Pirkko Saisio’s Helsinki Trilogy has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it should have, but her writing melts time anyway. The layers she finds, the dreams she collects:

what a diptych

And here is a still image, if that’s easier:

Bluesky hive mind, I need your help! I am revising my book edits, this week is my opening Derek Jarman chapter, & I would love to confirm that these shivering flowers in a wintry Dungeness are…viper’s bugloss? Unlike Derek, I am no expert – keen to get this detail right!

really chuffed that my book edits have come back during this cool spell when concentration & energy levels are at their peak

I bought this 1976 zine on Wim Wenders for its Q&A with Jan Dawson, so imagine my delight when I flicked to the back & discovered an early review he wrote on the early albums of Van Morrison – “not just moments, but extended & long periods of experience which convey the feel of what films could be.”

This print is now in my kitchen but for a long time it hung above my bed. When Pat died, I would lie on my back, put my feet on the cool wall below it, & imagine myself walking through colour again, following his path to some place new. That’s what great art can do. That’s what Hockney did for me.

Tell me where in ANY of this editors are seeing “anti-immigration protesting”, are you kidding me? This is how you legitimise fascism

She had such a powerful voice. Words for now – the full interview is here: www.salon.com/2005/04/24/s...

This is the one, for me:

It’s always a delight when Nicholas & Alexandra is re-shown on the BBC. I remember hiding behind the sofa as a young child when my mum got lined up by the firing squad – MORE FOR MY THERAPIST. Here she is with Lynne Frederick, Candace Glendenning & Fiona Fullerton. On BBC Two today – at 14:00!

Last days in Warsaw & I think I found my new fave street food? Zapiekanki! This Polish "pizza" popped up in the 1970s when a loosening of Communist restrictions allowed for it: a hefty slab of baguette topped with whatever you like (in my case: wiejska sausage, tomato, gherkin & mustard) – so tasty!

I was also blown away by their Maria Jarema 'Cracked Modernism' exhibition, suffice to say that her fractured, bodily monotypes REALLY got me going:

What a treat to visit Warsaw's Museum of Modern Art, it opened only a few years ago in 2024, such an expansive & light-filled space:

And this line, too: “body parts crying out to be completed by the gaze of another person.” He writes with such grace:

Thrilled that my favourite film OF ALL TIME is returning to the BFI in June. I have this Eve Arnold shot framed at home & it encapsulates everything I love about The Misfits: the stifling heat, the haunting desert & the gothic loneliness – with as much drama off screen as on it. It's a masterpiece.

5 years later, she’s still out in the world, and in excellent company on the @hatchards.bsky.social shelf – always puts a smile on my face

And as you can see it gets them all flocking to my lectures:

It’s my final day teaching my intensive five-day personal narrative module at City & can I just confess to you all how much I still relish a whiteboard and marker pen.

Case in point, that Lispector passage, what a beautiful and devastating quote to illustrate your point, bravo:

I urge you all to go & see this small but mighty RA exhibition. Michaelina Wautier was painting extraordinarily humanistic portraits, mythologies & histories in the 1600s & I hope that the recent ascension of Artemisia Gentileschi leads to more awakenings like this; it is a triumph of scholarship

My mum bought me a super-sized ex-display Parker Quink bottle for my birthday and can I just say that it is now the joy of my writing desk:

I mean, all of the paragraphs but also this paragraph:

I genuinely can’t remember the last time I felt such a sense of loss coming to the end of a book. 800 pages and I could read 800 more. The late great Rachel Cooke was right – these diaries are the richest since Virginia Woolf’s.

My mum attended a signing at the London Film Fair a few months ago, signing pictures from her Blake’s 7 appearance as Geela in 1978’s The Web. Obviously I stamped my foot & demanded my own autograph like the tyrannical daughter that I am –delighted to say that she came up with the goods:

A Tracey Emin quote in the Tate’s exhibition book reminding me of why I hate that term “confessional” as much as I do: nearly always lobbed at women to imply guilt where there should be none:

This is also incredibly smart, I hadn’t thought of a possible expressionist inversion with Schiele’s art – this idea of surfaces and what they made possible for him:

Over at mum’s, delving into her archive – my favourite past time. Here she is with Liv Ullmann on the set of The Abdication, 1974. There is something so delicate about this photograph, I have always treasured it

and again, and again – these diaries are extraordinary: