There is no such thing…

‘There is such a thing as the optimal degree of alienation, and it isn't zero. You want to see the world from an angle of about 45 degrees. Much more than that makes for a life full of tension. Much less, and the risk is innocuousness and complacency.’ Janan Ganesh FT

The medieval Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral has east at the top, showing Adam and Eve in Eden, and west at the bottom. This was an orientation that defined European Christianity for more than 1,000 years.

Strabismus - misalignment of the eyes

‘people all over the world in their back gardens, observing the multibillion-year history of the universe. And then they get up and have their dinner.’ Stephen Homer

“Pain leaves scars, doesn’t it?” Overheard

He treads lightly on the darkness

"She'd always told me that she could no longer swim there ever since her best friend had employed the Swiss company ‘Exit’ for her assisted suicide and decreed that her ashes be strewn over the clear, pleasant waters of the lake. My mother had said if she'd swallow a bit of lake water by accident while swimming, she'd be drinking Margie, and that was a ghastly notion to her.” Eurotrash - Christian Kracht

I eat the wind…

I eat the wind and drink the rain

She was the only person they knew who spoke in semi colons.

Semi-detached

Pancake

Hundreds and Thousands

She has synesthesia. She states that the word apocalypse tastes of sausage.

According to a questionable experiment in 1907, the soul weighs 21g.

“He’s got short arms and deep pockets” Overheard

“Good at literature, shit at maths.” Overheard

The stitches of hip replacements are regularly compared among the men swimming at Hampstead Ponds - they can even identify the surgeon. They swim in slow circles together.

Taking Cover

Cauliflower is a variety of the common cabbage whose flowers are arrested at the bud stage, resulting in dense ‘curds’.

‘Good policy experiments produce results, telling us what works and what doesn't and allowing us to get better outcomes for less effort. Children learn more, criminals go straight, new drugs cure old diseases. Results matter, but they are not the only reason to aim for an experimenting society. Such a society values curiosity, the childlike sense that the world is full of mysteries to be solved. It values humility, the recognition that nobody has all the answers and that others may know more than we do. It values practical action, the drive to get things done and to solve problems.’ Tim Harford FT

Walk on Air…

‘Walk on air against your better judgement’ Seamus Heaney

The store sells guns, fishing tackle and lingerie.

Some people in the Andes believe that the future comes up from behind you and the past is always in front of you.

Whisky is the twilight wine of Scotland

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. Paul Virilio.

He goes at life at a wrong angle

‘Step out of the water. Who knows, you may find that you walk on it.’

‘Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping’ Gertrude Stein

That money talks, I won’t deny / I heard it once/ It said, “goodbye”. Richard Armour

Young actors overact. Older ones are measured, they say less and say it slower.

Rumble strips

Skipper Street, The Dirty Onion, The Cloth Ear

Frank is Diagnosed…

‘Frank was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fading away, he smells like himself, but metallic’. Description by Moon Zappa of her father

Colonial history tells us that countries that are not at the table are typically on the menu.

His letter arrived coincidentally on the morning of our parade. He wrote: 'As soon as an Irishman leaves home and enters America, he ceases to be whatever he was but behaves rather more so.'

‘When you interact with the British people you can hear the rain in their voices’ Tina Brown

He was always trying to put on weight and walk without crutches

She longs to go somewhere….anywhere ….else

Lavender and dust

‘You also told me not to use Google no more.’ Overheard

You can hear the bones humming. Mis-auto correction

I don’t do full fat…

“I don’t do full fat, man. It’s not the same as back in the day. No cream, watered down.” Overheard.

This is the face of an angry young man. You should see him when he smiles.

Wars do not start with explosions, they start with silence.

No one said anything / Silence is not an effective foreign policy.

“Art isn’t the cherry on the cake; it’s the cake”

‘Lord, / When you send the rain, / think about it, please / a little.’ Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, James Baldwin

‘The moment we cease to hold each other, / the moment we break faith with one another, / the sea engulfs us and the lights go out.’ For Nothing is Fixed, James Baldwin

The Romans thought aubergine were poisonous, and called them mala insana (the apples of insanity). The name stuck and in Italy are now known as melanzana.

Rene Magritte asleep

He heard the valves…

He heard the valves in his heart. He heard the quick, feathering action of the hinges. Extraordinary, he thought.

mouse jigglers = employees who pretend to work

I thought growing old would take longer.

