20th October 2017 As I bathed my closed eyes saw these famous three monkeys equipped with a camera, headphones and a microphone. I was delighted, then sighed or swore: inspiration is often a nuisance. I hate getting out of bed and not finding the dictaphone it would be sensible to always leave by it. A memory would be useful. Once while driving I surprised myself by saying the line that fitted the hole in a song. Car swaying, I found in the dashboard or, perhaps under the seat, three ballpoints that didn‘t really work, so still saying the line, pulled over, then scrawled it along the ground with a twig and photographed it. By the time the photographs came back I‘d decided all the lines in the song weren‘t much good. I‘ve stopped people in the street, asked them to ring my home phone (I dont have a mobile) and sung quite a lot of a song into my answer-machine.
So, anyway, I walked half the water of my bath downstairs then shivered and steamed flappily back up with a pad of A4, jumped back in, turned on the hot tap, pushed my hair back, and with drops of water trotting down the underside of my forearm and jumping off the heel of my hand onto the pad pressed on the tops of my raised knees, I drew this crossly confident and rubbishy approximation of my vision. Bad as it is it does the job. I don‘t think I could have done any better if water was dry.
11th March 2016 Tadidas I took this photograph of my brother Tad in about 1978. I am fairly sure that‘s a wall of the local primary school in Waldniel where we used to play football after school hours. The drawing must be from a few years later.
20th September 2015 I drew two people, a man and a woman, both a year or two older than my twenty-one years, as they sat opposite me talking increasingly fast German, in a busy bar in Berlin one evening in 1981. They had asked me if I minded sharing my table, and for twenty minutes – until they broke off into German – we had been been chatting pleasantly in English. The woman said something fast crossly, then stood up, smiled nicely, if wryly at me, said a clenched goodbye to him and went. I asked what they had been talking about. He explained that they were arguing about which of them would sleep with me, and he had won by pointing out that it was his turn. I had time during their conflab to quickly draw their close together faces half a dozen times on unused bar tabs. I can find only one and a trodden on photostat of another.
