, frantically bobbing his head in front of a projection of a pair of chairs. What was he actually doing up there ? I'm no live music purist - as long as it sounds good and is entertaining I guess I don't care too much how much is actually being done live - but this actually felt slightly voyeuristic, as though I was watching someone nodding along to a favourite tune in their bedroom. The set was slightly dissapointing too in that it eschewed pretty much all my favourite tracks. Four Tet are the pioneers of folktronica, but at the Scala the delicate, bucolic sounds of the last two albums were ignored in favour of the louder, heavier tracks. On record Four Tet are great (although I still prefer his other band Fridge) - live I have my doubts. Both the supports were more entertaining. Icarus melded a dark, industrial sounding beats over projections of speeding journeys through anonymous cityscapes. Assembly 3 consisted of a lose collective of people playing an assortment of accoustic instruments - ranging from xylophones and violins to pieces of what appeared to be washing-machine tubing - being conducted by various people from the collective. On the back of the stage were projected at random vague instructions such as 'Stringed instruments play beautifully', 'Noise' or 'Ping Pong' which directed the general flow of the improvisation (an idea not disimlar to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies). OK you wouldn't want to listen to this at home (well I wouldn't at least) but it was great fun to watch, and probably more fun to participate in.

[22/4/03] Flat Exhibition

I was lounging on my sofa the other day, mulling things over as you do when you're a little bit at a loose end, when I was suddenly struck by how nice my picture frame looked above the radiator. Something seemed to be missing though, and it occured to me that what would really have completed the effect was one of those small signs you get beside works of art in galleries saying who they're by and what medium they're in.

Transforming the contents of my flat into various exhibits really appealed to me. The pile of compact discs haphazardly strewn around my hi-fi also had that instalation art feel which could really have been enhanced by a small sign saying 'Music Collection. 1987 - 2003. Mixed Media. The collection of the artist.'.

[21/4/03] Chilli Diary No. 4

An unseasonally hot and sunny spell finally come to an end this weekend. This was particularly frustrating as it seemed to have reached the ideal conditions for my chilli seeds. Over the last week several more have sprouted. The current success rate stands at this:

[13/4/03] Tea Binge

I spent this afternoon on a bizarre tea buying binge. Due to my fascination with all things Japanese I've been trying to track down Japanese green tea. As I was in town I thought I'd try Chinatown. I love wandering about the food stores there - just the smell of them is fantastic and I'm a sucker for all that oriental packaging too. Anyway they had Chinese green tea, but no Japanese green tea. To be absolutely honest I've no idea if there's any difference between the two. Anyway to avoid leaving empty handed I bought some Jasmine tea along with something described as Special Gunpowder.

It was then I remembered the Japanese Centre on Picadilly - somehwere I've passed a dozen times but never ckecked out. What a great little store - there's a food bar as you walk in and a great little bookshop. Best of all though is the foodhall downstairs packed full of Japanese sweets, drinks, snacks and green tea. Of course when I finally got it home it tasted pretty awful and not how I remembered it at all.

[13/4/03] Chilli Diary No. 3

At last, success. The first seedlings appeared this morning. Over a month since they were originally planted I noticed a tiny green seedling growing in my Hungarian Hot Wax tub. Checking back later in the day, a shoot had started to appear in the Thai Dragon pot. Curious that nothing should happen for weeks and then two seeds sprout on the same day.

It may have had something to do with having recently placed the tubs inside those clear, plastic bags they use in Sainsburys for your fruit and veg. This seems to have helped trap the heat from the morning sun - it gets pretty steamy in those bags by midday.

[12/4/03] Photography Links

Well it may look as though I've been not been doing anything to the site, and I guess that's largely true. However hidden away on some of the other pages I've been tweaking pages and adding more of my photographs. I've also added a list of links to my favourite photographers.

[31/3/03] Chilli Diary No. 2

Well on the second of this month I planted two varieties of chillis with high expectations that they would be as successful as the Habaneros I grew in 2002. Now, almost a month later, I have to report that nothing has happened. Not one measly seedling has appeared. This despite unseasonably good weather, with over a week of warm sunshine.