To understand life talk to a 4-year old and then an 84-year old.

The etymology of the word haunt is tied to the Old French verb hanter, meaning “to visit frequently or regularly”. But it is also tied to the Old Norse word heimta, which means “to bring home”.

Most people’s lives contain half a dozen completely unbelievable incidents.

A real copy

Speak a living language

We live a perpetual state of informed ignorance.

‘God says he don't deal with Small Heath' / ‘This is the face of an angry young man. You should see him when he smiles.’ / The writer stood next to the wall and cried “This is the way I feel'. A Londoner said ‘Yes, but is it art?' Benjamin Zephaniah

“Call it Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)” Song by ‘T-Bone’ Walker 1947

Dangerous pavements…

‘Dangerous pavements / But I face the ice this year with my father’s stick.’ Seamus Heaney

‘The photograph fulfilled my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transient less painful. Sometimes I want a picture to ask why, and to not be too easily deciphered and decoded, because our lives are often like that.’ Dorothy Bohm

‘When you’re younger, you’re scared of dying. As you get older, it seems rather fun.’  Barbara Hulanicki

He felt like a raisin on top of a cake, extraneous.

The Bee Gees song ‘Staying Alive’, with its 103 BPM tempo, was widely used as a guide for administering CPR.

The courage to fail is the same courage you need to succeed, so welcome failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying, so keep failing.

People hate anything well made, it gives them a guilty conscience.

‘The sun came up like a yellow rose and fell like a sweating orange.’ Alistair Cooke

A million seconds is less than 12 days, while 1 billion seconds is nearly 32 years.

He would sniff like a gusting wind and brush away the tear with the back of his hand the size of a cod.

He drowned…

He drowned his bonsai tree with too much love.

The self-storage centre is a park where people go and stroll among their things to think and forget.

“Being in a city without arts is like being in a room without windows” Stephen Knight on Birmingham

“Jesus’ blood never failed me yet / never failed me yet / Jesus’ blood never failed me yet /There’s one thing I know / For he loves me so.” Gavin Bryars’ appropriated recoding of a street drunk singing.

It was so special it was only used on high days and holidays

‘For children are natural impressionists, taking the adjectives of music and knifing them close against the nouns of sight and touch. Every child knows that colour sings and trees walk’. Alistair Cooke describing trees in fall in New England

Yesterday came suddenly.

We cannot stand still, even in the best of times

Customers were allowed to run up tabs – but had to leave their sets of false teeth as collateral, which were kept in a bucket of water.

Stone walls and silence, thank God.

I hope that you are happy, not happier.

Sussex lay under…

Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself together from chalk and fishbones.

‘I think his obsession with curtains is partly the sense that they have that theatrical quality and that when the curtains part something is about to start, but they also have a degree of concealment about them. They might be hiding something.’ On David Lynch

The lightening bolt tattoo on his forehead was meant to be a sign of power; instead it’s signifies a need for more thought.

Strong stances are for weightlifters

“The story of the internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.” Chris Knight

Sunny Jim

‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think that you control it.’ John Steinbeck

“You’ve just head butted him Delilah.” Overheard

‘I come just from the other side of nowhere’ Johnny Cash

It took about 24 seconds for the sound of Mount Vesuvius erupting to reach the bakery of Pompeii via Nola, roughly 19 hours for ashfall and volcanic debris to bury the building, and almost 2000 years for the secrets entombed within to be rediscovered .

Memories are…

‘Memories are dynamic, neither false nor true: they are constructed in the moment, reflecting both fragments of what actually transpired in the past and the biases, motivations, and cues that we have around us in the present.’ Charan Ranganath ‘Why We Remember’

I think we are suffering from toxic empathy

I like to be near the kettle

‘A soupçon of peril and lust sounds just fine’ Eva Wiseman

He always dressed heavily.

Time will tell

0.00am. The present: is always in the present. As we respond to the moment, it never ages: we are alive, now. It is, is.

12.00am The past: memories are otherwise, offering solace and surety that it was, it happened, and may again someday.

12.00pm The future: has no certainty. It simply might never happen. Or it might prove wondrous, a source of joy, life changing.

‘I sat, stood or paced around. I did a Wordle, read a Jack Reacher novel, ate a scotch egg. Everything felt a bit wrong.’ Adrian Chiles on the death of his father.

