The Road to Liliput

I spent much of the morning and early afternoon shifting files between drives ready for burning, piling old David Bowie songs onto my mp3 player, and then burning a couple of David B0wie CDs for Heather. In the process of listening through the burns, and a burn of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, I got a powerful sense of nostalgia.

Not nostalgia for an actual time, but for a state of expectation. I remembered there was once a time, which probably ended when I was around 30, when I thought I would be spending my life in some semi-bohemian life in London. It may have started to die when I failed to get a place at the Royal College of Art when I was 22, or it might have started to die when John Shelley went to Japan leaving me no cheap way to visit or live in London.

I remembered that I never wanted an ordinary job, but wanted a life where I made things. The fear of having to work in an office was one of the things that motivated me to produce artwork when nothing else would. A negative motivation, but a motivation none the less.

More and more I'm remembering the person I used to be, before I was flattened by having to conform to the limiting expectations imposed on poor people by what I must call - for want of a better word - the system.