Sunday Morning

Up early - nice dog walk up to Noth's Seat to see out over Sussex and towards Le Touquet. Very clear skies, cold and fresh.

I was exhausted yesterday and ended up sleeping through the afternoon, feel much better now. Really needed the break.

Last night I went over to st mary in The Castle to see two performances, a puppet theatre  presentation based on the life of Jean Shrimpton - which I honestly didn't enjoy or understand, and later - an 'evening with' type event with Billy Childish - who is another of my long term heroes. we were early, so I did have a brief chat with him at the start ( oddly - I first met him when I was 19 - his then girlfriend, Tracy Emin - was at college with me - but that's enough name dropping for one day ). The show could have been a bit of a disaster - the audio visual part included a projector powerful enough to cast full colour images onto the side of buildings, but they didn't have a connector for a mac - so myself and my friend linda drove over to my studio to collet one - the puppet show had already started when we got back - in silence, and it was very strange to have it jerk into life suddenly when they connected the computers.

The 2nd show was so much better - with Billy reading from his books ad poetry, singing some ( which worked really welland his voice is much better than I expected ) and talking about his paintings - musing on the merits of 99p reading glasses and interjecting on the McAlpine farce. Very good evening was had by all - even the annoying drunk woman at the back who kept asking stupid questions - and the various arty types who tried to come up with really pretentious crap during the Q&A.

I'm very friendly with the girl who organised the storytelling festival and had a chat with her afterwards - and again with Billy - which ended up with me talking about my teeth again. I need to change the subject.

Here is Billy at the ICA recently interviewed by Neal Brown ( who is very boring ) - in the same suit as last night. It was interesting to hear him talk about spending three decades working for almost nothing and wearing 2nd hand shoes - and then a couple of years ago become a 'sudden overnight success' for a long weekend - but at least he now has a bigger house and somewhere decent to paint.
This is much better - it's in 3 parts.

I'm listening to this at the moment.

The dogs have figured out how to get the front room door open - I'm going to have to take action. As it's quite nice, might try and do something in the garden in anticipation of winter - but it's still very wet.