Barry Miles's Blog

On February 17 we flew down to Luxor, the ancient Thebes. It’s a short flight, just under an hour. We couldn’t get into the Nefertiti but booked the hotel next door. This used to be the Suzanne, but now has the slightly unfortunate name of the S. S. Luxor. Just like the Carlton in Cairo, the only coffee provided at breakfast is Nescafe. For real coffee you have to pay extra and even then there’s not much coffee in it. The lift is more modern than the Carlton in that it has a door, and you can buy a beer in the lobby. (Warning: Sakara King Beer is 10%, more than twice as strong as in Britain, but they also do Stella at 4.5% a bit stronger than the UK.) 

The S. S. Luxor has the same wonderful view of Luxor Temple and the avenue of the Sphinxes which goes all the way to the Karnak complex, 2.7 k away. The temple is remarkably well preserved, with most of the first pylon intact (the wall-like structure with a ‘v’ shape in the middle referencing the slot cut in a cliff by a waterfall. Only one obelisk remains to guard it – the missing right-hand one is now at the place de la Concorde in Paris. Some large statues have been moved there to replace the missing ones.  It would be nice if they replaced the brightly coloured banners that once flew from the niches.

As the S. S. Luxor does not do food other than breakfast our first move was to go to the Winter Palace, the luxury hotel facing the Nile where Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon and other archaeologists and aristos stayed in the twenties and where the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 was first announced to the world’s press. We ate in the garden. Such luxury.

Next day we started our explorations gently by visiting the Luxor temple, just across the street. After passing through the first pylon, you enter the Great Court of Rameses II where the 74 columns still show their origins as bundled papyrus with bud capitals and there are a couple of huge statues of him. Then come pairs of open-flower papyrus columns which still have their architrave blocks followed by another court of papyrus columns. The huge size and scale of it all is overwhelming, partly because of its great age. It was built by Amenhotep III (1390-52 BC, finished by Tutankhamun (1336-27 BC then added to by Rameses II (1279-1213 BC, died at the age of 90 or 91). Much of the colour is still there, also, preserved in the dry desert climate. 

One key thing for British travellers is, of course, the provision of alcohol. International hotels are fine but not surprisingly most restaurants serving Egyptian food do not sell wine or beer. It is not difficult to get a drink in Cairo but in a small town like Luxor it becomes more problematic. The Lantern is one of the highly recommended restaurants in this respect as it’s English run. It’s never going to get a Michelin star but the food is okay. The washing dripped on me as we walked in.

Karnak is one of the wonders of the world. You could spend a month there and still not see all the carvings and colours. You enter in it down an avenue of sphinxes with ram’s heads. As I described it in great detail in this blog just a year ago I won’t repeat myself except to ID the pictures. 

It seemed as if this visit there were far more fashion shoots than before and young Oriental women in particular had dressed the part as spirits of the Nile or some idealised goddesses, sometimes great groups of them. We returned twice to the pleasant café out by the side of the sacred lake which tourists didn’t seem to find. We saw the giant scarab and the wall of Egyptian bureaucracy; the accounting of offerings literally carved in stone.

When Theo and I were there we did not have time to find the precinct of Mut which is situated some distance from the main temple complex in the direction of the avenue of the sphinxes. You pass where they terminate, in a wasteland of barely uncovered ruins, and finally reach a large wooden gate. Here an old retainer spent a great deal of time examining our tickets before unlocking it and letting us in. We were the only visitors. All four sides of a courtyard once held row of statues of the goddess Sekhmet, who I must have mentioned before as she’s my favourite goddess. And in the centre, jumbled lines of Sekhmet body parts, rows of feet, rows of heads, rows of torsos await future archaeologists’ attention. Presumably modern computer science would be able to scan them and fit them all back together. The British Museum has some superb examples of Sekhmet taken from this very place. It had not occurred to me that they were probably broken when they acquired them as they look in beautiful condition now. There is one large Sekhmet in the precinct, intact except for her sun-disk and she allowed me to hold her ankh while Suzy took a picture. 

I awoke with the call to prayer the next morning and saw the hot air balloons ascending over the Nile. This is one of the local attractions and does look spectacular. Trouble is, they lift off at 6am.

The 20th was Valley of the Kings day and we first went to Seti I’s tomb, (KV17) my favourite, which has the unfinished preparatory drawings on some of the columns as there was not enough time to complete the tomb when Seti died in 1279 BC. There is a looseness and openness about them that you don’t get in the beautifully finished works. You can relate more fully to the original artist, standing where you are, drawing on the white plaster almost three and half thousand years before. I particularly like the last picture, of Seti (on the left) with the god Atum.

We made a quick stop at the Colossi of Memnon (1350 BC), two giant statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III which once guarded the entrance to his mortuary temple, now gone. We continued to the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. My friend Egyptologist Tom Hardwich is appalled by the restauration of this temple by a Polish team which has virtually recreated the building but to the layman it now provides an almost magical experience. When I returned to London, I dug out my father’s photo album which I hadn’t looked at in decades, but which contains family snaps and pictures taken by him. He was based in Cairo during the war and took part in the Battle of Al Alamain in 1942 in the desert close to Cairo. As well as pictures of tanks roaring across the desert, taken with a Brownie box camera, I was astonished to find a photograph of Hatshepsut’s temple, taken by him. He never spoke about his wartime experience, and I had no idea that he was ever in Luxor as the British forces were concentrated mostly in Cairo and Port Said. 

Next day, the 21st, we visited the Habu temple. It is decorated largely with celebrations of military triumph: massive wall carvings showing soldiers piling up hands, severed from their enemies. It’s all rather gruesome, but the low reliefs show a degree of animation unusual in Egyptian art. The Habu temple has a pleasant outdoor café located behind the first pylon which I recommend to visitors.

My friend the writer Maria Golia invited us to lunch. She lives in a house that she built herself next to the south wall of the Habu temple so it was just around the corner. She has no address, as such, so there was a bit of a problem finding her as I couldn’t quite remember how to find her house even though there are only about a dozen houses in the settlement. She welcomed us and showed us around – her rooftop view is astounding. It was my birthday, so she produced a candle and turned an apple crumble into a birthday cake! It was very kind of her and a delightful meal. I didn’t want to leave. Next day we flew back to Cairo for our final excursion, this time to Saqqara.

