Up the shop there was a stall selling magic tricks.
I expect that when I was in hospital they must have fitted me with donkey ears and tattooed ‘MUG’ on my forehead because they saw me coming alright.

This bloke showed me a couple of tricks. The second one has only got three cards in it. I couldn’t work out quite how it was done but the end result was amazing. It was a variation of the three-card monte but on the packet said ‘COLOR MONTE’. Hmmmm….

‘How much is that then?’

‘Six quid.’

‘What’s your best price?’

‘Six quid.’

I’ll give you four.’

He started putting the packets back together with rubber bands round them so I let him waste his time for a bit.

‘So you want six quid for three cards made in China do you?’

‘No, they’re made in England.’

Well that must be the England where they can’t spell ‘Colour’ for a start so I offered him four again.

He was starting to get a bit annoyed now so I let him smell the money. I wafted a tenner under his nose. I offered him a fiver.

So I got my magic trick for a fiver and now all I have to do is work out how it works. It’s only three cards and I thought that even I can do that. The bloody instructions go on for about a year.

He did show me a good one which was a pack of cards that he spread out to show they were all different. Then he turned them over and riffled through and I had to pick one. I took one and it was the 7 of spades. Then he put the pack back together and said ‘OK, now put the 7 of spades back on the top’ and then he turned the deck back over to show they were all different. Then he did it again, 7 of spades, and for six quid I would have learned the secret. But I didn’t.

You wait til I get good at my Colour Monte though. I’ll have your pockets inside-out.

Anyone who has ever overnighted in hospital will know that there is a great deal of farting goes on.

The first time I enjoyed this was in the Royal Sussex and so tremendous were the blow-offs that I could hardly sleep. A patient who was in a close bed kept pooing his jimjams. The nurse started to get a bit exasperated and suggested that this man should no longer wear the jimjams.

I got moved to another ward which was smaller and in the bed next to mine was a prisoner from Lewes Gaol and he had two prison wardens with him at all times. He was bright yellow because his insides had packed up. The nurse was a gay man which I didn’t mind at all but the lag wasn’t happy one bit.

Now, there is no dignity in hospital.

They whizzed the curtains round but I could hear the doctor talking to him…
“There seems to be a problen with your bile duct and that’s what’s made you go yellow. We will insert a probe to try to clear it”

I found it hard not to laugh out loud. If he didn’t like gay nurses I wondered how he thought the probe might be inserted. I didn’t say anything. Perhaps he thought it might be some magic keyhole surgery. I thought that the suffix ‘hole’ might be about right but that the prefix ‘arse’ might be more accurate.

Anyway, when I was kipping in the hospital the other few days I was reliably informed that my very own bottom had gone off at regular intervals and had disturbed the slumbers of several patients.

Now I don’t like to be an annoyance but I was trying to be a vegetarian. Hospitals are so funny. You can actually tell someone that they blow off all the time without a fight starting.

Maybe this is why I live alone.

Here’s a yarn that I may have spun before. I don’t know whether it’s true or not but it makes sense to me.

Someone that I know left the police and wound up working as an HGV driver. One day he was pulling out onto a road and checked the offside window to see if anything was coming. There were two cars coming and they were both the same. He was seeing double because he had had a stroke.

I was reminded of this today when I was at the doc’s and he mentioned that my facial smash-up may cause double vision because the damage I have done to my face may result in double vision by poking one orbit out of alignment with the other. That’s why Stirling Moss had to stop racing after his prang.

My doctor opined, ‘Nice scar’, which isn’t exactly how I feel about it but there you go.

My friend who had had the stroke had to go to a clinic thing and he was asked how he felt about what had happened to him.

“Angry.”

“I see. And what, exactly, makes you feel so angry?”

“Well, I have just bought a new string of lights for the Christmas tree but if I had known that I would be seeing double I needn’t have bothered.”

This is what I refer to as a police joke. It works because the cause is tragedy but the joke leaves that so far behind. You have to become unhinged from ‘normal’ life to get these things and the job makes you leave the planet just to survive. There are simply too many horrors and they aren’t just things on the telly either - they are daily life and matter of fact.

I was on duty in the comms room once and some poor sod had to go to a call which involved maggots coming out from under a flat door. He kicked his way in and found a man who had been dead for a few months sitting in an armchair. I asked if he had found any ID but he hadn’t. I asked if he was black or white.