To make matters worse my one remaining Habanero plant, which survived admirably throughout the winter, has finally started dying over the last couple of weeks. All I'm left with is three feet of stem and two dozen very sickly looking leaves. In one last attempt to save it I decided to try repotting it today - when I did this I noticed the fallen leaves at the base of the stem were thick with tiny flies, so perhaps it was the victim of some kind of pest ?

Oh well, undaunted I've planted two more sets of seeds today.

Hopefully these will fare a little better than the last two batches.

[26/3/03] 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' Prince Charles Cinema

Not the film I was expecting at all. It follows the career of Hollywood studio head / producer Robert Evans who was involved to varying extents in giving the world the Godfather, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. I'd presumed it was going to be a biopic rather than a straight documentary. It was one of the strangest film documentaries I've ever seen, being for large parts comprised of stills with Robert Evans himself narrating his life over the top. I imagine if you weren't interested in the movie industry of the Sixities and Seventies then you might find this one of the dullest films you could see. If you are interested in the period though Evans was one of its leading figures and his mix of glamour, youth, excess and inspired creativity summed up the whole era. For a great overview of Seventies Hollywood though I would recommend reading 'Easy Riders Raging Bulls' by Peter Biskind which covers the rise and fall of the Hollywood auteurs but mixes it with more than enough bitchiness, gossip and scandal to keep it entertaining.

Best moment of 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' ? Dustin Hoffman doing his impression of Evans, presumably of the shoot of The Marathon Man, over the closing credits.

[25/3/03] Manitoba, 100 Club

Cool bear masks, cute visuals, great drumming. Hold on - dressing up on stage, complicated instrumentals, drum solos (two drummers, so technically drum duets I guess) - post-rock is the new prog-rock. Expect the return of the gatefold sleeve any day now...

[25/3/03] War II

The media war so far:

Day minus One: Special Operations Units such as the SAS infiltrate enemy lines. Their role is to reconnoitre Iraqi positions, gather information, make notes and generally prepare the groundwork for future best-selling books after the conflict is over.

Day One: The American Television networks launch the main offensive supported by coalition armoured units. A swift and decisive war is imperative if the audience is to remain interested and any loss of momentum could result in the campaign being cancelled mid-season.

Alright, pretty heavy-handed satire, but the lasting image from the intitial day of the conflict was seeing an American journalist riding on a tank as it charged across the desert, wearing dark glasses and a visible air of enjoyment. Earlier in the day I had heard another Amerian jounralist talking about this reporter, and he mentioned how it was often overlooked that for many there was, and always has been, a certain thrill going into war. My initial reaction was surprise at an opinion I don't recall ever being voiced on a serious war discussion before, and amazement that he could be so crass, particularly broadcasting to an audience he knew had, for a large section, serious misgivings about the whole conflict. But although it seemed an extraordinary thing to be saying when you knew that within days, or possibly hours, the first news stories of casualties and suffering would soon be appearing, with a heavy heart I guessed he was probably right - for a lot of those troops this would be the moment they joined up for - the ultimate buzz.

I have found myself sucked into the television commentary on the war. The strangest part is the night-time view of a road junction in Baghdad which accompanies most reporting from the city. Never before can so much of the world's population be focussed on so insignificant a road.

[24/3/03] Aztecs, Royal Academy

Impressive in predictable sort-of way. The exhibits were beautifully lit, which really brought these stone carvings to life. Several of the strongest pieces were already familar from the posters, such as Mictlantecuhtli, god of death, a wasted frame with his liver hanging down from his ribcage like some strange propellor. There was still much more to see though; in particular I loved the coiled serpents. These sculptures looked almost modern in their geometric simplicity. One exhibit which brought home how these were not simply created as decorative works was a strangely knobbled casket. Reading further it transpired that the casket was used to store the flayed skins of human sacrifices - saved to be worn by priests in certain ceremonies - and that the knobbled surface mimiced the deposits of fat found under the human skin. Refined but bloody - this was the Hannibal Lector of art exhibitions.

[19/3/03] War

So tonight we stand on the verge of war. It's not the first in my lifetime, and I've no doubt it will not be the last. It does feel different to those that have gone before though; I'm viewing this one through a filter of cynicism and sadness that I would not have had when I was younger. I have held off mentioning the Iraq crisis on this site up until now. There were several reasons for this. Firstly there are enough opinions already out there - both mirroring and conflicting with my own views, and many are far more eloquently argued that I could manage myself. Secondly I doubt my own expertise on the subject - it is easy to have strong opinions when you are ill informed. In my experience when discussing an issue as complicated as the Iraq crisis is the less sure my opinions are. I guess you could argue, from whatever position you may hold yourself, that the crisis is not complicated - perhaps to some it seems that way, but to me it does not. Lastly I worry that I would be able to give the subject the depth of argument necessary to do it justice and would therefore end up shackling myself to a more simplified opinion that I do not necessarily agree with.

So why am I mentioning the war now ?

Watching Newsnight on Monday night whilst they showed footage of Robin Cook's resignation speach it really felt as though I was watching history being made. We are used to history being written by the rumbling of tanks or the dropping of bombs, but the feeling of hearing someone speak and to feel that the weight and eloquence of what they say is powerful enough to last, and to not have resorted to soundbites, does feel unusal to me.

[10/3/03] Writing. Arghhhhhhh

Just watched Scribbling, a BBC2 programme which follows the life of a writer over the course of writing a book, for the second time in a week. I was never a huge fan of comedian Rob Newman when he was in the Mary Whitehouse Experience, and after he retired from comedy to write novels I didn't show much interest in his books except to grumble to myself about yet another celebrity novel. As I watched him trying to write his third book though, the first he was writing without the cushion of fame to support him, I found myself increasingly cheering him on.

He started off with all the classic writing avoidance techniques - pretty much re-designing his whole house in preparation for actually doing any writing. It was all so painfully familiar. The commentry didn't pick up on the constant changes of computer - another classic avoidance technique; if I had a better / cooler computer I'd find writing so much easier. We all know deep down it's a lie, but it has to be done. Two years into his writing, still struggling with rewrites, rejections and the threat of losing his flat and I was praying it would all ahve a happy ending. Rob Newman came across as a genuinely thoughtful guy with a heroicly optimistic nature. He could see the funny side when working late one night two people passed by his window and he overheard one say 'That's Rob newman's house but he isn't funny anymore.'. As he said himself, how many writers have been heckled at their own desks. Good news is though that, whatever its merits - and I was never entirely convinced by the extracts in the programme - his novel is being published.

[8/3/03] Adaptation, Warner Village Cinema, Islington

This was one of those movies you can probably only get made if you happen to have just come off the back of a massive unexpected hit, which is of course exactly the position Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman were in. Everyone seemed to love the quirky Being John Malkovich - except me. Yes it was clever, yes it was unlike anything I'd seen before - but after the intitial fun I found the story progressively irritating. A real case of a great idea which out-stayed its welcome.

Adaptation is a subtler movie - more difficult to summarise than its predecessor but ultimately I found it more enjoyable. It's a film about film making which allows Gerald Kaufman to play games with the blurring of fiction and reality. The main premise is that a screenwriter has been hired to adapt a screenplay from a book called 'The Orchid Thief' - a real book as it turns out. The main joke in the film though is that the lead character, the screenwriter, is Charlie Kaufman himself. The film even starts on the set of Being John Malkovich. It just about gets away with all being too clever by half, although later in the film Charlie berates himself for self-indulgence when he tries a similar trick by writing himself into his own script for The Orchid Thief.

To add a further twist Kaufman has created for himself a fictional twin brother called Donald. The two are complete opposites; Donald is shallow and carefree. Nicolas Cage does a good job in both roles, particularly as the sweaty, overweight Charlie. Their lives are interwoven with those of the author of the original book, played by Meryl Streep, and the events of the book itself. But without wanting to give too much away, what seems to be simply a gentle love-story intertwined with humourous odd-couple bickering suddenly shifts into a whole new genre at the end. The movie's style shifts as it's on-screen author changes too.

[6/3/03] Lemon Jelly, Forum, London

Lemon Jelly's Lost Horizon album has been essential background music in my flat for a good few months now. I'd been lured in by Nice Weather for Ducks' kitschy sampling and up-beat brass, but the album had turned out to be less about easy laughs and more about chilled electronica. I imagined them as a bucolic version of Orbital.