Back at the Carlton, in a better room this time with a proper shower, it felt like coming home. Ramadan posed less of a problem in the big city: during Ramadan no restaurant is allowed to serve alcohol, and no Egyptians are permitted to drink alcohol in public, even in a hotel. We had Egyptian guests over for a drink, only to find they had to drink lemonade or peppermint tea when they would normally have enjoyed a glass of Omar Khayyam. The regime micro-controls its citizens. Naturally the Carlton ran out of wine on our last evening; we should have bought supplies and kept emergency rations in our rooms. 

We saw Mira Shihadeh when we were first in Cairo and had drinks at the Café Riche. This time we went to her house in Maadi. Maadi is a leafy suburb, about 12 kilometres upriver from the Downtown area, a drive that is best avoided in rush hour. It is a low-rise area filled with trees and gardens, and, like the equally upmarket Zamalek area, it is home to several dozen embassies as well as up-market restaurants and shops. As usual, we couldn’t find her house. In fact the Uber driver had dropped us very close, but she was a little further up the street, so we wandered around for a half hour before managing to contact her on the phone. It should have been easy because her Palestinian flag was easily visible from the street, and she was responsible for the Palestinian graffiti at the end of the block. The watermelon is used as a symbol because the Israelis prohibited the use of the Palestinian flag within the Zionist colony and a watermelon has the same colours. 

Mira showed us around the house. We looked at her paintings which are inspired by yoga and ballet poses – she taught yoga for 20 years – and by the protesters during the 2011 Revolution. We sat for a while on her terrace, then went to visit the local Diwan bookshop. Both Suzy and I had read Nadia Wassef’s autobiography Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, so it was great to find that Mira actually knew her. Diwan sells English language and Arab books. The shop could not have been in greater contrast to most of Cairo. A clean sunny area out front where people sat drinking coffee or snacks from the shop café with no beggars and very little passing traffic. It houses a selection of books, mostly in English, concentrating on the arts and self-help. The contrast between the stock and staff in places like this is hard to ignore. Statutory minimum wage for this type of work is EGP 7,000 a month (£103.92) and the average monthly salary in Cairo is EGP 9,780 (£145.19), so it’s unlikely that Diwan pays much more than that, whereas an art book can easily cost EGP 1,000 (£14.85) or more.  No wonder Wassef complains of constant theft in her book. There is no solution to this, short of making the shops into collectives and somehow paying back the capital but then why not start their own? It’s unlikely that there are government loans or incentives for this kind of trade. Mira sent a picture of us all waving to Nadia Wassef. Then to the Villa Belle Epoque for a meal in the garden. But for the fact that they don’t serve alcohol, we could have been in Provence.

We hired a car for the day and set off to Saqqara. This is a huge site, and new discoveries seem to be made every few months. However, we concentrated on the highlights, of which the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser is the star. It is the first ever pyramid and was built between 2670 and 2650 BC, in the Third Dynasty for the Pharaoh Djoser. (Oddly enough, it is almost exactly contemporary with the pyramids at Caral-Supe in Peru which date to 2627 BC). It’s big, it was originally 62.5 meters tall (205 feet) and covered in polished white limestone. Sixteen other kings built their pyramids at Saqqara, which are in various states of preservation and are mostly closed and some of which are dangerous to explore. They dot the horizon. When Rosemary and I first visited Saqqara ten years ago with Tom Hardwick, the Stepped Pyramid was still undergoing its 14-year restoration, and one side was covered with scaffolding. But now the work is complete and the site looks wonderful. The restoration is sensitive and the surrounding archaeological site clean and well laid out. The site includes a temple structure with the usual row of columns and a wall.  There’s a good Wikipedia article about it.

One of the most extraordinary sites at Saqqara is the Serapeum where they buried the sacred bulls of the Apis Cult. The Apis bulls were thought to be the incarnations of the God Ptah who, when they died became immortal as Osiris-Apis. The cult was in existence for about 1400 years but the ones in the Serapeum are from the late period, ending around 30 BC. The bulls are buried in tombs lining long underground galleries. Each Apis sarcophagi weighs about 40 tons and they have lids weighing in at about 25 tons. The oldest sarcophagi here is from 550 BC. The labour involved in excavating these catacombs is mind-boggling. There are two dozen sarcophagi in the Serapeum, all but two of which were robbed in antiquity and all the grave goods stolen. Older burials have isolated tombs dotted around the area. The Serapeum was once approached by an avenue of 370 to 380 sphinxes, but they have all been removed with some in the Louvre and most of them in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Looking across what is now a flat piece of desert you would never know a funerary complex once stood there or that these amazing tombs lie beneath the sand.

Off we go on a new trip and the sign on the seat back of the British Airways flight to Cairo suggested a very intellectual clientele indeed. I tucked my copy of Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club in the pocket and looked around to see if the flight consisted entirely of Egyptologists. 

When I returned from Egypt with my son Theo a year ago, I enthused so much about the trip to my friends Richard Grayson and Suzy Treister that, after an evening of fine food and wine, we had agreed that we should all go there together. It took a while before plans were firmed up but on February 10th, we went through the first of many security checks at LHR.  We stayed at the Carlton which is a fine old thirties building that has seen better days – particularly the bathroom fittings – but has a great roof garden which becomes a pleasant club in the evening , with a snooker table, candles on tables, and a view of rooftop Cairo, serving wine, beer and reasonable food at about half London prices.

The usual problems of tourism are clear cut in Cairo. Tourists come to see the remains of an ancient civilisation that lasted 3,000 years and have little, or no interest, in the subsequent 2,000 years or in present day Cairo. It therefore comes as quite a shock to find themselves in a Third World country. The Greater Cairo Metropolitan area has between 22 and 23 million people, and they are very poor, and they want your money. The city is on its last legs: it seems as if anything that can be smashed, has been smashed and the debris left where it landed. The pavements are impossible to walk along because jagged bits of iron stick up, manhole covers are missing, every time a cable or a pipe is laid the trench is only loosely infilled with sand and a few rocks, and the pavement tiles themselves are often loose and frequently missing. Consequently people mostly walk on in the road, where the traffic is thick, the level of pollution almost makes you retch, and crossing the road requires a strong belief that they will indeed stop when you walk out into the traffic – all the time avoiding the potholes, some big enough to bury a dead dog. Suzy, Richard and I quickly became adept at the road crossing skill but never managed the insouciance of my friend Mira who appeared to not bother to look at the traffic at all, just stepped straight out in front of oncoming cars.