“He’s black now.”

I might go and mag the lock out and sit with my new plimmers in the water to soften them up a bit. Or I might not. I hate this hot weather.

This is something that you absolutely HAVE to watch.

David Hockney is a genius. His recent return to oils is a triumph.

I beg you to watch this.

I’ve been up for hours.
It’s horrible when you can’t sleep but it’s not the end of the world.
I read back through my blog and, on the whole, I was quite pleased by what I saw. There are little moments that crackle and please. There are some bits with holes in, of course, but I like to think that mostly my posts have been good.

Some bits have been better than good and I like to think that I have provoked interest in some artworks like Ian Hamilton-Finlay and the works of the PRB. My own artworks have featured and I like to think that the way that I write helps things along.

In my shabby life I must do what I must do. I am driven, you see, by a force that will never let me stop so the blog keeps pounding away in my head and will never let me go.

All that I find interesting must be reported on and can never be ignored. I post links and paintings, songs and photographs. I have to keep doing this because otherwise I shall surely die.

We will die and that is guaranteed but this is my life. I can’t stop. This is me.

The PRB were, without doubt, the most important thing that happened in English art ever. I hope that you bothered to watch the first two. Here is another.

Here I am, in my new swimming shorts. Oh, and T-shirt. I’m going to be doing some swimming type lessons for children.

The beautiful song is this one. This version is by Robert Wyatt. He was from the Canterbury school and was in Soft Machine. He was in the first gig that I ever went to, Matching Mole at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the grand sum of 45 pence. He was a drummer then but he fell out of a window at a party and got right spazzed. I suspect that some drug taking may have been involved.

The song was written by Elvis Costello and really beckons to the heart. I love this version.

I arrived well over an hour early for my appointment. I hate to be late and you never know when you might get slipped in a tad early. Not this time, however.

So, as always, I started talking to people in the waiting room. Today I spoke with a lovely young lady in pink jodphurs about, guess what, horse riding. She has got two horses down at Wisley and I wondered if they might have a horse that might not snap under my weight. They have a Shire Horse! Hoorah! And how much might it cost to have a go on it for an hour? 30 or 40 quids!?

I spoke to an old lady who runs schools for children to learn snorkelling and scuba diving. They are running short of instructors. Now I’ve never snorkelled or scubad in my life but I can swim and sometimes on top of the water too. I took down the details and made the call when I got home. Next Saturday should see me in the pool at 07:30 if you don’t mind. When the children have taught me how not to drown I might be on the way to being an instructor. I’ve already done the lifesaving thing when I was a copper and I’ve been under boats and I’m not scared. Now all I have to do is get taught snorkelling off an eight-year old.

“Mr W.”

It was time to have my stitches unstitched.

The deep, subcutaneous ones will melt but the ones on the top needed to be removed.

“Nice wound” she said and if that’s not an oxymoron I don’t know what is. They all came out clean and, I suppose, the end result doesn’t look too bad. A duelling scar, nothing worse.

Now I have to buy some swimming trunks. Speedos are off the menu. Shorts and a T-shirt (not yellow) are the order of the day.

Not always easy to know just where things are. Sometimes here and sometimes there.

I like to know just where things are at and that’s not because I’m nuts. I like to know where things are because that’s how my mind works. If you don’t know where things are then everything gets all muddled up and that’s the truth. If you don’t know where things are you might as well be dead.

Say you don’t know where something is… Urm, urm, urm… Well what good is that?

It’s much better if you know where everything is because then you don’t have to spend time gulping. I just found my lighter.

Not only that but I found my watercress beds and the mooring post. I found the tawny owl. I found loads of stuff just by looking.

I find loads of stuff just by not walking in dog-plop.

Anyone up for the Waterhouse and a trip to the PRB at the Tate?

Go on, you know you want to.

The first time that I had my nose broken I was 13 or 14 something.
I had a job selling papers off a stand near Hampton Court station. Two boxes to run and a leather bag for the takings.

There was a boy who used to go my school and he got expelled for selling the beverages alcoholic. His father, now dead, was a popular entertainer and was on telly quite a lot. I mustn’t give too much away because my assailant might still be alive although I truly hope that he is not.

One afternoon I was approached by this scumbag who was showing off to a dimwit girl. I never even saw the punch coming. The next thing I knew I had bounced back off the window behind me and was on the deck and worried about my cashbag and with blood and snot pouring out of my nose. An off-duty copper ran up and asked me who had done it. “The one with the fuzzy hair.”

