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.