Piles of trash and rubbish are not confined to the street, however. After the failed 2011 Revolution there was a period of free-for-all when a shantytown of shacks was built on the rooftops. Most of these have now been pulled down, but no-one has bothered to remove the piles of broken concrete and mud-bricks which now litter the rooftops. Here’s the view from my room at the Carlton:

Rather than confront the conmen and hustlers at the Pyramids on our first day, we paid a sedate visit to the old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, still open although many of its treasures have been transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum out by the Pyramids. The galleries which once contained the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb are now empty, and there are great gaps in other places, but many wonderful things remain such as the Narmer Palette, made c3000-3,000 BC which shows the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by King Narmer. It is the earliest record of a king wearing both crowns. Phonetically his name means King Catfish and there is a beautiful carving of such a fish at the top of the panel. When our Egyptologist friend Tom Hardwick explained the meaning of the palette to Rosemary and I, on a visit ten years ago, a crowd gathered around, thinking he was a guide. He could have been, of course, as he certainly knows far more than most of the people showing tourists round. The palette has been referred to as ‘the oldest Egyptian historical record.’  It is about the same age as the original earthwork enclosure of Stonehenge or 500 years older than the first stone circle and shows how much more advanced the Egyptians were than anything happening in northern Europe at the time. 

The other great things, for me, in the museum are the statues of Akhenaten (who reigned 1353-1336 BC.) He began life as Amenhotep IV but in the fifth year of his reign became Akhenaten when he introduced monotheism in the worship of the Aten, or life force as represented by the sun. Among his wives was Nefertiti, mother of his son Tutankhamun. He also introduced an extraordinary new fashion, depicting himself, his wives and children, with elongated heads and large bulbous stomachs and thighs. Heree I am with him to give him scale.

You needed food in the afterlife and there are rows of mummified ducks and, one of my favourites, a mummified leg of lamb, shown here.

The Museum looked like this when Theo and I saw it a year ago: vitrines standing at angles, some of their contents tipped over; labels missing; piles of objects near a service elevator already dusty, awaiting transport, and many objects with their original faded nineteen-thirties English language (or French) type-written labels, often surprisingly candid ‘these work is not very good’ or ‘of little interest’. Everywhere there are exquisite details like the man taking his dog for a walk. We took two days to see it and only scratched the surface as they say. It is a space in stasis, frozen in time, while someone, somewhere, decides what to do with it. It is marvellous, filled with character, a complex toybox of discovery unlike the ghastly bling of the Grand Egyptian Museum that we went to see the next day. Some cases are empty, other have one remaining object, but you can be sure it would look nice on display in your home. There are rooms of ostraca, the flakes of stone or broken pottery used for preliminary drawings or as notepads, where almost every object deserves study.

Egyptians get up early. The call to prayer is amplified at high volume just before 5:00am throughout the city, making it virtually impossible to ignore. In fact, it is not long since the whole society lived by the ancient rhythm of rising with the sun and sleeping shortly after dark. The construction of the Aswan Dam finally brought a widespread electricity supply, and with it the ability for students to study after dark, for families to eat later, and more recently air conditioning. However, a dawn start with an early breakfast with the main meal late in the afternoon is still very common. To delicate Europeans like Suzy, Richard and me, the Muezzin’s sing-song wake-up call was less than welcome, but it’s their country. I wonder what the 15% Coptic Christians think about it. It meant I never had a decent night’s sleep the whole time I was there. Too much of a night-person.

Of course the greatest treasure in Egypt is the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb, still housed in the old Tahrir Square Museum when Theo and I were in Cairo a year ago, now occupying a whole gallery at the GEM, the Grand Egyptian Museum on the edge of the desert out by the Pyramids. The less said about the building the better, but it most reminds me of Cairo International Airport. Soulless. I understand that Irish architects Heneghan Peng at one point tried to take their name off of it because of so much interference from know-nothing politicians, but it still features heavily on their website. 

The galleries are all on a high level, reached by a grand staircase, littered with wonderful examples of Egyptian statuary. Not everyone wants to climb a long series of steps to reach the main displays but there are no lifts, only one narrow, London underground-sized, escalator, with three stops, to take tens of thousands of people to the top. It is already jam-packed and, as this is Egypt, the likelihood of at least one stage failing is great. The busier London tube stations usually have two each way for far less people. 

The first day we concentrated on Tutankhamun: the four great shrines that fit into each other like Russian dolls and which, in turn, contained sarcophagi fitted into each other. Again, each of these deserves hours of study but most people gaze open-mouthed at so much gold, take a picture and move on. Tut’s gold funerary mask now appears suspended above the crowds in its bullet-proof vitrine while worshipful crowds take thousands of selfies. In a way, the purpose of mummification and preservation seems to have worked for him for although Howard Carter was nothing more than a modern-day tomb robber, Tut is still being worshiped whereas when he was sealed in his tomb, he was just a footnote in history as a minor pharaoh in a list of hundreds. 

There are over 1000 objects from his tomb on display, some of them truly extraordinary such as his throne. There are chariots, slippers, toys, all manner of jars and vessels. It takes a day just to see this section of the museum. It had been misty all morning, but when we left the museum, a full-scale sandstorm had evolved and you couldn’t even see the pyramids, which are only 2 k away and are normally easily visible from Cairo 18 k away. In fact, it was already becoming hard to see clearly across the giant central atrium, which is open to the elements in the museum (another future conservation problem?). We left in a hurry, and I had a bad cough for days.

It was still a bit misty the next day, Valentine’s Day, so we explored Cairo instead of continuing our visit to the Giza plateau. I have never been a fan of the Copts, or of any of the Judaeo-Christian religions for that matter, but I dutifully walked through the Coptic Museum which only confirmed to me how much art and culture declined after Christianity destroyed the old Classical culture. The museum has a collection of rather nice Ottoman windows. 

Back in Cairo we met my friend Mira for an early meal at Café Riche. The café is a great place or coffee, beer or wine but the food is pretty bad. In fact it is hard to get any at all. It turned out that they had run out of both the rabbit and the quail that we ordered, to the delight of the smirking young waiter. Mira is Palestinian, but from her looks they assumed she was a European. She grew up in Cairo and had a few words; they soon found some quail, which they proceeded to grill to a crisp. 

