Mock up for a zine - a sheet of A4 or A3 cuts and folds into an eight-page booklet. This is the outer face that creates the pages of the zine, and there is an inner face, a secret hidden place where you could leave a map or plans or an invitation to a gathering. Made in an hour or two with what I had with me.
Field Notes
This collection sits between On Loss, Grief and Origin Stories and On Tea at the Tate Modern — a loose sheaf of days in late October and early November 2025 in which I careened, faltered, lurched. They capture the uneasy moments of transition as it reaches and passes its nadir and the lowering between bursts of inspiration as I scrabbled for a foothold. They are fragments and false starts. Maybe seedlings of what will become.
Tuesday 28 October 2025
Sitting in a surprisingly chilly third floor restaurant in John Lewis after a busy morning in town. I may even have to put my jacket - an ancient Barbour bike jacket acquired for £30 through the Oxfam shop - on, some quilting insulating me from the cold.
This is my new Kaweco Perkeo fountain pen, jungle green, with palm green ink cartridges. Assembled in the Cafe - just £16 for the pen and £1.99 for 6 cartridges. It is very easy to write with. I am also thrilled with the Washi tape and semi-transparent sticky notes or post-its which I've bought for one of my projects, 'The Library'.
My artwork, creative practice, seems to have taken an interesting and unexpected turn from what I thought I would be doing - constructing artefacts from yarn (and maybe I still will) to exploring projects about contested space. The ideas for the blog names: 
Friday 31 October 2025
Today is my official retirement day from the main job I have been doing over the past eight years. I actually took a week's leave, but this is the first day I have had time to write.
The early part of the past eight days was taken up with travelling and visitors. I finally caught up for a face to face heart to heart with my daughter about the big changes she has made in her life this year. As always, brave and stoic!
Travelling has gone well, I am moving closer to the lifestyle I want: a set of everything in each place and then travelling between the two with only a backpack and whatever I am working on at the time.
But this week has been busy progressing my ideas for the three new blogs: 
We had lots to catch up with - changes ...
Page 2
... in my life, he has two young children now and is feeling the reality of that. We spent a lot of time talking about Hive, me trying to explain in a very disjointed, flibbertygibbet way, he looking in turn, incredulous, overwhelmed, bowled over.
But he picked up quickly what I was trying to do, we looked at some fonts, we both liked the pirate-y look of some of them, and he knew (this is why you work with a designer) that I wanted something textural, eroded, with worn smudge-y edges. We looked at some paper samples and reviewed some of the work we had done together in the past.
His company still handles the accounts for the artist materials companies like Winsor and Newton and Reeves, at least one of which had a big factory in Leicester, on an industrial estate along the Uppingham Road. The designers work in a long line, work stations down one wall, and the centre of the room is a mess of plan chests and artists' materials. There are great wall cupboards of samples and past work. We've agreed I can have a rummage next time I am there, ...
Page 3
... and I may even make a film for 3speak.
I came home buzzing with ideas and experimented with mocking up zines and working on design briefs for each of the blogs, in between investigating Baudelaire's essay, 'The Modern Painter'.
It's amazing (to me) how the portfolio for
I also visited my friends in the stationers to collect my cheap Kaweco fountain pen. Still with the stainless steel nib of more expensive versions, and the fabulous green ink.
Wednesday 5 November 2025
I only truly seem to come alive at the point of transition. As I pull together this and that to pack in my tiny suitcase, I remember, "Oh yes, this is who I am, this is what I was doing."
Who knows what happens in the in between bits when I seem bogged down, trapped by the weight of wherever I am. I can remember that afternoon reading Baudelaire, becoming entranced by the ideas, the art itself and how I could sustain it, over hours.
What happened in the intervening days that crushed that light and weighed it down with responsibility, belongings, the inertia of many shelves, many cupboards, many floors requiring attention. The light went first in the garage, inconvenient but you could scramble around with the torch of the phone.
And then the landing light, one of the original eco lights, ugly and taking ages to warm to the dim light it was able to transmit. I pondered how long it had been there. Possibly since 2006? It was possible, and I had had my ...
Page 2
... money's worth.
Meanwhile, while I was gathering the wherewithal to make it to the back of the garage and investigate my stock of spare lamps, I engaged in an intricate dance of switching on supporting lights in the bedroom and the bathroom so I could see my way down the treacherous stairs, the bottom steps especially dangerous, the rocks under the water, so unsure of your footing - was it the last step or the firm foundation of the hall floor - you might fall and break an ankle or a hip or your glasses.
Saturday 8 November 2025
Pinioned like Gulliver in Lilliput, arms and legs and hair tethered, even your eyelashes held down, inertia rules until that moment of release: we're moving on, going away. The sheer delight of relinquishing responsibility. Of course, I had cleared the gutter, deposited scraps in the compost, all the sensible things, so you don't come back to floods and rats.
I love the liminal life of travelling by bus or train, slightly marred by whether they will run on time, or at all, and will you get a seat, and whether there will be refreshments ...
Page 3
... and toilets fit to use. Aside from all those minor considerations which you don't think about for long, it's a delightful way to be.
Two trains involved in each journey, one a simple interchange in the same station, the second a short distance, either underground or along the road. But, in any event, all part of the journey, from the minute you close and lock the door, and like a child happy at school, no backward glance as you set off on your way to the final touch down, three or more hours later, kicking off your shoes and collapsing on the couch with a beer. For that time you've been unavailable, out of contact, mostly because you couldn't do anything if you were in touch.
There's a birthday party going on where I ...
Monday 10 November 2025
Reading the Prologue of Will Self's Psychogeography, I'm enthralled by his dense vocabulary, earthy, claggy, sticking to your boots, chthonic itself, an early word I picked from him.
The story of the lift to the Wirral Line.
proleptically
Michael Caine
J G Ballard - Millenium People
littoral
graticule
moraine
Soon, I'll be Ballardian myself - my name a prosaic Anglo-Saxon puzzle - Vaughan, Ventriis, Laing - which even when solved, will only tell you my profession and my class.
barges of urban shedonists.
230 years ago:
St Mary's, Battersea, William Blake m. Catherine Boucher.
moist rage of paterfamilias manqué.
satnav, circumambulate.
bowdlerise, gnomon.
Field Notes
I was travelling continuously during this time - Leicester, Ramsgate, Liverpool, Ramsgate - and more journeys either side, with clocks changing at the beginning of the period, all adding to my sense of chaos and deracination. But even so, there were bursts of creativity, the zine, a lineage map of flânerie, psychogeography and transliteracy, becoming immersed in Baudelaire and Will Self. Thankfully, I am on the other side now as we head for the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.
References
Psychogeography (2007) - Will Self
The Painter of Modern Life (1863) - Charles Baudelaire
How to Make a Zine (2025) - Curtis Ashby
12-page Zine (2021) - Austen Kleon
Previous Posts in This Series
On Tea at the Tate Modern - Monday 17 November 2025
On Loss, Grief and Origin Stories - Monday 20 October 2025
On Pens, Diaries, Mrs Dalloway and Oliver Cromwell - Friday 10 October 2025
On Rain before the Code - Friday 3 October 2025
On Transitions - Friday 26 September 2025
On Bringing New Audiences - Saturday 20 September 2025
On Liminal Spaces - Saturday 13 September 2025