The trees had long lost their nerves

“It really doesn’t matter at all / No, it really doesn’t matter at all / Life’s a gas.” Song lyrics by T Rex

It makes you look up at the sky, fearful of what might fall out of it.

She could talk a glass eye asleep.

His voice, the roughest grade of sandpaper, stripped all conversation to nods and uncertainty.

She grew up…

‘She grew up with her father who believed that Armageddon was just round the corner, his survival bag packed and ready by the front door every night during her childhood’ Charlotte Mullins on the painter Clare Woods

‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I am frightened of the old ones.’ John Cage

Memory is like an onion, the older layers the last to go.

Born in a leap year, today she is happily celebrating her 18th birthday. She is 72 years old. She feels life is all before her, knowing it’s all behind.

‘He always looked skywards when he was about to say ‘no’ to something, as if checking up to an invisible mezzanine for a ‘yes’ someone might have forgotten there.’ Youmna Melhem Chamieh

The trick, when crossing the road in Hanoi, is to avoid sudden movements or pauses.

‘The minute a chap’s wife dies, her friends, come crawling out of the woodwork with their casseroles and condolences, and snap him up before his spouse is cold in the grave.’ Deborah Moggachn

I get confused...

‘I get confused by the letter P’

‘Why don’t you ask me about all of these keys?’

It’s a reminder that the heart is a muscle. 

To make art, start with a sense of direction not the destination. 

A dog’s view of the world. 

Contemporary autocrats are highly effective in the use of a ‘firehose of falsehoods’, using speed, relevance and volume. They understands that people become confused and easily fall in behind the ‘big man’. It is a known historic pattern that always ends in catastrophe. 

‘What is a photograph if it not a game of representation? Is this how the world really looks? Or just how it looks when it is photographed’ Josh Lustig 

‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new’ Samuel Beckett

An unspoken word                                          

niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. 

‘And even if you had a little limp / Or a wooden leg / I would say, ‘it doesn’t bother me’’ Lyrics by Jacob Jacobs for the Yiddish musical comedy, I Would If I Could 1932 

In an atmosphere…

‘In an atmosphere normally reserved for the independent days of an emergent African state’ Times reporting on the opening by the Queen of ‘Spaghetti Junction’ in Birmingham.

Bomb sites after the Second World War in Birmingham were locally known as ‘pecks’

In summer I like Green Park to be full of spread eagled bodies, honey gold and pink, half tanned against leafy green, seen from a deckchair. Low as spines. Jeffrey Camp, British painter

I played a moth in the first act and a butterfly in the second. Barbra Streisand

‘The past is the mother of the future. What was dictates what is and what will be’ Vincent Deary, How We Break

All the furniture was sprayed in speckled paint

Pies in cages…

Pies in cages and oranges in pyramids of four.’ Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck

Out of order

“I remember the first time I saw the Milky Way. I didn’t feel small. I felt magnificent.” Tom Hanks

Pstt…

Deborah lived in what used to be a factory for making police uniforms, a small, three- story building hidden in a courtyard.  David Sedaris

Family history research is the third most common use of the internet after shopping and pornography.

He was a hard working lazy man

He was neat about the feet

We get up in the morning and do our best. Nothing else matters.

All we know about the futures is that it will be different. Perhaps what we fear is that it remain the same.

“I feel like I am going to burst into flames, the perfume is so strong.” Overheard

Never let anyone dim your light.

It is the silence that kills you.

Birmingham included manufacturers of artificial limbs, billiard tables and dog collars.

We are all blind…

‘We are all blind to our own profiles, in the same way that we don’t know the backs of our own heads’ Tacita Dean on Philip Guston

In all the time I knew her, she had been highly sprung. She lived with and without light, sang with the birds, and when her time came, stopped in a fraction of a second, completely unwound.

A strange form appears on the horizon in this painting. Is it the heel of a shoe or a horseshoe? It could be the parted hair and forehead Guston painted to symbolise Mckim. He described the transformative potential of the painting process to the poet Bill Berkson: You're painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread. Paintings of Philip Guston

He has heavy hands

Following last years earthquake, a lot of people got married, but and equal number split up, realising life was too short to spend with the wrong person

The simple text message, #REL1=ON, was enough to blow the vehicle to smithereens. The time was 2.58pm. Assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia

Her time is spent…

Her time is spent making excellent coffee for mediocre chemists.

