Wednesday 31 July 2013

Feeling a bit crap

Must be something I ate. So cancelled my gallery babysitting today. My current guest is leaving this morning with another, an American actress, expected this afternoon. Just time to change the bed, and my cleaner is coming today. I have been working on some amateurish looking posters for the exhibition which has been fun. Great Monday evening at Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec, and met David on Tuesday morning for coffee. I hope I shall be better tomorrow as I am due to be sketching at Lambeth Palace with Jo. If I starve all day things should improve. We shall see. I shall have a quiet day resting today, and checking that I have some breakfast stuff in the cupboard. Dorothy due back from the States on Saturday I think, when I am supposed to be sketching around Westminster. The weather is very dismal today, back to the normal British summer. So disappointing - at vast expense and on impulse as usual, I bought something called an Xhose for the garden, only to discover it does not fit my garden tap, so have sent off another six quid to obtain the right fitting. The hose is meant to be self tidying by shrinking down as it dries and expanding when the water is turned on. A bit frustrating not to be able to try it. Fortunately it is raining anyway, and knowing my luck the damned thing will be ready in time for winter. There seem to be a lot of gulls outside. This takes me back to when my grandmother lived in a kind of hut thing on the cliff in Combe Martin. She frequently fed the gulls and had a favourite who would stamp on the tin roof, demanding his breakfast.

Sunday 28 July 2013

Back again

I have survived the Barcelona experience and am slaving away at Airbnb, doing a bit of sketching and babysitting the gallery. I think I have sorted out how to pay the bills in Barcelona and my Spanish bank account. The symposium was bearable and I met a few friendly fellow sketchers while there. My best fun was going on boat rides and going to the theatre del Raval to see zoo troupe perform their hilarious magic pantomime. Julian had been kindly minding my flat and feeding the Kookster in my absence. It has continued to be boiling hot, which makes it difficult to get any sleep. I have done some fairly awful designs for a poster for the ongoing Waterloo Zeitgeist exhibition. Unfortunately to produce anything decent would involve skills I evidently do not possess. However I have done a few very rough designs, which have been fun to try,though the results were rather unsatisfactory. The guy who was going to paint my window frames and the front of the house has not appeared, so I will now have to find someone else. We shall see. I see today that Mick Farren has died yesterday onstage. I did not follow his career but remember him well from the very early sixties. At that time J and I arrived back in London via Crete, where we met up with some Goldsmiths students. We found a flat to rent in a large house in Manor Way, Blackheath, where we had some of the students for a flat share. One of them moved Mick Farren in. I was told he was a strange guy selling rubbishy goods from a suitcase in Oxford Street at the time. He turned out to be OK and was mainly responsible for a huge party in our flat at the time. Later, we moved to Oxford where J had a new job and I had my son. We had some contact still with some of the Goldsmiths people but lost touch with Mick.

Friday 5 July 2013

Tired and Weary

I am today. Had a couple of gins with Dorothy last night before falling asleep in front of the TV and going to bed really early. Woke up before 5am with pains in the head, which have worn off a bit but still persist. I am hoping that a vertical position will get rid of them eventually. Not looking forward to Barcelona and morbidly looked up the cost of a funeral in Spain, just in case I croak while absent on leave. Not good, but probably cheaper than bringing a corpse back. I do like to look on the bright side before going on holiday. Which is probably why I don't normally go away. Can't wait to get back here again. What with Easyjet changing the cabin bag size to a size impossible to purchase I now have a minute bag. Weighed it and 8kg so far so have a little scope. Maybe will leave the extra 2kg for any local purchases. We shall see. I think I may need to take quite a long break from doing AirBnb but am booked up well into October for the time being. Maybe I could take off December and January to try and regain some energy. We shall see.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Back again

I am having a horrible time trying to deal with technology. I think I have now reclaimed this blog so it will be basically about whingeing about everything so you can stop reading right now. I reported in the blog I set up by mistake: Kookydays.blogspot.com that one of my esteemed guests buggered the hot water control on the shower. On the plus side she paid for the plumber.. Another two guests slunk off slightly furtively having apparently broken the thing the clicks th gas on at the hob. Then I discovered that the oven which they had used for heating pizzas was also apparently broken. After a bit of a panic I remembered that the timer on the oven is very difficult to use, so fiddled about with this for a bit and lo, the oven is working again..mysteriously the ignition thing has also started working again. I shall be quite happy to get off for a few days. Anyway I may try and keep my Kookydays blog about artwork and photography etc and this one about everything else. Had a fabulous dinner at Zucca last night -Dorothy's birthday. Julian popped over today for a cup of tea. My current guests leave tomorrow and no more expected for a couple of weeks.