Would their mellower sound convert to a good night out though ? Well, half an hour into the gig and the atmosphere was pretty muted. Admittedly the build-up had been poor - a long wait with no music followed by bingo. The novelty of which soon wore off and the accompanying Take Hart theme-music began to lose its charm. They seemed to be calling out numbers for ages in the attempt to find a winner, and the prescence of Death himself on stage as one of the callers began to seem sadly appropriate. So once Lemon Jelly got underway the atmosphere could hardly have been described as electric. It took a while to build. Slowly though it got there. Rambling Man got a great reception although it is better suited to the living room than the stage, but Patagonia turned things around and by the time of predictable crowd-pleaser Nice Weather for Ducks it finally felt as if everyone was having fun.

[2/3/03] Chilli Diary no.1

Last year I bought, on a whim, a packet of habanero chilli seeds whilst on a visit to Kew gardens. Not having a garden or a lot of window space I didn't hold out much hope that they would grow. I planted ten seeds in mid-May and to my surprise all ten seeds grew and in the end I had to give most of the plants away as they had grown too big for my flat. I ended up with a crop of around thirty habanero chillis from the four plants I kept.

This year, inspired by my success, I've decided to grow four new varieties. I've decided to start two of them off early so that they can make the most of the summer months. If these seeds successfully grow I'll get the other two varieties started soon.

Now it's a case of sitting back and waiting. The habanero seeds took around ten days for the seedlings to appear.

Pretty much everything I learnt about chilli plants last year I gained from the Internet. In particular Mats and Patricia Pettersson's site was a real inspiration, and they were really helpful when I e-mailed them with questions.

[1/3/03] Welcome to Sofaville

I finally have my own domain name on the web.

[13/2/03] Spontanuity

Some words are simply too good not to exist. I first came across spontanuity whilst I was at art college. A friend of mine was giving a presentation of his work and, being more naturally a visual communicator than a verbal one, used the term whilst struggling under pressure to describe the motivation behind his project. It was of course an amalgam of the words spontaneity and continuity, unintentionally forged in the heat of the moment. At the time we laughed pretty hard at his mistake, but over the years the word has nagged away at the back of my mind and occasionally I've come close to using it by accident myself.

I was reminded of it today when a friend tried to get away with using unettiquetical, an equally imaginary word, but one with a such an amusingly staccato rhythm that it would instantly get my vote for elevation to the standard English dictionary.

Inspired I decided to throw my old favourite, spontanuity, into Google to see if anything came back. Of course it was then I faced the issue of how the word was spelt; up until then it had had a purely oral history. I juggled with three alternatives; spontanuity, spontinuity and spontainuity.

The first spelling brought back an impresssive 116 hits. Oh, the Internet is a wondrous thing. Did you mean Spontaneity ? Google asked presumptuously. No, thank you very much, if I'd wanted that I'd have typed it. What you've brought back is exactly what I'm after.

Top of the list was a young lady at hotornot.com who according to her own keywords loved opera and spontanuity. I like to imagine her finding friendship, or maybe more, with some likeminded person with a similarly eccentric vocabulary.

Looking further down Google's list of search results my heart suddenly sank. I was prepared to find the word in usage, but here was someone claiming to have invented the word and given its defintion; Paul Kellerman a lecturer of English no less, at Penn State.

I felt crestfallen - someone had got there first. Then it struck me that many of mankind's greatest achievements had been arrived at simultaneously, but also independantly, by several people. In mathematics both Newton and Liebnitz discovered calculus at the same time. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed for patent of the telephone on the same day, and of course Hollywood releasing both Volcano and Dante's Peak in the same year. Instead of seeing Kellerman as a rival, I decided to look upon him as an ally in spreading the word.

I'm hoping to save future etymologists a lot of hard graft by becoming the word's offical historian and promoter. Of course the frustrating thing about creating a new word is that you can't name it after yourself.

