I have not been adding to this blog for quite a long while, despite having had plans for various pieces I wanted to write. Up here in the north is normally an ideal place to catch up on projected writing. But neither have I been making the visual work I had provisionally intended to do when we came north at the end of September, retreating from the seemingly endless sound of building work on the house opposite us in the street. 

Partly this has been due to my not being entirely well, but if I’m honest I think it has had more to do with the disturbance caused by the books I’ve been reading: bell hooks on place and on the visual politics of art and, more significantly, Naomi Klein’s extraordinary analysis of the digital mirror world, Doppelganger. Terrifying as what she reveals is in so many respects, it’s also clearly the case that it’s better to have a more complete understanding of what is happening in the digital world than not. 

It’s not clear to me at present whether it’s better simply to withdraw as far as possible from that world – I have in any case been banned from Facebook for some time, for reasons that are entirely unclear and, as far as I can tell, unfounded – or to continue with this blog. No doubt something will prompt me to go one way or the other.