The copper hauled him off a bus and nicked him and I got taken away in an ambulance.

When my dad found out who the celebrity dad was he got hold of his address, probably via the agent, and went round and had a word. I would like to think that some of the words began with ‘F’ and ‘C’ but my dad is more clever than that.

Since that sorry day my nose never worked properly again. My left nostril always felt like it had had a piece of bone grown over it and needed drilling out. Nearly forty years this has been going on.

No one ever seemed to believe that I hadn’t contributed to the fracas althought the first I ever knew of it was a whacking smack in the bugle. All I got was £50 and 95% of that got spent on mending the roof. And I got a nose which no longer worked.

When I got beaten up in Newington Butts I never saw what I got hit with. I suspect it was a bottle which, thank God, didn’t break. My left cheekbone got broken in three places and my nerves got severed and my teeth went numb. No one was ever caught for that but I know how it felt - or didn’t feel.

And now, thanks to my fall, I realise what has happened again. I know what a broken cheekbone feels like, I know what the numbness of cut nerves feels like and I know what a broken nose feels like.

But my nose feels like it might be working again. I might be able to breathe properly through my left nostril after all these years.

The stitches come out tomorrow and although my face looks a bit smashed the bruises will go and the bones will heal.

Maybe some good will come of it all. And maybe the person who started all this off will die in screaming agony.

I have already banged on about episode one in this, most brilliant, series.

Here is episode two.

To me, the works of the PRB are unfathomable. Mere boys, they turned the world of art upside down. I beg you to watch this series, I really do. Episode one is still available and really should be compulsory viewing.

Have fun. Lots of love.

H.

I had to go out to play on my own.

After I had walked for many a mile I realised that there were people that I knew, people who were a bit stuck.

Two people who had a problem with a boat. A problem that I had had before. I needed a torch and my fingertips.

The boat is still there. As far as I am concerned it can rot there. I know exactly how to free it but no one can be arsed to ask me.

This is hard to believe.

The shopping needs to be done nearly every day and, not having a car, I walk and being a bit green I take my daypack.

So far, so good.

But I must have brain damage from my fall because for the first time in about seven years I find myself going into Marks and Sparks. And liking it.

Nope, I haven’t won the lottery, I just took a sharp left before I even got to Tesco.

My stitches come out on Monday and I see Doc Holiday on Thursday. I cancelled my appointment at the Maxillo-Facial clinic but now my super-observant objective self-awareness thingy tells me that something has really changed. Me? Marks and Sparks?

Something has happened and something has changed.

Lawks knows what has happened but something has. If anything, I’m even nicer than I was before.

I’ve stopped listening to the radio because I couldn’t give a Bubbles about the demise of Michael Jackson and I just read my book and think about things in a wholly new way.

How weird is that?

Regular readers, and quite rightly so, may have wondered how the kitchen/bathroom/bed bloodbath may have occurred.

Unlikely that I would have kicked my own face in. Unlikely that I would have ripped a 15 stitcher in my own face. Unlikely that I would have broken bones in my own fizzog.

Now I’m not suggesting that I should be called, ‘Henry of the Yard’ but it did strike me as odd. There was the case of the ‘not missing anything except blood’ to contend with.

But have a look at this…

My dear friend, Mani, offerred to clean up the blood and some of the detritus of my life and he found the cracked pool of gore. I had gone down and taken the brunt with my cheekbone on the radiator as I passed by. The sock-hanger had taken out the left-side of my face and I had fallen. My face was broken on the plumbing and the blood had flowed. Not knowing what to do I had retreated and the claret had been spread about the kitchen.

With the evidence, all becomes clear. The slice taken out of me; so clear like the opening of the curtains under the proscinium arch of the eye, is visible. When I pulled open the wound and saw, much later, the meat that lay beneath and saw the spattering of blood from the gaping horror of the cutting. The broken bones. The slice. The unconscious eyes. The gore. The open flesh rubbed and twitched across the bare linoleum.

The blackened blood that settles and gives reason to nothing.

Fifteen stitches that may as well be medals to nothing.

Broken bones.

