In between Christmas and New Year sofaman and I drifted off to North Norfolk and stayed at the very lovely Neptune Restaurant in Old Hunstanton. It is about an hours drive to the coast from home and Old H. sits at the point where the land turns right and the road maps the tidal inlets and marshes that define this beautiful, flat, timeless end of land. Artists have painted it, sculptors built it from driftwood, photographers have battled the elements and tried to capture its heart and writers scribbled furiously to pen its haunting beauty but nothing reaches you deeper and more profoundly than to stand barefooted on a December day on the wet sand watching the red sun die into the shallows of the sea.   

Its that time of year again, when the Fen wakes misty in the morning, pale, golden, warm or cold it is never the same. The subtle shades of wetland mist are far more complex than those of the dry, rolling counties. In these mists lurk tales of malaria, miasmas and murder. The ditches are as full of mystery as they are water, in the dead of Winter, shrouded in heavy fog many a man has lost his way and slipped silently into the blackness. Do not stray from the pathways in the dark, tread confidently on the high ground and hurry home to the warm fire and the light.

Visiting the UKs premiere literary festival in Hay-on-Wye is one of the highlights of the year for me, walking the winding streets of the town and searching the countless bookshops, beer drinking, eating, chatting, drawing, camping, and celebrity spotting [Dom Joly, Marcus Brigstock, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Jimmy Carr [he almost trod on me], Dan Cruikshank [he said hello, I think he recognised me] and that actress who used to be the Pathologist on Waking the Dead]. Ideally, I suppose, the ‘events’ should be the exciting junctions in the route through the whole proceedings, and it was thrilling coming face-to-face with Marc Almond whilst dancing to him singing Tainted Love. I felt the untainted affection flow between us, I wanted him to feel loved and he wanted to be loved, a thoroughly mutually platonic abundance of affection, though my individual feelings were somewhat swamped by the outpourings from the other 60 or so fourty-somethings dancing with just, if not more enthusiasm. It was a rare chance as the audience was quite small and the venue a tent in a muddy field. We also saw Kathleen Turner, who was as formidable as I expected but so not Hollywood and all the better for it. Of all the cultural wealth available in such a public arena I found a private event that for me was more special than any memories of times past or witty banter about Shakespeare’s colloquelisms. In the woods next to our camping field, in the shade of the tall canopy of trees and sometime in the early hours of Friday morning a litter of 7 piglets was born, I chanced to walk by their pen at about 6am and peeped in to see how the heavily expectant pig was doing. She had been trailing her belly through the muddy tracks the previous day having broken out of the pen and come visiting the campsite toilets as pigs like to do. As I leaned over there she lay grunting in pleasure and breathing deeply, her belly swamped in shiny clean piglets, suckling rapidly, and there the afterbirth warm and steaming in the early morning air. This was just lovely and eclipsed the festival of words and music for who needs noise more beautiful than the grunt of a happy pig.

For those who crave the creative life West Dean is a unique community, a creative and rich mixture of artists and craftspeople, conservators and restorers, working alongside gardeners, farmers, foresters and builders. Take a look at their website.

Making the move from figurative to abstract is potentially a painful road, a roller coaster of doubt and uncertainty, guilt and excitement, I have personally tried to be consistent in style but have found that what is more important is resolving the process and responding correctly to oneself. Sarah Ball has developed from illustrative figures into pure abstraction over a period of about 20 years, her work has strong visual links to the early 20th century school of the St Ives artists [see Ben Nicholson to the left], she pays tribute to their process in her work but where is her personal response to the environment?, when is a work of art personal and when is it a tribute? can it really be both? I have painfully trawled through the desire to be as good as those that I admire and to struggle with being honest to myself, finding a means of expression that does not relay on integrating into a school of thought is by far the most challenging experience for any artist. Where Ball is driven to paint and exhibit I choose to think about process and experience little of the applied activity, am I not an artist by comparison if the output and drive to exhibit is lacking?
Sarah is currently exhibiting at St Judes Gallery in Norfolk.

Last night I stood on the stage at The Globe Theatre, a slight breeze blowing down out of the night sky I saw the faces of the audience in my mind, roudy, laughing, cheering and leaning over the balconies, bright and alive from a time that was so real in this place that I could really feel their presence. I was extremely lucky to have this opportunity, to walk the boards, to feel my racing heart and my deluded desire to bellow Shakespearian monologues was bearly controllable, infact some 15 hours later still rising and falling inside me wishing I was there again and this time all hell would be loose about me. Yeh right!

