And so I have returned from the land of meat and beer. Good old Germany. I got there okay in the end (plane-plane-train-train-train) although if it wasn’t for a nice Germany lady who spoke English I might have ended up somewhere completely wrong. And then second I stepped off the train it started snowing and I had done my usual and assumed that anywhere outside of Scotland has better weather and not really prepared for it not being. But it wasn’t really that cold.

The space was really good- large and in a slight L-shape, with a couple of sliding walls. Felix, the gallery man was very nice and looked after me well. I took over two paintings, a hexagon construction, some drawings and a bag of materials.

I decided to do a wall drawing on one of the walls and it worked out really well because one of the sliding walls had a slight step in it where one part slid behind the other; and I decided that that was good place for it. And it was. Depending on what angle you were looking at the drawing from, it caused a sort of perspective error which is what I was after.

So yes, it was good. I also ate some of the best pretzels known to man.

I’ll add some photos and installation shots to the gallery when I get them sorted out but in the meantime, here are a few images. (It might take a minute for the page to load). You can also see some images at the Raum 45 site.

I saw this in Aldi when I was in Germany. Who needs Red Bull when you can have a Big Pump?

One of the very few highlights of walking dogs is some of the things you find lying around. But then again, you would get that just from walking around on your own. (One thing you never find lying around is dead dogs).

I need to get up early tomorrow to go to Germany. I’m doing a show over there in a place near Stuttgart. It’s a solo show; it’s called EYEaginstEYE and I just tried to send the mailout to everyone. But alas, the server seems to be misconfigured and it just flooded my inbox with 154 Unroutable Mail messages.    I just spammed myself. But there’s no time to fix it because I need to get to bed and get some sleep. On a more successful note, I noticed that the site just passed quarter of a million hits. That’s since August when I rebuild everything, so that’s quite good.

Trish gets back tomorrow after a week of snowboarding somewhere in France. So I’ve got tomorrow morning to square everything up and make it look like I can look after myself. I mean I obviously can look after myself, just not always in the way that Trish expects I should. That girl has got high standards.

I’ve watered most of the plants, apart from the one I hate.  I’ve washed some things- I can’t remember what but they’re clean. The vegetable man called at at a time that only someone who grows and sells vegetables for a living could consider reasonable. So I ignored that. I’ve smoked and drunk at a normal rate. The fish are swimming. And here I am half drunk writing on my website, checking all the spelling.

I’ve been watching slightly more TV than normal and simultaneously reading a really good essay about watching TV. Celebrity Big Brother is on telly at the moment which is the type of TV I hate the most but is also undeniably compulsive viewing. I would be surprised if there wasn’t a version of it in America, but I’m not very up on TV so I don’t know. But the premise is simple- you lock a bunch of desperate celebrities (I don’t know what that word means anymore (I don’t know if I ever did)) in a house together- you stress them out in various ways (they’re already stressed- they’re desperate)- hilarity ensues, or not as the case may be; in any case, something (badly) representing the gamut of human emotion ensues- it’s all televised - we, the public, get to vote for who stays in and who doesn’t- someone ‘wins’- everyone talks about it- and some people probably make a lot of money. That’s entertainment. Or at least, it’s a form of entertainment. Like snake charming, or badger baiting, or going out at the weekend and getting into a fight. And in some ways it operates in the same sort of way. It’s not the sort of thing that you would do… it’s actually a good example of exactly the type of thing you would go out of your way not to do. But if someone else is going to do it then you’re going to be the first to get a good ringside seat where you can watch the mayhem unfold. It’s on at the moment and I’m going to watch it even if nothing much is happening.