[10/2/03] 'Feast of Wire', Calexico, City Slang

First album of the year I've really been looking forward to, and thankfully it doesn't disappoint. Calexico are Joey Burns and John Convertino, the rhythm section of Giant Sand, but they also call on a wide variety of additianal musicians to add, amongst other sounds, accordian, mariachi trumpets, slide guitar and strings. To me they sound a little like a Tex-Mex Tindersticks, with the suits traded in for sombreros. Their sound is panoramic and moody, and invariably reviews compare them to the cinematic scores of Ennio Morricone. The stirring instrumental track Close Behind certainly does indicate his influence, but this is defintitely their most diverse sounding album yet - on Crumble they sound like the Dave Brubeck Quartet ! I can see myself playing it to death over the coming months.

[6/2/03] The Mountain Goats, Spitz, London

The Mountain Goats: tall, thin, sensitive guy playing accoustic guitar for tall, thin, sensitive guys. Pleasant enough, but started off enjoying the between-song banter more than the songs. Went up a gear when he was joined on stage by a rhythm section.

Supports were good. Liked The Broken Family Band, who played alt.countryish songs which reminded me a little of Calexico in places. Bit disconcerting that despite singing in American accents they actually come from Cambridge. Didn't catch the name of the second support, but nice use of the saw on his version of Another Girl, Another Planet. If anyone knows who he was then please e-mail me.

[5/2/03] 13th Battersea Beer Festival

I think we all know what to expect from a beer festival don't we ? Overweight, middle-aged men with rubicund faces staring earnestly at ridiculously monikered beers whilst scratching at their large, unkempt beards. Ideally they would also be wearing cheaply printed t-shirts stretched tautly across their ale-swollen bellies proudly acknowledging their appearance at previous festivals.

It's nice to have some prejudices confirmed. Yes the 13th Battersea Beer Festival was almost beyond parody in the make-up of its attendees. If McDonalds ever do get successfully sued for making their customers fat, then heaven help Britain's independent brewers - there was every male body shape on display except those approved by the medical fraternity.

In fact, as I looked around the hall at the serious drinking taking place, I could almost hear the collective groan of livers toiling under the strain.

What a perfect antidote to styled-up, image obsessed Camden. I noticed that, unlike my nearest bar in Camden, they didn't feel the need to have Fashion TV playing continually in the background on a flat-screen television.

The selection of beers was fantastic. My hopes of trying the Oscar Wilde Mild (Mighty Oak brewery, 'dark mild with a roast character and hints of coffee') were in vain as this, along with several other beers, were no longer available by the time we arrived. However, there were more than enough great pints to try. I particularly enjoyed O'Hanlan's Port Stout, the Enville Ale and I think Nelson' Revenge (Woodforde brewery) went down well too, however by that stage my judgement was becoming slightly clouded. Perhaps it was the alcohol but were the drinks getting stranger and stranger - did a pint of Granny Wouldn't Like It really taste of cigarettes ? The ciders too seemed to have longer and increasingly peculiar names; names which didn't seem to match anything on the drinks list. By now my drink-inflamed imagination was beginning to play tricks and, coupled with the fact that the barman pouring these West-country ciders had the look of a slightly-greying druid, I began to have serious suspicions about what sort of concoctions they were handing out to the innocent drinkers of South London. I decided, before total paranoia set-in, to take my leave and, clutching my commemorative pint-glass to my chest, vanished into the London night.

[4/2/03] Is this a weblog ?

When I decided to set up a new web presence, to replace the aged and long neglected site I created about five years back, the one thing I was wary of was jumping on the weblog bandwagon. I wanted to post up a few of my favourite photographs, maybe some graphics and, hell, maybe the odd piece of writing too. But I definitely didn't want to create a weblog. There's a lot of great weblogs out there, run by people who genuinely have interesting things to say and discoveries to share. Without these qualities, I guess the whole weblog idea feels a little self-indulgent. Of course, here I am two weeks after starting up my site again, and what do I find - I'm creating a weblog.

I'm so bad at discovering stuff on the internet too. I should really be diving in there and finding esoteric or amusing sites from the plethora that must be out there, but instead I usually just go to Haddock instead and check out what they're looking at.

Now, if you want a decent weblog you should try Methylsalicate. This was the first weblog I came across meeting its owner at a 'blogmeet' in a London pub a few years, which I'd found myself in the middle of by accident. It does everything a good weblog should - and dammit I just can't be that smart.

So what now for Sofaville ? I like the name too much to give up on it now, so it may be back to the drawing board for a while to rethink exactly what I want to do.