I still love Café Riche because it is in the tradition of the great Parisian cafes where writers and politicians gather. Gamel Abdel Nasser planned the overthrow of King Farouk here, Naguib Mahfouz mentions it in a number of his novels and it would close on Fridays for him to hold meetings with his fellow intellectuals. It served as a refuge for injured protesters from nearby Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution.  Here’s Mira showing some of her paintings to Richard and Suzy at the café. 

The next day the air was clear so off we went to see the rest of the Great Egyptian Museum and the Pyramids. It is quite a long drive, through some of the most horrific slums I have ever seen. The plan is to have a dedicated Metro stop at GEM, but I’ll never see that in my lifetime. It was rewarding to have a second look because even those objects you had looked at before seemed to have new qualities, inscriptions or traces of colour. Our driver, Muhammed, was waiting and when we were through we were soon at the Pyramids. There were none of the crowds that Theo and I had to fight through the year before and suddenly, there we were walking past the Sphinx on our way to the Great Pyramid.

It was already quite hot, and as I am now 83 I felt the need for a little sit down so I suggested Suzy and Richard explore on their own and I would rest and contemplate the Great Pyramid for a bit. There was no-one around this corner of the building so for about quarter of an hour I had Khufu’s tomb all to myself. The more you look at it, the more details emerge. There are different strata, corresponding to the layers of rock quarried to build it, each block dug out, shaped, shipped to the site and placed so that each layer of rock in the quarry is disenable in the final structure.

Then a young Egyptian family arrived, looking for shade. They each said ‘Hello’ politely as they passed, and in each case I replied. They settled in a little distance from me, then the man held up a plastic bag of food and pointed to his mouth. He was very kindly asking if I would like to join them. It is in their religion and culture to welcome and feed strangers, so I was honoured to be included, but none-the-less I declined, not having a word of Egyptian, and not wanting to spoil their picnic. They finished and left, each saying goodbye in turn – the two teenage daughters giggling a bit. Then they turned and came back. They took a photograph of each of them standing next to me, smiling, we each said goodbye again, and they were gone. It was a delightful experience. Then Suzy and Richard returned having walked right round the pyramid and experienced its massive bulk and after a rest we walked back to the gate.

Outside one of the shops at the entrance to the complex was a copy of my favourite goddess Sehkmet. She was just about my size. What a pussycat! There would be plenty more of her where we were going.

On the 16th we finished off the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, as we had only managed to see the ground floor, where all the larger objects are located, on our first visit. Now we poked around in the upper galleries which, in many ways, are more rewarding. How long the museum will stay in this intermediary state is hard to tell but it is magical.

Our last day in Cairo (we were to return in a week) was spent in the medieval section. Richard and Suzy explored the Mosque of Sultan al-Muayyad Shaykh, but I chose to stay outside the door and just people-watch. Not much had changed on the street for centuries and I loved it, just observing la vie quotidienne: the old lady dressed in black who arrived, set down her cushion, arranged her few vegetables, and sat, immobile as she must have done for years. The Ottoman windows overlooking the street and the mosque at the end; it was a timeless scene.

Though hardly a dry January, life was relatively quiet as we recovered from Victor’s visit and the Christmas festivities. Marsha returned to Norwich, I took down the Christmas decorations and Hannah and I continued work on the picture research for In the 80s, the follow up to my In the Sixties and In the Seventies memoirs. I like working with her because she is very decisive in her choices and there is no messing about. The pictures are either in or out. 

My wonderful neighbour Valerie had me over for dinner and we also had an evening at the Colony Room Green followed by Zeidel – here she is tackling a tough lettuce – which rather wiped me out for a day or two. 

And all this time Theo and Mina were in Japan. I followed their progress via a stream of photographs and also, in a parallel Japanese experience, reading Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, accurately described on the cover blurb as ‘a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.’ It’s a book filled with tempting descriptions of food, recipes and a terrific storyline. I haven’t read such an interesting fictional work (though it’s based on a true story) in several years. Highly recommended.

Jesse Goodman and I met up with Luke Ingram from the Wylie Agency to discuss plans for the 100th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth which will be celebrated on July 11th at Queen Elizabeth Hall. There will probably also be panel discussions, film screenings and the like at the October Gallery and possibly other venues. Here are Jesse and me in Soho.

I received an e-mail from Marella Paramatti, whom I hadn’t seen since she invited me to attend the 2013 Mantova Festivaletteratura that September. I had very fond memories of the festival and of her, so it was great to hear from her. She was passing through London on her way to Liverpool with her daughter Olivia to some Beatles event – they are both big Beatles fans; (Olivia is the biggest). I had no idea that a 16-year-old girl from Mantua would know all about different vinyl pressings of Beatles records or manage to dress and look as if she just stepped out of the mid-Sixties. Her hairstyle, which she does herself, was totally accurate for the period. Astonishing. Here is Olivia with a Paul McCartney print. She turned 17 the next day.

I had to go to Basel at the end of the month to see my old friend Luzius Martin who is working on the restoration of what remains of the Ian Sommerville archive. It was cold and wet but another old friend – Udo Breger, whom I’ve known for more than 50 years – lives in Luzius’s building, where I was staying, so it was a very social visit. 

In Basel I was fortunate to coincide with the truly wonderful Cezanne show at the Fondation Beyeler of 80 late oil paintings and watercolours. The show is of perfect size. I don’t believe you can take in much more than 80 pictures at any one viewing so it was just right. Many old favourites were there, including the Card Players from the Courtauld, but displayed next to another version of the same subject, and there were many pictures I’d not seen before. It runs until 25 May. Next day we visited the Kunstmuseum, one of the greatest museums in the world, not just Switzerland. We concentrated on modern works as a follow-up to Cezanne who was, as Picasso said, ‘the father of us all.’  It was great to see Cezanne’s influence on Matisse and so many of the other artists represented there. I’d been there the year before with Luzius when we’d concentrated on the older work: Leonardo, Holbein and co. so it was good to be selective. They have a beautiful tiny Pollock, a great Franz Klein, two huge Rothkos; rooms of Picassos, of Paul Klee, of Leger, one and a half rooms of Giacomettis – my favourite rooms in the museum – and an enormous Helen Frankenthaler – they have a Frankenthaler show coming up: April 18-August 23 featuring over 50 pictures which I hope I can get to see. I wrote my NDD essay on her work at art school back in 1963.

According to the latest figures released by the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH) on December 23rd 2025, Israel had killed at least 70,937 Palestinians and wounded 171,192; of those identified fatalities, 53% were women, children or elderly. When will talks about reparations begin? When will the Palestinians get their country back?

