After many months staring at the wall or out of the window I finally got my paints out last week and made some marks on a canvas. It's a landscape about landscapes really, based on the image I have in my memory of looking down over the wondrous CaherMacrusheen fields in Doolin. My inspiration/motivation has probably come from the fact that I've got two paintings in an exhibition at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Haringey - my portraits of Rivelino and JFK - and hanging around with other artists is always a good way to get things moving again.  

http://www.wix.com/surprise10/Portrait-for-everyone

I'm upstairs in a MacDonalds on Kingsland Road in Dalston, sipping at weak foamy coffee in a paper cup and trying to write. Procrastination is high, thanks to the decent Wi-Fi service and the newspaper. No matter how much I try to concentrate, my mind slips and I start reading about forthcoming football fixtures and surf various sites looking for Christmas presents for the kids.

Next to my laptop is a notebook with my list of weekly tasks for the next few months. I only drew up the list last week but I'm already behind. My eye strays towards a man on the other side of the restaurant. It's late period Leo Tolstoy, drinking coffee and eating a donut, content in the knowledge that he's already written great books and can soon go back to his own time via a pan-dimensional wormhole in the smelly toilets. He'd have been better off going further back in time, where coffee and donuts would have been cheaper.

Crappy Christmas music blares out from the speakers. Tolstoy gets up and stares out of the window. A woman to my left is writing what looks like a dissertation on an old Compaq laptop. Further away two middle ages people talk vaguely about shopping and TV programmes. No-one is eating burgers or chips. In fact, no-one is eating anything. McDonald's has become a drop in centre for drifters.

Tolstoy is now staring at me. I sense the possibility that he'll decide to kidnap me and take me back to the 19th century. It would be interesting but I have presents to buy. Books to write.

Last week I went on a walk with deep topographer Nick Papadimitriou and the writer/producer John Rogers, as part of their radio show 'Ventures and Adventures in Topography'. Each week they pick a different part of the Greater London area and do a walk, usually aided by a book from the early 20th century.

Our walk started at South Harrow station and ended up a few hundred yards away in a crow-infested patch of parkland.

The podcast is here.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting on here again. And I can't remember why I stopped back in 2004. Probably something to do with the speed of service on Blogger back then, or the user interface on Typepad. My Typepad blog became an online version of my old Smoke newsletter, with mundane local news and little Zen newsflashes. I do still like writing those reports but for some reason it's harder to get into the slightly cutesy mindset required to properly pull it off. And it does seem as if the whole local non-news news thing is now being done to death much better elsewhere, on twitter/facebook etc. I've doen the odd post on Twitter but so far I'm stuck in a slightly bewildering cycle of kids, beer, old records and the sound of lorries. Plus I've got so many websites with my work stuff on that I've sort of lost track of how I reveal myself online.

And I just want a change, obviously. I've been staring at the Typepad 'Compose Post' area since June and haven't come up with anything. I't's Blogger's Block. Or Writer's Blog. Blogck?

But I'm back mainly because there are a load of blogs I like - some great writers and artists - on here and I can re-engage in a community again. And the really great thing? No-one has *ever* looked at this blog. The only way is up...

A couple of days ago I went to Borders to buy a copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Came away with £110 worth of books, including a Teach Yourself Welsh course. They should store all the books in cardboard boxes so people like me aren't tempted to browse.