Carnie Folk

Today we got lost near the football stadium. We ended up in a series of Cul de Sacs, one by the 1930s bus depot, one by a carnival behind fencing and one near a barbers with a stolen dog poster on it's gate. We rode past Veronica Lake's apartment which looks like a set for Poirot and now houses the Brazilian mistress of a doctor who is the father of a very sweet ex student. She named the mistresses baby after me in the end so the half Brazilian Annabel lives in Veronica Lake's apartment now.

We cycled past the river near where one of the prostitute's body was found. Before I remembered that I briefly fancied swimming in it. There is a lido near us too which I yearned for, but it's full of rubbish at the moment. Alex and I went to look at it once but it was impossible to get into.

I then spent ages wrestling a huge framed watercolour painting into several jackets-cardboard, bubblewrap, cardboard etc. The image is from a beautiful red calf-skin A-Z my mother had from the 1950s. It had all of the buildings drawn in, that had actually been bombed in the war. It had my mother's bus routes in to various liason locations and some which were things like Liberty and the restaurant in Soho with the big golden snail on the front.

The painting itself spent a day unacompanied at Victoria station once. A then boyfriend took a show down for me in Brighton, left the roll of paintings on a bench and then picked them up five hours later. Only telling me on his return. The red calf-skin A-Z is lost now. pulped maybe by the mouse that used to live in my studio bedroom who used my mother's communion gloves as a nest filler.