Nick has been listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies and the Vaselines, and reading The Interrogation by J. M. G. Le Clézio. Also there was a film that he watched recently by Christopher Petit called Radio On which was very strange and good although it did have Sting in it, but only very briefly. He has also recently been enjoying sitting in the National Portrait Gallery and looking especially at the Holbein portraits of very important people from Tudor times who have a special darkness on them and look like they are waiting to be ghosts. Generally these kinds of places are good anyway whether you are interested in the pictures or not because you spend no money and there are all kinds of things to take your interest which carry with them some centuries of weight and would laugh in our faces if they had the ability to do such a thing. In the Victoria and Albert Museum you can see many wonderful Rodins, but also you can see Tippoo's Tiger which is an eighteenth century life-size clockwork automaton of a fearsome tiger devouring a prostrate European with a pipe organ inside to make the killing sounds and which was the favourite possession of Tipu Sultan, known as 'the Tiger of Mysore', who was a great enemy of the British in India and by all accounts would delight at the groans and roars of his favourite toy until the British came and killed him in 1799 and his favourite toy is in a glass box in London now, which is such a good example of what we call irony that clearly this is part of the item's appeal. The big old museums are also warm in the winter and have a special kind of light and space and silence about them. You can also often see very pretty bohemian looking girls who will be sitting for a long time and making sketches and you can watch them in the peacefulness and imagine what they are like, and you can realise how they are also an exhibit and so are you and so is everyone who passes through the place to behold and be beheld and this is a very strange and interesting place to be. There is also a quite excellent selection of very early blues recordings in Hackney Library which you can borrow free of charge but be warned that many of the CDs are missing from their cases, so you should make sure and check this before you take them out. It is not such a nice place to be hanging around in for very long either if you can help it, but it is good for the free CDs.