They’re expanding the London Hospital

They’re expanding the London Hospital and I can see it from the balcony at Danny’s flat.  At the top of what looks like three high rise blocks of flats is a metal sheet that is held about 15 ft above the roof or from my point of view about 2 cm above.

I was standing out there last night braving the frost and thinking about what it was and imagining that it would be a landing station for air ambulances but is probably just something that looked good in the plan.

They’ve been building it for months and it’s amazing how quickly it went from being a jagged structure with cranes busily, well craning, on every corner to this almost finished structure with the obligatory blue glass cladding that seems to be the fashion right now.

So I’m standing outside and I’m wearing my coat and hat and scarf and its cold and I also see the same woman put some plates in a cupboard across the road and I was thinking about this New Year thing, which might be a bit late, now that the year is 9 days old, but the whole resolution idea. 

I had to resist the urge to make a buoyant New Year blog.  Stuff that started last year will carry on and finish this year, or not.  The bad habits that I have, the tendency to over-think things, the London hospital expansion, the run on sentences, having to wash up after dinner.

And so my work.  I’m sitting up at half twelve because I love these photographs.  I took them in September or October and I keep on coming back to them. 

This was what our flat looked like last year before we pulled out all the wires, putty filled the screw holes and sanded down the bad paintwork. 

The wires wound untidily around the skirting board, at times intersecting with each other or running on top of each other, around the room and out through holes where the radiator pipes run and through the doorframes into sockets and junction boxes in other rooms. 

Years of gloss paint over wires created glutinous bubbles, which popped as we pulled the wires of the wall scattering small wall clips and bits of plaster and lot of dust. 

The photographs are in my studio and in my sketchbook.  I can’t work out if I like it because its the perfect example of taking a line for a walk, or that I can see the traces of a broken transmission or that when we followed all those wires, 2 out of four didn’t work. 

But they’re the bit of last year that is left over, the unfinished idea about absence and connections and the faintly domestic, that when I think about it has been running through my work for the past four or five years.