Dad kept meticulous records of money spent every day. These accounts were frequently mixed in with other accounts of his day, diary musings. He wrote a line or two in small pocket diaries for every day of his adult life as far as I know. I’ve saved some of them and had it in mind to type them up at some point. I wonder if I ever will?

These pages show that at this point in his life he was not short of disposable cash.

Reading ‘A Girl’s Story’ I find reference to a diary for 1963. I look through my Dad’s pocket diaries from the 1960s to see if there is one for that year that I can photograph. There isn’t but at the bottom of the box the diaries live in there are a couple of notebooks of my Dad’s and I idly flick through one. Two blotters are inbetween the pages, very well used. Blotters as palimpsests. I marvel at how much he used them. Would anyone, today, use one piece of paper so often for so long. Did he enjoy, I wonder, the multiple traces of letters written in blue and black inks superimposed one on top of another? Or was it just usual for consumable items to be kept and used for much longer in the 1950s and 60s?

A kind of palimpsest?

I am noticing some characterful windows in my neighbourhood.

I watched Audrey Diwan’s film of ‘Happening’ (2021) on Saturday and recognised a feature of the kitchen of the abortionist: an enamel ladle rack.

I have a very similar one which I bought nearly a year ago and which has not yet found its place in our home.

I can’t seem to get it onto the wall. So I take it upstairs to my office, complete with the attached ladles, when it is getting in the way in the kitchen.

And then I take it back down to the kitchen when it is getting in the way in my office.

Sometimes it ends up halfway down the stairs on the landing and stays there for a while until I decide what to do with it.

I was inordinately excited to see one like it in the film. It was a bit like seeing a blouse I own appear in ‘Nymphomaniac’ (Lars von Trier) worn by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I like to reflect upon the ridiculous and irrational aspects of our relationships with objects. I am deliberately making this my review of Diwan’s film because for me it was a stand out moment. Obviously we could talk about how well the film captures the spirit of Ernaux’s text etc etc or not, or about the performances, or how well it reflects that moment in France’s history and political life but that would be less interesting to me than looking at and considering the juxtaposition of the enamel ladle rack in the film and the real one which is mine and which floats around our house.

Link to video: shadowwalking

[For some reason I can’t get this video to play. Will come back to this in a while when I’m feeling a little less frustrated by it.]

I had the idea to tell a story, and I had started drafting how I would tell it, in my head, but less than a minute later and by the time I had sat down to write it on my computer, it had vanished and I can’t remember which it was. It was one of the incredible ones, the kind I often think no one would believe but I found, just now, in the bathroom, in my mind, the words to put it down. And now it’s gone.

I have put everything that happened to me, just as it happened to me, as drawings, into a glass case underneath a rock ten feet by twelve feet by eight feet in size at an undisclosed location in the countryside.

Image is called ‘foundation’ since I made it on art foundation, it displays women’s complexions under foundation make up and seems like a mulch of women’s faces, the foundation of society. I like the discoloured, yellowing, old sellotape marks. I made it by placing Sellotape over magazine images then using a pencil tip to rub over the faces so that the tape acts like a transfer medium.

I decide it is high time I dusted my dressing table.

Everything is covered with a thick layer of dust, not a good look for a dressing table consisting mostly of mirrored surfaces.

I take off all the perfume bottles and other accumulated objects and put them on a tray ready for dusting.

I photograph them and the glass shelf they have been taken from, which is reflected in the main full-length mirror.

I am reminded of my idea of reflecting on why it is that French words are romantic in themselves and photograph the large bottles, saved from my Mum’s dressing table, when we cleared her house: ‘bien-être’, ‘Femme’, ‘jardins de bagatelle’, ‘AMAZONE’.

I am astonished to notice my foot in the photograph, something I hadn’t planned.

I rephotograph the perfume bottles with more of myself in the mirror, being careful to pose in such a way as not to allow any compromising details (!) into the image.

I remember photographing perfume bottle tops when I was on art foundation back in 1990. I am astonished to find that I can reach behind me onto a low shelf to retrieve a ring binder containing photographs of these experiments from all those years earlier. I am more organised than I am prepared to admit to myself. I remember quite clearly not knowing why I was taking photos of perfume bottle tops back in 1990. Quite often on this project I get the feeling that everything in my life has been leading to this point.

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Yesterday’s sleep was fitful. I awoke rather early – soon before 5am. On my way down the stairs to the bathroom I looked out of the small window out onto the street and saw what I took to be at first glance a ghost. A figure of a man standing squarely looking at our house. I’d like to try to describe the feeling of thinking he was a ghost. It was a mixture of delight and horror. He was a big chap, tall, well-built and yet on the first glance he seemed weightless and like a relief stuck onto the flat plane that was the street scene. The street lighting at that time of night rendered everything pale orange and he was part of and yet distinct from everything around him, also coloured pale orange. [on reading through this account, I find myself trying to remember if any shadows were to be seen in this light, if everything was as flat as my memory tells me it was. Excited that I was seeing a ghost I retracted my foot from completing its action and continuing to step down to the next tread and stopped on the stair where I could best see out of the window. Even now I am amazed that I made that very quick decision to look at the figure given that, were it a ghost, that would seem terrifying to me. Curiosity and the need to disbelieve any ghostly possibilities were what made me stop to look again. When I did I saw his figure continue to stand, feet slightly apart, face on to the façade of our house but then his head inclined slightly and I saw that his left hand was attached by a lead to a small, dark dog. He was just a man out walking his dog in the early hours. One reason I had seen him as a ghost is that he had been filling the frame in which I am used to looking in anticipation of seeing a ghost. When I get up in this way to visit the bathroom early morning, I usually look out of this window to the street and beyond, across and over the flint wall, searching the view to see if there are any ghosts abroad. This mainly since S. told me that one day he had seen three nuns float along near one of the buildings then disappear into a wall. As he told me this story of his experience I felt the pleasurable tingling in the back of my neck, which is where my friend J. who is a Shaman and can see the dead, says they enter and leave the body through a kind of trap door. She is very matter of fact about this. So matter of fact that I sometimes think it rather a pity that her extraordinary abilities inhabit such an ordinary place in her own account to herself about what she gets to experience by dint of whatever particular gift she possesses.

The man tugged slightly on the lead to encourage his dog to start walking again and they both turned on their heels and headed up to the top of the street by which time I had lost interest in them both, the tingling had ended and I reached the bathroom door.

I must draw him as I saw him as a ghost and try to convey both his solidity and flatness in that pale orange light. How he seemed like a relief (as in solid within a plane). How his figure asserted itself within the frame of my expectant looking. How the expecting to see something plays such a part in the conjuring of ghosts.