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a thing about obsolete pieces of office equipment and in this case brought with him a Polaroid camera with some clearly out of date film.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.