[1/2/03] Brian Eno

Great documentary on Radio 2 this evening on long-standing hero of mine Brian Eno. In the early Nineties I was obsessed with his work. Funnily enough his own music was often the least interesting thing about him - although that was still pretty interesting. What really fascinated me was his way of working; his eclecticism, his constant desire to experiment and question the way things are done. Very much an inspiration to the way I have tried to work. The idea is more interesting than the quality of the final result. Pretty much my motto when I was at art college.

There's loads of sites dedicated to Eno out there on the web - brianeno.com is a new one on me though, although all it does is take you to an, admittedly nice, picture. Intriguing...

[30/1/03] Back from the North

Arrived back from four sunny days in Yorkshire with the city engulfed in a snowstorm. In the short space between the workers getting home and my own return, Northwood Road and its usual two rows of parked cars, was covered in an almost perfect layer of snow.

An inspring sight, and a suitable end to what has on the whole been an inspriring few days, ableit mixed in with a little frustration resulting from four days of family obligations.

I was highly impressed by York Minster - the space and light of the Nave was unlike any cathedral I could remember, and I made a real effort to look more closely at the stained glass. York Minster has a large amount of genuinely medieval glass. I'm sure like most people I always imagine the vast majority of stained glass to be older than it really is, but of course a lot, such as at Ripon Cathedral which we also visited, is actually from the late 19th century, the work of Victorian religous and Gothic revivalism - replacing the work destroyed during the reformation. Also learnt that there are nine ranks of angels - one of those trivial pieces of information you never know may come in handy one day. I love all the arcane information hidden away in medieval art - the symbolism which is lost to us as a modern viewers but would have presumably been clear to its original audience.

Fountains Abbey was also interesting.

My imagination was also fired by the classic railway posters at the National Railway Museum, York. I love those imagines of an idyllic English past, where the sun always shines and the train could transport you to a very British paradise.

[23/1/03] The Laurel Tree, Camden

The Laurel Tree seemed to have been in a state of semi-repair for years. Finally, just before Christmas, the gradually stripping away of the building became a gradual rebuilding. Greenland Street had been gradually going up market for some time. Once mainly the realm of the homeless, last year we gained the Proud Gallery, giving us contemporary photography. For a while the homeless still camped out in the spots they always did, their blankets heaped behind the railings outside the gallery for a while. But then the long, long work rebuilding the church building on the other side of the street was completed, so even they now have modern new facilities. The resurgence of the Laurel tree was inevitable.

Perhaps this would solve all our Camden drinking problems ? As their work neared completion, it became apparent this was not going to offer the Spread Eagle any competition in the serious drinking stakes. When one of the staff promised the place would be "bangin'" my hopes dropped even lower.

Tonight was the grand opening. Free drink vouchers distributed around the local offices ensured the place was packed, if not quite bangin'. A flat screen tv on the wall gave us Fashion TV - why ? Who knows ? Maybe the idea was frocks for the ladies, and fit lookin' birds for the guys ? Bangin'.

So what's my verdict ? You know, I'm not really sure. Get rid of the television would be a start. I like the candles, and the snacks they laid on for the opening crowd were nice. I can see this being a good lunchtime option.

[21/1/03] Morven Callar, Prince Charles Cinema

I can't remember the last time I went to see a film almost entirely on the strength of its soundtrack. Morven Callar's includes a suitable array of cool names; Aphex Twin, Stereolab, Can. I wasn't expecting the film to be so bleak though. The first half hour or so began to really test my patience, and I didn't find myself particularly drawn to Morven either. However when the story moves to Spain and she in turn starts to discover a new side to herself I found myself being drawn in. It's a fairly simplistic coming of age story, with an interesting soundtrack although the direction seemed a little self-consciously arty at times. There seemed to be very little wit or charmisma at work - unlike say, Ken Loach's equally bleak but more enjoyable Sweet Sixteen.

Oh, and from what I've read, the book the film is based on is meant to be very good.

[12/1/03] Here starts Sofaville.

My new, no thrills, no gimmicks website.

The plan is to make it more weblog in style, but it probably won't be updated as regularly as a good weblog. I will try and post up regular photographic updates, and bits and pieces on my little obsessions.