There was a private view at the October Gallery on December 3rd where I was pleased to run into Liliane Lijn. We showed her at the Indica Gallery back in 1966. She is going from strength to strength and has more shows and projects than ever. 

My old friend Victor Bockris made a rare visit to London. We first met in 1973 (I think), introduced in New York by Allen Ginsberg. It was at a poetry reading at Barnard College and he said, ‘There’s someone over there that you should meet. I think you’ll get on.’ He was right.  During the seventies and eighties Victor and I were very close. I hardly saw him in the last 35 years as I rarely went to the States and he moved, first to Florida to be with his father, then to Philadelphia. I had not seen him in 11 years.

One evening Jim Pennington came to dinner. Jim has a thing about obsolete pieces of office equipment and in this case brought with him a Polaroid camera with some clearly out of date film. The pictures came out very dark and Victor suggested that more light was needed. He proposed the bathroom, which had super new LED-lighting and so, like the old fools that we were, we crowded into the shower while my son Theo took pictures. Naturally Victor leaned against the shower controls and we all got soaked., Victor more than anyone, requiring a complete change of clothes. He paraded the red suit he wore in Lisbon.

I did an interview at Darren Coffield’s Colony-Room-Green on the 8th. We got a full house, but that’s not difficult as it is a small room and it was free. Here we are with Roberta before she returned to Slovakia for Christmas.

2026 will be the 100th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth – June 3, 2026 and his friends are preparing various celebrations in his honour. Jesse Goodman and Antonio and I met to discuss some of the proposals at the Colony-Room on the 16th and it looks like we will be able to give him a good show if they work out.

The next day I spent the afternoon working on the illustrations for my upcoming In The Eighties (a follow on from my In the Sixties and In the Seventies) with my friend and publisher Hannah Watson from Trolley Books. She just had a dramatic new haircut in Paris  that reminded me immediately of Francoise Hardy, so we spent quite a lot of time looking at pictures of her and comparing them.  And also got quite a lot of work done.

On the 22nd, Marina came over, visiting from Lisbon where I’d last seen her. We went to the Picasso Theatre show at Tate Modern. As usual the pictures were lit from so high above that they had a dark shadow across the top, altering the picture ratio and, of course, obscuring detail. It is not difficult to fly lighting just over people’s heads so that pictures are not changed in this way. Whoever hung the show should be fired, but it is common in London. The Courtauld does it too, and the National. Any roadie could do it for them. They don’t have a clue. As for the show. Some engravings and etchings were hung so far above eye-level that you couldn’t see any of the detail. There were none of Picasso’s actual backdrops. It was a very amateurish, badly conceived show, made up almost entirely of their own holdings and so they were charging an outrageous entry fee for pictures that could normally be seen free (if you asked to see them in advance). Many of the pictures were, of course, wonderful. To me Picasso is still the master.

That evening we ate quail wrapped in prosciutto with pears and roasties. Victor loves his roasties.

The next evening it was Victor’s turn to be interviewed by Darren at the Colony Room Green. Another good turn-out, only two days before Christmas. It went very well. Victor used New York audience tactics on them: no talking in the back, no statements, only questions. 

Victor flew back to New York on Christmas Day, and Theo and Mina took a cab at 4:45am on Boxing Day to Heathrow to fly to Tokyo. Suddenly the flat was empty. But not for long as my good friend Marsha Rowe came to stay. We celebrated New Year together and had a wonderful visit. 

She may have moved to the right, but for my generation, Brigitte Bardot was an important part of our lives. She died December 29. RIP.

Let’s end 2025 with an inspiring photograph: the last CIA flight out of Saigon in 1975 after the Vietnamese whipped America’s ass. 

My friend Camila is a William Blake specialist, and we have often talked about where he and his friends lived as most of these sites are close to my flat. Fuseli, for instance, lived at the south end of my street and Blake himself was born in Soho, 15 minutes’ walk away. In the course of other completely different research I found that after Blake died, his wife Catherine moved to a house that originally stood at the north end of my street. Sadly, that block was completely destroyed in 1966 and a large block of flats now occupies the entire site, with the road itself moved some yards to the east. Catherine’s house is now beneath the north-east corner of Holcroft Court, with even the foundations swept away by a subterranean car park. However, we can make pretty good guess at how it once looked as the houses there were very similar to those built in the 1770s on nearby Warren Street and in the remaining south block of Hanson Street where I live. Classic cheap Georgian with one ground floor window, round head door, string course and an attic with dormers. Here’s a nearby example c1777.

The big trip this month was for a conference on the counterculture organised by my friend Camila Oliveira at the University of Lisbon’s English dept. It coincided with a visit to London by my old friend Victor Bockris. Victor and I have known each other for 50 years, introduced in New York by Allen Ginsberg, but I hadn’t actually seen him for 11 years, which is how long it’s been since I last went to the US. We flew to Lisbon on November 25th. Camila picked us up from the hotel and took us to a wonderful restaurant in an old palace for dinner. 

The next day there were two panel discussions. We were the first, Victor and I were interviewed by Camila about the sixties underground scene in London (me) and the seventies punk scene in New York (Victor), followed by questions from the audience. As used Victor and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye which made the audience laugh. Two young Brazilian women were moved to tears; not by our performance, but the physical contact with such remote cultural events, so utterly different in geographical location, language, and time from their present lives in quarter-21st-century Portugal. We joined another panel discussion the next day on Kathy Acker. Both Victor and I knew Kathy as a friend from the seventies and eighties but were not asked for any recollections. 

Walking around the streets near to my hotel I found a bookshop which had on display a Burroughs Adding Machine. This was invented by William Burroughs’ grandfather, the source of the family money, and the title of one of Burroughs’ books (The Adding Machine.). 

I did finally get some time with Camila, who persuaded one of the waiters to take a picture of us at lunch at the Gulbenkian Foundation.

That evening Camila and her flatmate Lilia cooked a big dinner for eight at her flat. Marina kindly dropped Victor and I off at our hotel where Victor took a picture of us.

While Victor went to visit relatives, my friend Maribel came to London for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other for about a year, when I visited her in Algeciras so there was a lot of catching up to do. She very sensibly left Britain because she could not stand the food, the weather, and the fact that British men had no contact whatsoever with their feelings. It was great to see her, as ever.

