mum and dad's house

We went up to Dalgety Bay in Fife for the weekend, my first stay in my mum and dad's new house. I enjoyed waking up before everybody else and having a choice of different rooms to sit and draw in.

Yesterday I sat on an armchair in dad's study (above). The day before I sat on the landing, at the top of the stairs, looking down to the hall below.

Warm sunny days, indoors

Room 6, Hotel Chatelet, Luxembourg, Thursday June 14, 6 am


Luxembourg: the smallest nation ever to be immortalised in a Smiths song.

I could find no discernable trace of those frightening verses which may or may not have been sent to a buck toothed girl in the Duchy. It was a long shot....

From the bottom step

Another view of our hall.

I drew the door too narrow. Good job I'm not an architect, and good job we don't have to get prams and buggies in and out.

our hall

I sat on the ninth step of our stairs every morning last week to draw this picture.

Oulipo evening

On June 5 I'll be going to Rational Rec's OULIPO evening at Bethnal Green Working Mens Club. Below is Russell Martin's blurb for the event (I've added a few links):

The OuLiPo - an acronym that translates as "workshop of potential literature" - was a post-war French literary movement that included Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau. The tenet of the OuLiPo is to create literature via constraints such as palindromes and lipograms.

The event Features:

-- An OuTraPo performance (Workshop for Potential Tragi-comedy)

-- Interview with Stanley Chapman, the first exponent of OuLiPo in the UK in the 1960's

-- OuLiPo like music pieces by Tom Johnson and Damien Ricketson

-- Oulipean activities and games for the audience

-- "Documentary Saga of the OuLiPo" - a new multimedia work by Rees Archibald, Andrew Infanti and Matthew Shlomwowitz that promises to explain everything you need to know about OuLiPo.

-- Book stalls by Bookworks, Artwords Bookshop and Strange Attractor.

Stanley Chapman (b. 1925) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. He became a member of Oulipo in 1960, founded the Outrapo, and is also a member of the French Collège de 'Pataphysique, and the London Institute of 'Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with "admiring stupefaction" by Raymond Queneau.