I am looking to do an average two days of work per week – the past month has seen me in the office about three days a week.   I bike it into the office today for 1pm and arrive to see Mary King saunter through the door of EAT. Mary King has been artist in residence at The South Bank since November 06 . 

I should have started then, but didn’t cause of contracts and stuff. I should’ve though.   I was then supposed to start in January but the literature officer left two days after my starting so I felt that my time would have been wasted and suggested to Jude I begin in June, which I did.  All of this was my doing. Ridiculous really,  and if I could do it all again I would have started in November when I was first asked. Hindsight has twenty twenty vision right. 

Mary King runs Voice Lab at The South Bank and is a tour de force of sound and principle. She has sound principle and is a bit of a laugh too. We shoot the breeze about being artists in residence and it’s a breath of fresh air.  Meeting lasts an hour in the sunshine and feels qualative and a good opening for developments. 

I then step down to eat where I’m meeting Lucy McNabb but there’s half an hour so I ask a woman if she mind I sit at her table.  She asks if I will watch her seat while she gets a coffee. She’s tall sophisticated looking and I guess somewhere in the back of my mind that she is Polish.  She returns takes  a seat and asks “excuse me do you have a cigarette”. A conversation sparks up and turns somehow to what I do.  After admitting to writing poetry and being artist in residence she laughs to herself. She was waiting for her friend who is an hour late and had prayed for God to send her a sign.  I’m not a believer myself but I believe in people believing, if you see what I mean. 

She worked in a casino where she makes a very  healthy income but really what she wants to be is a poet and writer. One here's this alot,  but at this point Corletta (Italian, from Tuscany) brings from her Gucci bag a book of her poems.   Now I know why she was laughing - she had her answer. The laugh wasn't for me, but for her man upstairs We exchange emails and I see Lucy and move tables.   Carlotta lives in the shadow of The SOuth Bank. 

I have a substantial hour and a half meeting with Lucy McNabb that is brimming with clear ideas which we will move on. 4.45pm. It’s been a good day of quality meetings and happenstance. Just how it should be. I wasn’t in the office once. Look I know there are spelling mistakes and stuff in these Blogs. And I know that they are not riveting reading. And I know that at the moment they only skim event. But bear with me.

Abdullah called me, to thank me for the tickets, as I was biking it across the bridge to the embankment.  "I should go out more often" he said and then spoke enthusiastically about Orhan Pamuk at The QEH and the way he spoke both in Turkish and English. Abdullah felt included in the south bank. There's quite an artistic community in Clapton where I live  - he  saw many of his customers in the audience, who were suprised to see him from beyond the counter. Whereas this Turkish shopkeeper serves other people for his entire life, yesterday the south bank served him - art's for all. From the immigrant shop keeper to the casino worker.  I must thank Martin Colthorpe, the Head of Literature.  The ticket was waiting under Abdullah's name.