I went with Lucy to the launch party for the Lee Miller show at Tate Brit on September 30. What a show! I could have done with a few more solarizations, but all the top images were there from her Surrealist compositions to Lee sitting in Hitler’s bathtub. Her experiences as a war photographer covering the concentration camps obviously left a permanent scar and she retired from photography. Fortunately, her negatives survived and are in the hands of the Estate who are doing a wonderful job of cataloguing, preserving and exhibiting her work.

We had a bit of a Bailey family get-together on October 17, the before what would have been Rosemary’s birthday. Her sister Jackie came over with sister Caroline who has just moved to London from Manchester to become the Vicar of Dulwich. Here’s Jackie about to throttle me with Caro looking on. It is something of a family tradition: Rosemary’s brother Simon was also a C of E Vicar, and their father was a Baptist minister. 

It was cartoonist Michael Heath’s 90th birthday on October 13th and a celebration was held at Colony-Green in Heddon Street a few days before. Heath looks more like 70 than 90 and remained standing talking while I looked for a seat. Great man. 

Simon and Ginette came to dinner on the 15th, as usual bringing a rather good bottle of wine. Simon and I have something of a tradition of taking lunch at the Academy Club every month or so. All very London. 

The 18th was my son Theo’s birthday, and we went to Hachi on Brewer Street in Soho. You cook your own food and we had so much fun that we were the last ones in the restaurant, still eating as the chairs were being stacked on the tables. They conveniently label the different cuts of meat.

I’ve been spending more time at The Academy Club recently, one of the last remnants of old Soho (though not in fact very old, 1986, though the building itself is 18th century). Here’s Celine modelling her new crown, prior to using it at a performance at City Racing in Shropshire.

At home, Mina proves to be an expert cork stacker. It’s harder than it looks.

Back at the Colony Green, Lucy and Cassie bond over Lily Allen’s new album.

Camila is editing an anthology of Allen Ginsberg poems that relate to his 1948 auditory vision of William Blake’s voice coming to him across the vault of time, reading poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I am writing the foreword. To do this we first had to agree on the meaning of each selected poem. I thought I was familiar with them all as I once spent a year editing Allen’s tape collection and selecting the best live recording of each of his published poems, but even so I was occasionally puzzled as to what he actually meant. (Allen himself sometimes didn’t know, sometimes placing two words together in the same way as Cezanne placed two colours together to get what Allen called ‘eyeball kicks’. He had also written quite a number of poems since I did that work back in 1971. By reading them aloud and discussing each one the meanings became clear. It was insightful work and, in fact, a delight to revisit poems that I mostly hadn’t read in decades. As you can see it was exhausting work.

Although we worked every day, there was still time for meals, for a drop of wine, and visits to friends. Martha has a swimming pond, surrounded by plants and flowers with a superb view of the mountains.

We went with Martha to a concert of Bach Cantatas played by the Ensemble Correspondences at the tenth century abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa, part of the Pablo Casals Festival. The building was erected in 950 in the Mozarabic style and has superb acoustics. I was not that happy with the lighting which was sometimes distracting and would have preferred to see the 1000-year-old horseshoe arches in their natural colours, but it was a great concert. 

I forgot to mention the Anselm Kiefer-Van Gogh show in last month’s post. Jill and I went to the show which was at the Royal Academy. As usual I found these artist pairings to be a little forced. It’s true that Kiefer liked Van Gogh but he wasn’t that much influenced by him. There were some nice Van Goghs though. 

Back to France and my next visitors were Ken Weaver and Maxine. I hadn’t seen them since I visited their place last year with a film crew who were making a documentary about Ken’s fellow-Fug Tuli Kupferberg. Here’s Roslyn with Maxine and Ken in Prades. They overlapped with Richard and Suzy. Suzy had just completed a six month residency at the Citie des Arts in Montmartre and I really regret not having the time to visit them there. They brought with them some rather interesting anarchic local wines from the other wise of the Col.

I saw quite a lot of Roslyn and Gordon which was good because they rarely come down to London. Unfortunately, we didn’t overlap by many days as they had to return to Britain because of Brexit rules (a pox on all who voted Brexit!). There was time for one more concert: the Cobla Sol de Banyuls did a free concert at the local church. It is some of the strangest music you will ever hear in Europe; despite the bass being the only stringed instrument, it sounds like the string section of an orchestra. A cobla consists of 10 wind instruments and a double bass, with one person playing both a flute and a hand drum attached to his wrist. Women have only been permitted to play in a cobla since the 1980s and to my disgust, at the end of the concert, only the men were called to stand and take a bow by name. They played modern works, but all had the distinctive triple beat of the Sardana at their root (actually a 6/8 rhythm). It has a slightly sinister feel, an echo of the distant past. The earliest reference to the Sardana is from 1552. Here’s more what-we-did-on-our-holidays pix of the cobla and of Gordon and Roslyn with Catherine and Billy and their daughter Niamh.

My final visitor of the summer was Marsha Rowe, veteran of Australian Oz, English Oz, co-founder and editor of Spare Rib and co-founder of Virago Books. We have been fellow travellers for decades, hoping to subvert people! She last appeared here throwing eggs with Sara Lucas. Meanwhile, bamboo threatens to overtake the garden and life goes on, at least for a bit longer.

I usually try to get to the Soho Fete each year. Held in the churchyard of the wartime bombed St. Anne’s, on Wardour Street, it remains a truly local affair, with the bar run by the French pub and locals manning the stalls. There is a Soho waiters’ race that starts and ends outside the French, when waiters carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne, a glass and an ashtray, run up Dean Street, round Soho Square, back down Greek Street and across Romilly Street to the finish line; this year won by the Ham Yard Hotel. The London Fire Brigade won the tug-of-war against the local police and the London pearly kings and queens were out in their finery All the usual attractions were there including the Human Fruit Machine and the snail race, a Rocky Horror show singalong, the drag queen finale and a few choruses of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘Cock Linnet’. How London can you get? Here’s the Fire Brigade getting their award and some of the alternate London royalty showing community support. 

My son Theo was there with Mina. I went with Lucy but soon ran into Hannah. I love being with them both and when the fete ended we went on to The White Horse on Newburgh Street, next to Carnaby Street, where The Fallen Heroes, friends of Lucy’s, were playing. The three of us finally got home where I had fortunately prepped a meal that I somehow managed to cook. It was a real Soho day in brilliant sunshine, though it took me a day to get over it.