Travelling north of Cambridgeshire into Norfolk at sunrise in heavy mist is an unearthly experience. I did this last week in search of a small garage into which my car had been booked to repair a suspension spring, yet more cash seeping out of the bank and into the mits of others. In this case I wasn’t too upset as the garage wasn’t brand lead, it was a proper old style ramshackled building with an inspection pit half filled with oil, a sort of engineers jacuzzi I guess. The journey to the garage was alongside the weaving river, fortunately the bank to the river sat higher than I did in the car and so my recurrent nightmare senario of plunging into the icey Winter waters was safely tucked away in my head. The landscape lay pale and bright, washed of almost all its colour and in soft focus like an aging Hollywood great, a sort of geographical Lana Turner. The village of Southery straddles the A10 just north of Brandon Creek, it is an eclectic mix of old and new but most definately bound into the face of the Fens. Some houses cling to the pancake flat surface with the same grim determination that a stranded climber might grip the vertical face of an extra slippery cliff, sinking like the Titanic deep into the black soil, cracking and twisting under the stain, they are beautiful and sad. Amoungst this slipping and sliding, resting peacefully and soundly, sit others proud and errect, unmoved in the rising and falling of the Fen, holding their breath and whispering there but for the grace of God. In this allegorical landscape there are truths to be found, we all, to some extend cling grimly to our own cliff face, breath held, eyes tightly shut hoping that we manage to hold on. I guess like the houses we have to ask why? What are we clinging to so tightly? and what, if we let go would happen?

Rutland is small but beautifully formed. Sitting to the left of the A1 northbound it is an undulating landscape peppered with lovely stone villages that have an excitingly generous amount of pubs, cafes and walks. Particularly pleasent in February when the sky is blue and the sun sufficiently warm that sitting outside is easy with a pint in your hand and in my case a sketchbook begging to be filled.

Shibboleth is a crack in the floor of the turbine hall at the Tate Modern. It runs the length of the great room, it splits off into hairline cracks as it passes through many of the finely polished concret slabs that make up the walking surface. I wondered what people might think of it, do most them think of it at all and if not what are they thinking about. In my case I thought briefly but rather shallowly, its a manmade crack, its a photo opportunity, am I bothered how they created it, and whats for lunch. We had walked from Covent Garden and my blood sugar levels were counting the cost. I love walking round London, it is a grand place to visit, every corner has a story embedded in our common history. The National Portrait Gallery called me, I love portraits, but it was crack we came to see, so we passed history by in the desire to see Doris Salacedo’s cultural canyon. With little regard to the instructions from the Tate I like almost everyone else couldn’t resist reaching into the crack, small children were slipping down into it, pushing feet and tiny hands into the dark crevices. I dangled the camera down to get a view that satisfed me. I remarked that I wanted to shout ‘Oh God! theres a rat down there’ to see how quickly the hall could empty but my internal Health and Safety officer took over and I had a vision of hoards of small children trampled by mad adults.

I think that when neatly wrapped up in a warm scalf and feet slipped into fleecy boots a mooch around a winter market on a fresh blue skied day is lovely, no plans to buy, just wander, look and chat. Unfortunately sharing this experience with ‘the man that lives on the sofa’ isn’t always an easy process, he can blur into a mass of boredom, who could blame him, following in the shadow of a seasoned wanderer must be frustrating. Therefore my personal suggestion is that if company is a must for you choose the appropriate companion for a shopping drift. I cannot claim to be a professional or serial shopper, infact on a scale of 1-10 I am, to put it seasonally, bearly out of the pear tree, with the occasional turtle dove moment. A few weeks ago I spent a whole day with a friend who is clearly a far more experienced and accomplished purchaser, I was impressed with her understanding of shopping protocol, the way she drifted with easy, rarely faltering, in awe I realised my natural position as the personal shopper. Could this be the perfect job for me?. I like to drift, I like to look, I like to spend but after that there is rarely any residual pleasure, the process of finding far outweights the ownership. So if the money I spent was someone elses and I got paid for doing it how perfect is that?.