I happened upon this book in Blackwells' Art Bookshop. It's quite a find - kind of Bernadette Mayer's Poetry Experiments List for visual artists. Individual ideas are good but it's more the overall approach that grabs me. Basically: start looking and drawing and assembling and living. A book to take you through into 2009.

Highlights of nearly a week in the U.K.?

1. The Jack Spicer 'My Vocabulary Did This To Me' volume arrived the day after Boxing Day just as we were having breakfast before leaving.

2. Jonathan Black's 'The Secret History of the World' which I'd never heard of and found by accident in Waterstone's.

3. Jack & The Beanstalk at the Camberley Theatre (Simple Simon: "The Giant's so big he has people bicycling up and down his back - he's a cycle path" - geddit?)

4. Getting through the whole Christmas Thing without a major row involving all concerned and the Wafflettes being just Outstanding with Grandma & Grandpa.

5. Two or three really great bottles of wine.

6. My Dad looking - given the circ's - pretty good.

And the lows?

1. The sense that the U.K. is up for sale, everything at 50 or 75 per cent off which confirms that we've been ripped off all along.

2. A copy of The Independent costing one pound. What? A quid for a newspaper?

3. Motor way stupidity & arrogance & hogging the middle lane for no reason at all.

4. Blackwells' 'Poets' Corner' poetry section which has to be one of the most uninspired collections of volumes I've seen (at least since last time).

5. The little tosser who hurled abuse at my wife as he cut in front of us on his bike on the pavement.

6. The sense of a culture utterly in thrall to 'Celebrity' - there's now an entire magazine devoted to Jamie Oliver? What?

O Albion ...

To come: New Year Resolutions.