a wonderful run this morning. 90 minutes or so. small roads, public footpaths, permissive footpaths, a park, a bridleway, a towpath, finishing with a swim in the river during which a dog ran off with one of my socks. it reminded me how deeply i missed public access land while living in boston, mass. (and how much i had taken it for granted while living here). i've just flicked through a couple of random uk ordnance survey maps and in the countryside it's almost impossible to find a square mile you can't cross using some kind of road or track or path.
new year's day. kids at their grandmother's. last holiday ever, maybe. shitty white cell count. still no-one on the stem cell register. i should be inside with kathy, but the wind's coming in off the sea and i'm guessing there aren't too many germs over the atlantic. christ, it's good to be outside. dragon's breath and pine-needles. down into little coves then up again into dappled forest-light.
an afterthought…
(see the previous entry ‘the case for god’)
my friend, will fiennes, finally has a website (he is a lovely man, he is single and the photo on his home page doesn't do him justice). among other things the site contains a link to this gloriously eccentric repository of, well, strange maps.
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
also, you should really, really read will's memoir 'the music room'.
every year the art room, an art therapy charity for kids in oxford, runs a fundraising auction of artwork. contributors are asked to do something artistic to a particular object. this year it was a sketchbook of handmade paper.
crap cover, crap title, but a rather wonderful book (by karen armstrong. and I'm speaking as an atheist here. it's emphatically not (despite cover and title) a riposte to dawkins and hitchens (she agrees with many of their arguments).
boom! will be published on 3rd september.
here's the book's introduction which pretty much explains everything:
between 1 and 2pm on tuesday 15th september the admirable vincent creelan will be on the fourth plinth. among other things he will be reading some poetry by owen sheers and some poetry by me. this is a portrait taken by his partner.
http://www.oneandother.co.uk/blog/2009/06/guest-blogger-2-vincent-creelan.html
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