When we say ‘chronic’ it doesn’t mean really horrible. It comes from chronos, the time, and means that we have had pneumonia or alcoholism or whatever for a long time. It might be bad too but it refers to time. When we say ‘forensic’ it doesn’t mean beardies in paper suits with microscopes but rather the application to legal argument.

When your bed looks like this it doesn’t necessarily mean that Emin has come to stay but it does make you scratch your head…

A quick check of the blood/glucose level means that some fault-finding is called for.
Oh dear. Here is the kitchen. Perhaps a pig has been slaughtered…

Not-particularly-forensic analysis leads one to the mirror.

Nose - broken at the bridge.
Cheekbone - broken.
Facial nerves - broken and dead below the left orbit.
Left cheek - cut deeply and at well over an inch. Subcutaneous and superficial stitching required.

On my way to the fridge to get some more Lucozade (blood/glucose level 1.6 and falling) I must have gone over like a telegraph pole and broken the fall using my face.

The photo isn’t all that but I had to take it myself and I’ve been in the madhouse for five days.

The thing that really cheesed me is that the staff, for some reason known only to themselves, failed to realise that I am a ’should-be-qualled’ doctor even though I read all the relevant pages in Womanly mags and have commonsense and straw-coloured fluid coming out of my ears.

Life is such an adventure.

Sorry to bore you with all this.

If you play a guitar string and it goes ‘plung’ then to get some harmonics out of it you have to pinch the string when you hit it. You musn’t stop the string. If you pinch it halfway then what you are doing is setting up a sine wave that, effectively, shortens the string so that you can get ‘pling’ and ‘ding’ out of it instead of ‘plung’.

Like I know.

Anyway, St John of Martyn is here, with his leg off, in a wheelchair and showing you all about how to do things that I will never understand.

In the next episode I will tell you all about when Vodka Mick came round and I bored him silly with my ideas about how art and humour are both the same abstract and useless constructs and they were pointless and had no value except in bonkers human terms.

You tell me the difference between a joke and a Rembrandt. Now tell me the difference between a joke and a Magritte.

Or a Hirst or one of mine or a stand-up comedian.

You can’t do it, can you?

S’later!

Anyone with common sense will have read, and watched, my previous posting about the blessed John Martyn.

John Martyn wrote ‘Solid Air’ about Nick Drake. He wouldn’t speak about Nick for years. That’s what I hear, anyway. John has, sadly, passed away but here he is doing the same song at what is, obviously, Cropredy.

Poor John. He had his leg chopped off and then he died of pneumonia I think. But look at the videos of him and you can see the absolute beauty that he had.

Love you John - I’ll see you soon, eh?

Have a look at this.

Bob once told me (Hello, Bob!) that this was his favourite song.
Listen to the constant of the bass notes that John Martyn bashed out of the guitar and the beautiful descent of the ‘love is a lesson to learn in our time’. Listen to the way he uses his voice as a musical instrument.

May you never lose your woman overnight.

Laydees and gennlemen, please give it up and a big, warm, out of my head welcome to the one, the only, Mr John Martyn…

If you didn’t already see this
then you should.

I have been a follower of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for nearly all my life and this programme made me gasp and fizz all over.

The PRB were revolutionary and, as you will see when you watch this, they changed the world of art forever. I had to lie on the floor to watch it in case I fell over.

As you know, I am very interested in art and I am very interested in going on about it as well, but this blew my socks off.

Considering that they staggered about in the 19th C. and that they are STILL kicking the art world into touch all these years later is quite remarkable. The exquisite beauty of the works that they produced hollers down through the years.

God rest you, the PRB, and I’ll never let the sun go down on any of your paintings. My trilby will always be permadoffed in your direction and I wish to say…

Thank you.

Hey ho.
What’s that you say?
Take some drugs and then I’ll be in a band for life?
Brilliant.
I’ll be in Led Zep if you don’t mind.

Ahh, bless. Look at them likkle cygnets…

I am such a marvelous photographer. I knock about with so many weird people. This is a friend of mine and I think that these are a few of the best pictures that I have ever taken. Faces have such beauty. It’s life in a bucket.

When I was in Location X that I cannot and will never reveal I took a picture of this likkle wizard.

I think it’s a common or sand lizard. I tried to give them some apple but they probably just eat maggots or something.

And to finish, a picture of a cat.

I have a very interesting life. Walk a mile in my shoes and you will be a lot better off then you were before.

I hope that you enjoyed my snaps.

Be good and be careful.

Love,
H.