According to scientists, bedbugs are one of the few species to practice "traumatic insemination". With his barbed needle of a penis, the male bedbug can pierce the female at any point of her body. His sperm then makes its way via the bloodstream to her reproductive organ. Over the millennia, females have actually developed a dent in their abdomen to encourage males to pierce them at that spot.

A lot of the men collect animals to stroke and whisper to.

A film about endings: love, friendship, and hope.

He became a museum guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Americas’ greatest museum. He wanted to stand still in the most beautiful place he knew. He stood there for 10 years. All the Beauty of the World. Patrick Bringley

“When the complexity of the leaders’ speeches declined, war followed.” Stephen Pinker

“I love scrambled. The eggs are all fucked up” overheard comment in Glasgow

“Nothing’s good forever”

“Magda taught me how to listen. I used to bumble through the world, not listening. She taught me that Vienna sounds different to Istanbul. Manchester sounds different from London.” Lubaina Himid

Photograph - Saul Leiter

A Place of hard stones...

A place of hard stones 

I hear that she is going to name her new cats Martin Jones and Mrs Dixon

Well I never 

‘I became very fit. But is was not about sport, I was running away from death.’  Ayelet Gondar-Goshen 

When faced with a difficult question we often subconsciously find an easier question and answer that instead. 

‘Some people live to work, while most work to live. But nobody lives to commute’ Simon Kuper FT

St Augustine’s prayer:  “Lord give me chastity and continence. But not yet.”

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard

Money talks, wealth whispers.

In business, bad timing can be as disastrous as a bad idea; moving too too slow or too fast is the same as heading in the wrong direction . 

'If I had been a man I would have gone abroad & studied botany. Himalayan rare flowers..’ Madge Gill 

Arles ‘Les Rencontres’ 2023

He’s a handsome potato…

“He’s a handsome potato of a man but how much carbohydrate does a woman want?” Louise Doughty ‘A Bird in Winter’

“Imagine if every word we spoke became palpable and dropped from our lips,” the artist Joseph Grigely suggests. “Think about what would happen and the places we would find the residue of our words. Imagine scraps of language lying on countertops. Drawers full of sentences. Peelings of words in the sink. Imagine the dashboards of our cars covered with everyday conversation.”

faint hearts / controlled explosions

It is like trying to lip read in a crowded room

A fleeting moment in a floating world

She whistled all her breath away

Statistics can be like the drunk, where the lamp-post is used for support rather than illumination.

He has a good voice but no ear, a good eye but no taste. It makes little sense.

‘It is the hour of the pearl, the interval between day and night when time stops and examined itself’

‘The echoes made it sound as though she was crying under water.’ John Steinbeck Cannery Row

Shortly before Easter, Glyn Potts began to suspect that the children had not been eating. FT magazine

Royal College of Physicians

It knows nothing…

It knows nothing. And therefore understands everything.

Everyone at the airport is on your right

Angels ends with Bill Houston in the gas chamber, experiencing a moment which sums up Denis Johnson’s writing. “He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realised he was taking it. He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”

She believed in both God and the alphabet

Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming or home and algos, meaning pain) was first used by a medic Johannes Hofer to describe a military disease experienced by Swiss mercenaries on battlefields far from home.

Where else have I never been to

It’s not just the cliffs, The whole world is white. Where my sky is empty, Yours is abundantly clear.

Prosopagnosia = a condition that affects the ability to remember facial features

Do you mind…

“Do you mind going backwards?”

Let’s go the long way round

“Women used to go there to look out to sea when they were worried about their husbands. They called it ‘the serious place’” Veiholmen, Norway

Photography can be helpful because it reminds you of what was.

Permanent marker

"I'm a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don't trust diamonds and gold." Eartha Kitt

“He was known as Little Sparky”

Wurst, 2021 (left); Modesty, 2021 Wurm’s recent and unexpected use of marble – that most traditional of sculptural materials – to capture everyday objects came “because there is such a contradiction between the bread and the sausage and the marble”, he says. “Transferring something into eternity that would normally last a minute while we eat it – such a symbol of our existence and life.”

“Skate where the puck is going, not where it has been” Wayne Gretzky

“One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries.” Reviewer of ‘Naples ‘44’ by Norman Lewis