Remembering where I put my paints and what the sky looked like

After many months staring at the wall or out of the window I finally got my paints out last week and made some marks on a canvas. It's a landscape about landscapes really, based on the image I have in my memory of looking down over the wondrous CaherMacrusheen fields in Doolin. My inspiration/motivation has probably come from the fact that I've got two paintings in an exhibition at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Haringey - my portraits of Rivelino and JFK - and hanging around with other artists is always a good way to get things moving again.

Writing in a MacDonalds on a Saturday morning

I'm upstairs in a MacDonalds on Kingsland Road in Dalston, sipping at weak foamy coffee in a paper cup and trying to write. Procrastination is high, thanks to the decent Wi-Fi service and the newspaper. No matter how much I try to concentrate, my mind slips and I start reading about forthcoming football fixtures and surf various sites looking for Christmas presents for the kids.

Next to my laptop is a notebook with my list of weekly tasks for the next few months. I only drew up the list last week but I'm already behind. My eye strays towards a man on the other side of the restaurant. It's late period Leo Tolstoy, drinking coffee and eating a donut, content in the knowledge that he's already written great books and can soon go back to his own time via a pan-dimensional wormhole in the smelly toilets. He'd have been better off going further back in time, where coffee and donuts would have been cheaper.

Crappy Christmas music blares out from the speakers. Tolstoy gets up and stares out of the window. A woman to my left is writing what looks like a dissertation on an old Compaq laptop. Further away two middle ages people talk vaguely about shopping and TV programmes. No-one is eating burgers or chips. In fact, no-one is eating anything. McDonald's has become a drop in centre for drifters.

Tolstoy is now staring at me. I sense the possibility that he'll decide to kidnap me and take me back to the 19th century. It would be interesting but I have presents to buy. Books to write.

The Crow Road - A Walk in Roxeth

Last week I went on a walk with deep topographer Nick Papadimitriou and the writer/producer John Rogers, as part of their radio show 'Ventures and Adventures in Topography'. Each week they pick a different part of the Greater London area and do a walk, usually aided by a book from the early 20th century.

Our walk started at South Harrow station and ended up a few hundred yards away in a crow-infested patch of parkland.

The podcast is here

Rebuilding The Temple of Ying From The Ground Up

I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting on here again. And I can't remember why I stopped back in 2004. Probably something to do with the speed of service on Blogger back then, or the user interface on Typepad. My Typepad blog became an online version of my old Smoke newsletter, with mundane local news and little Zen newsflashes. I do still like writing those reports but for some reason it's harder to get into the slightly cutesy mindset required to properly pull it off. And it does seem as if the whole local non-news news thing is now being done to death much better elsewhere, on twitter/facebook etc. I've doen the odd post on Twitter but so far I'm stuck in a slightly bewildering cycle of kids, beer, old records and the sound of lorries. Plus I've got so many websites with my work stuff on that I've sort of lost track of how I reveal myself online.

And I just want a change, obviously. I've been staring at the Typepad 'Compose Post' area since June and haven't come up with anything. I't's Blogger's Block. Or Writer's Blog. Blogck?

But I'm back mainly because there are a load of blogs I like - some great writers and artists - on here and I can re-engage in a community again. And the really great thing? No-one has *ever* looked at this blog. The only way is up...

Getting to Know Brud

When you stare at an old photo of someone for long enough it sometimes seems that you're getting to know them. After several leads came up with nothing, for my painting of Brud Petty I had to use the picture lent to me by Bridey Fitzpatrick. In it a youthful Brud - perhaps no more than 20 years old - stares back at me, grinning wildly. It must have been taken in the 30s or 40s at a guess.

Looking for Photographs of Old People

Talked to some more local people today about the project. Mattie Shannon is a nephew of Maudie, the old lady who used to live at the crossroads at the bottom of the hill. I asked him about photos but he seemed to think there were no surviving photographs of her. He told me to call back next week and he'd do a bit of research in the meantime.

After that I popped round to see Mikey Carthy (who's 80 and has lived here all his life). Mikey wasn't in and had some tough looking guard cats on patrol outside the cottage. Further down the road I bumped into Pat Woods, a local farmer, and he was happy to talk about the project. He seemed to know a lot about the families who lived around here. "There's not much to say about Maudey and Tadey," he said, "apart from the fact that they lived in those cottages". As for pictures, he reckoned that "families didn't take photographs of themselves in those days. You hired people to do that." He suggested Buddy Flanagan in Doolin might have some old prints. It does seem that the more I dig for these old people, the more they disappear from view.

Finally I visited John Casey, an auctioneer in Lisdoonvarna, who used to be good friends with Brud Petty and who said he had both photos and VHS records of Brud.

Holy well and JCB

This week I'm going to draw up a list of local people that I need to talk to and try and get hold of some archive material. A trip to the local history archive in Ennis is probably on the cards at some point. But for now I'm going to walk around the lanes with my sketchbook and attempt to fit evertything together.

As well as documentary stuff about the old pople I want to emphasise my own motivations and response to Lurraga. The general theory round here is that I probably tend to romanticise the landscape more than any of the people who actually work on the land. It brings me back to the idea of the classic travel writing tradition - there is a whiff of colonialsim about an Englishman documenting scenes of Irish rural life. That fascination with otherness. I've just got to be open about that.

The images I have in my head at the moment are of a farmer cutting the hay with a scythe, a holy well and a great big bright yellow JCB.