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.