The US has left UNESCO yet again, following their withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and WHO. It’s really only their money that will be missed as the US has very little in the way of culture, given the size of its population; the Paris Climate Accords are inimical to the oil business so American compliance with any attempts to cut back on oil production were always likely to fail, and of course, with regard to WHO, the US is the only developed country in the world to not have a national health system. In other words, reactionary through and through, and destined to get worse as their position in the world becomes less and less significant. In fact, to use one of Trump’s favourite phrases, a real ‘shithole country’. 

On a lighter note. Camila and I went to see the David Hockney show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. All the great pictures were there: A Bigger Splash; Peter Schlesinger looking petulantly into a swimming pool and waiting expectantly on a bed; ‘Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy’,; the giant landscapes and the wonderful Royal College work from the early sixties which I have always liked. I sent Raymond Foye a pic of his portrait with Henry Geldzahler to show that we thought of him while viewing the picture. Sadly the Wayne Sleep-George Lawson double portrait wasn’t there, it would have been a nice tribute to George who died not that long ago. 

We were there largely to see Hockney’s new William Blake picture as Camila is a Blake scholar, on the board of the William Blake Society and the Blake Cottage Trust, and we were en route to the Pyrenees to spend a week working together on an anthology of Allen Ginsberg’s poems about the auditory vision of William Blake back in 1948 that so very much influenced his life and poetry.

The next day we went to the Museum d’Orsay. I sought out the Suzanne Valadon pictures, as I have been studying her work recently. The collection of Impressionists there is astonishing, I would love to live next door and see the pictures all the time. There was a Courbet there that caught Camila’s eye and a Renoir that matched her hat. I naturally did a bit of mansplaining having been several times to the Monet in London show recently at the Courtauld.

Paris would not be Paris without a few nice drinks. We were at Hotel La Louisiane, so the Palette was just up the street where William Burroughs used to score for heroin and boys – how things have changed! The pina colada pic was taken at the Rhumerie, the old rock ‘n’ roll haunt from when I was a rock critic in the seventies. All the visiting bands used to hang out there.

Next day we were on our way south.

Hannah Watson asked me for an essay on the role that the Liberty store played in cultural history to be included in a box set of booklets and essays published to celebrate the store’s 150th anniversary. Oscar Wilde praised it, it promoted the arts and crafts movement, was loved by the bright young people, dressed the Chelsea set, provided furnishing fabric for Granny Takes a Trip’s psychedelic jackets and David Bowie’s many personalities, before finally showing up at Taboo in Leigh Bowery’s fantastic costumes. There was a suitable launch in the exhibition of their historic fabrics in the store’s fourth floor exhibition. I wore a Liberty foulard.

I have been working a lot with Ed Maggs from the venerable antiquarian bookstore Maggs. He kindly turns to me when the subject of an archive falls within my specialisms: Beat Generation, British Counterculture and so on. Here is a particularly pleasant evening I spent with Ed and Fran at my local Italian.

On June 22, we had a visit from my God-daughter Sara Minard, born in London of American parents and living in New York City. I hadn’t seen her in a while and forgot that she was a vegetarian. Here is her reaction to a tray full of roast quail. She works for the mayor’s office so she is a diplomat. She ate one. 

There was an on-stage interview with Nicola Bowery Rainbird, Leigh Bowery’s wife, to go with the huge Leigh Bowery show on at Tate Modern. I went with Hannah who curated the previous Bowery show, held at the Fitzrovia Chapel (I wrote one of the catalogue essays). Here’s Hannah with Nicola, her son Angus, and gallerist Riccardo Pillon. The party spread to the grass outside the Tate beside the Thames. Hannah is here with Jessica Baxter, who curated the Tate show. 

The global-warming fuelled summer sun brought out the flowers. My old friend Fran Bentley showed me her garden.

It had been ages since I saw my friend Yang Lee. He came over with Lisa and here he enjoys a smoke with George Orwell. Lisa is a model from Novosibirsk, Siberia, and we discussed the role of Siberian troops in the Battle for Moscow in WWII. (Always high-level intellectual conversation around here you understand.) We dined at the Wolseley.

In Paris to discuss a show of Brion Gysin’s work at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris, I stayed at the Hotel La Louisiane on the rue de Seine. It’s always an exercise in false nostalgia as I never met J-P Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Cossery, Boris Vian, Albert Camus or Fujita who lived there. Or Charlie Parker, Bud Powell or any of the jazz greats who stayed there (it was where Miles Davis and Juliette Greco had their legendary affair in 1948). More recent guests included Jim Morrison, Keith Haring, Lucien Freud and Juliette Binoche. It’s still cheap – by Paris standards – and though that part of the Left Bank is now insanely expensive and gentrified, it reminds me of how it used to be when I first stayed in the area – at the Hotel de Seine a few doors up the street – back in 1966. My friend Luzius was also staying there, in town from Basel, for the same meetings, being the owner of a substantial collection of Gysin material. His wife Sairung was with him, here at the Palette. On our off-day, Luzius and I visited the Balzac Museum, which neither of us had been to. This is the desk at which he wrote La Comédie humaine. It’s a beautiful small museum – free, unusual for Paris – with a delightful garden and café. It is hard to imagine that when the house was built it was in open countryside.

Luzius and I were in Paris to meet with Hélène Leroywho is the Conservatrice en chef, Responsable des collections at the Musée d’art modern de Paris, and is organising a Brion Gysin exhibition for 2026 together with Olivier Weil. We have had previous meetings both here and in London and we are all in agreement as to how the show should look. Here we have Olivier, Hélène and her daughter Julie, at one of my favourite Parisian cafes, Chez René on blvd St Germain. (The snails are very good – huge, and they also do frogs’ legs. It’s a proper place.)

I ended my visit with a couple of nights with my old friends Catherine and Steve. We went to the Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely show at the Grand Palais. It is a huge show. I should have done my usual thing of running through the show first then returning to the start and pacing myself, as there were loads of videos that, for once, I really wanted to stop and see. But I didn’t and we were there almost two hours. I hadn’t realised how much of their work was genuine collaboration rather than mutual support. I had a picture of them, torn from a magazine pinned to my wall when I was art school back in the early sixties, and have always liked their work enormously. When we started International Times, one of the first art illustrations we used was of Nana, the huge sprawling female figure that you entered between the legs, that only existed for six months in 1966 at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet before it was destroyed. Fortunately, a few fragments remain: the head was at the Grand Palace and a fragment of torso. More importantly there was a lot of very interesting documentation about the figure and the original show. 

