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Cluster, Harmonia, Kraftwerk - felt mean leaving Can out but I love the first two most of all.

Watched it laughing at the way PSG frankly imploded with some of the worst defending I’ve seen at this level (and I watch Spurs a lot) Benzema was brilliant and I did love the step over for Mbappe’s disallowed goal. I do think that once RM play Bayern, City or Liverpool they won’t get a chance...

This off a great later Nelson album, Spirit

True story - I was with my dad shopping on a Saturday afternoon and we stopped outside a telly shop - Radio Rentals or such like - to check how the cricket was going, I said to Dad “that’s the new spinner they’ve got, he’s not done much in the county games.” We both stood there to see that...

Don’t even get me started. JOKESHOP

Sayers is a really interesting character - one of that early generation of women to take a degree from Cambridge, she moved in a very intellectual group including HD, Mirrlees and among others. Worked in advertising and then translated Dante for the general reader. While at the same she had an...

Started a Dorothy L Sayers, partly cos there’s an Essex connection and I read SquareHaunting last year and Backlisted have just done an episode on her. That golden age of crime from the 30s is interesting because you have the classic crime puzzle but also the cult of the detective - Wimsey in...

Love the Beck series - the way the crime and the historical moment works - charting the radical 60s70s but also the backlash.

Didn’t Ian Brown write FEAR as a series of acrostics?

I read this book a couple of years ago as her name had cropped up a lot especially stories of Bowie coked out there in LA with only that book between himself and total psychic collapse.

It supposed to be his last painting - there’s the door he’s slowly seeping into - I like the way he takes Picasso on with the bull, wrests its symbolism away from PP and repurposes it for himself but for the rest I find most too flat - strangely austere. I’d have like more screaming Popes -...

There was a great novel by Nicola Barker about Canvey that involved a bloke having his fingers eaten by owls - it always made me think of the Southend owl guy.

I like listening to her read, it’s as if English is another language in her mouth.

Edith Sitwell is underrated

I do wonder about seeing a whole bunch of work all together with some painters - like seeing lots of drafts towards something. I felt this about Giacometti - you could see he was working something out over a long period - obsessively fine tuning something with subtle variation. Other...

There’s a bloke in Southend that wanders the high street with two great big fuck off owls on a wagon he pulls behind him.

Saw the Bacon at RA today. I’ve really tried to like his work but the best I could get today was that I understood it but I didn’t really like his view of the world/people. Despite all the curator’s claim of emotion, in the end I felt there was something cold and bleak in there - the one...

Two lads speeding on 29 inch MTBs fully balaclava’d up steal a blokes phone out his hand - followed by the bloke chasing them. Obviously was a shit phone cos they just tossed it on the ground and rode away.

I said as much to my son (after explaining what Watergate was and therefore why every scandal afterwards has the suffix -gate, what do they teach them in schools??)

I’ve put my shoulder to the wheel for you maybe the combined leverage of Craner and myself can get you a new reader.