The books I buy give me ideas. Not so much the content of the book, though sometimes, but the book as an object, the feel of it in your hands. Size, shape, colour and surface are factors that draw me to them. This was a flea bitten, faded and stained book, lying on the floor of the £1 section in Voltaire and Rousseau, Glasgow. Part of a house clearing no doubt. Books that have sat unopened, unloved for years.
I feel often I am drawing an idea out of the book itself, listening to it for clues and suggestions, following some lead it gives me. The book is more often a conduit for remembering, revisiting experiences and memories. Nuts stored for the winter.
Sometimes it seems as if book and idea were both waiting for each other and the occasion of their meeting, and only in their combination does anything happen.

The faded green led me to camping trips. One summer a week in 1981 with classmates near Kelso, organised by a very shifty Chemistry teacher. Military bell tents, faded green.
And other trips. Ones with our boys. Disasterous comical ones, made against our better judgement, determined to have a ‘holiday’. Sometimes two of our party still in nappies.
Lewis was maybe 3, Jude was a baby. Somewhere in Arran. Craigie country. A tiny old tent. We got bitten to bits by the midges. They loved Lewis especially and I remember him sitting in the tent, his body covered in bites and him saying unprompted “I love camping”.

Veils of yellow through glazing, puddles of turpsy paint left to sit and do its thing, or let gravity do the work. The loch was a more defiant deliberate piece of painting. Egg, baby, canoe. A chain of connection? What?
Frying pan/egg like a face. Like on the floor of Brueghel’s Wedding feast a strange peacock feather sits.