There were also some major examples of her ‘tir’ series, where she made large assemblage ‘paintings’ which incorporated bags of paint which she, and invited friends, then shot at, causing the paint to spray and drip all over the work. William Burroughs credited her with being an influence on his ‘shotgun’ paintings. The pieces, before-shooting, reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s work, and indeed, he was one of her friends and did some of the shooting.

And of course there were loads of Tinguely’s amazing machines, including several painting machines, shown here, as well as films of the ones that auto-destructed like the one in New York. In the film a small section, like a small trolly, can be seen escaping as firemen tackle the implosion and it is displayed in the show, next to the film of the event.

Catherine and Steve collected me and my baggage from the hotel and it was fun to hang out at my old haunts with them. Back in the sixties and seventies the area was still cheap and filled with inexpensive hotels that you could just show up at and get a room. Then they started installing lifts, putting up the price, then they were bought out. Only a few remain today like the Hotel du Seine or La Louisiane. The Palette is still there, and the mirrors are becoming more and more corroded. Bill Burroughs liked it here.

Catherine and I visited the Musée de Montmartre, housed in a 300-year-old complex of artists’ studios and housing. Renoir lived here, (his garden has been recreated), as did Raoul Dufy, Suzanne Valadon, her husband André Utter and her son the painter Maurice Utrillo. Valadon’s studio is preserved intact with no vitrines or glass protection and you can just wander about in it. It’s like time travel. A wonderful experience. 

The museum also contains items from Le Chat Noir. Here is the original zinc, complete with ancient bottles, Catherine, and me.

A visit to Paris would not be complete without a dinner with Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari and her companion Junor. Her latest recording, ‘Errant Ear-2024’ has just been released. She worked with her husband, composer Luc Ferrari for 40 years and after his death in 2005 continued to release her own recordings. Catherine cooked a superb dinner for us all, then apparently tried to raise the table. Pix by Junor.

Remember that from the river to the sea it’s all Palestine. Israeli genocide continues.

The spring weather brought everyone out and we had a very busy start to May with dinners for Lucy and Valerie. Luzius Martin and Udo Breger arrived in London on the 5th and we had our usual dinners: one in a restaurant and one here the following day, always accompanied by Terry Wilson, who lives here. On the 8th we all had lunch with Tom Neurath at the Palestinian restaurant beneath his office on Golborne Road in Notting Hill. Tom was not looking at all well. He had lost considerable weight and had grey skin. Nonetheless, he spoke enthusiastically about his collection of Samuel Beckett first editions and asked me to have Ed Maggs send him the list of Beckett items that I knew that they were about to send to auction. His numerous cancer treatments had all failed and though they were trying a few experimental procedures he knew that he was dying. Consequently, he taken up smoking pot and cigarettes again and, certainly a few months before, was drinking a little schnapps again. We had an almost tearful hug when we all departed. We knew it was unlikely that we would see each other again.  

I kept up on the art world: the next day Marsha Rowe and I attended the opening of the refurbished Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery. Architecturally it seems to be a great improvement, but they still light the pictures from high above, throwing big black shadows from their frames across the tops of many of them, distorting the size ratio, obscuring detail, and very much damaging the viewers’ enjoyment. Why they can’t lower the lighting gantries by 10 meters or so is beyond me. Any rock ‘n’ roll lighting roadie could do it for them and it wouldn’t even cost very much to do. [I can recommend some.] As it is, the hang is a disgrace. In some cases, the shadow obscures the top half of a figure’s head or puts a strong wavy line across the top of the picture, distorting the composition. Typical of Britain, I’m afraid. Here’s Raphael’s Garvagh Madonna [1510]; Pontormo’s Joseph’s Brothers Beg For Help [1515] and his Joseph Sold to Potifer with their thick shadows.

My other art day was to have a pleasant lunch with Andrew Wilson and art dealer Anthony Reynolds at the Academy Club which is always a relaxing yet invigorating place at lunchtimes. Of course in the evenings the members can sometimes become boisterous as you can see. 

Theo, Mina and I flew to France on the 14th where Rosemary’s sister Jackie had assembled eight of her family members for a reunion. They all came to dinner of course, but were staying about an hour’s drive away so I didn’t see much of them. Theo joined them for one night and they all had a good time on the coast. Theo and Mina in France.

Back in town I resumed the usual round of dinners and visits to exhibitions as befits an elderly man in London: dinner with Lucy, show and a dinner with Jill – the Hiroshige show at the British Museum. I enjoyed it but was disturbed by the fact that all the women looked the same: same face, same blank expression, even if he was depicting a crowd of a dozen or more, they were all clones. It revealed a lot about the situation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, they were virtually inviable. But his colour and his un-western perspective is wonderful. They are prints, and his publishers have sometimes substituted different colour backgrounds which completely change the reading of the composition, it’s all fascinating.) 

Tom Neurath died on Saturday 14th June. I had known him since 1965; 60 years. We were introduced by Ian Sommerville who first became his friend in 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris where they both lived. Tom had always been a supporter of Ian and his work and collected his infinity-grid pictures. He was also a friend of Hoppy, who I shared a flat with in the mid-sixties, so I quickly got to known him. We were not close, but over the years we did quite a few things together. We once took the Thames & Hudson Rolls Royce down to Deal, on the coast, to meet Harold Chapman whose book of photographs, The Beat Hotel, [1984] was out of print. Tom was considering re-issuing it. The problem was that the reproductions in the original edition were not good enough to use for a reprint, so we were going down to hopefully collect the original prints or inspect his negatives to find possible substitutes or additions for an enlarged edition. Of course Harold hadn’t prepared anything. He finally found a box with a few curled-up prints but couldn’t find any contact sheets or anything that would have been of use. He pontificated about this and that. Claire produced a bottle of whiskey and the afternoon drifted by, but the visit was a waste of time. Either Harold didn’t want to really re-issue the book, or his dementia had already set in, and we hadn’t realised. 

Another time, more amusing, was when Peter Weibel, the director of ZKM in Karlsruhe, invited Tom and I to give a talk on ‘Swinging London’. A less likely subject for Tom to speak on would have been hard to find as he had not been a part of that scene at all. But it sounded like a fun project, so we flew out and sat in conversation, in English, before a packed auditorium. I don’t recall anyone leaving so I think they were entertained. I will miss him.