Head Space Daily Words...

There are few things in life as pleasurable as brewing your own stove top espresso, in one of those Italian style espresso makers; and the one we've just acquired is a beautiful little, single shot number. The taste experience beats your high street coffee chains and most other cafes hands down. I can remember being able to get a really good coffee in the Portuguese cafes on Stockwell Road but the times when you find a perfect cup are few and far between. From unscrewing the shiny silver contraption, to adding the water in the bottom chamber, then placing the perforated funnel inside the lower section and piling in the ground coffee, the process is a beautiful thing. After screwing the machine back together and placing it on the heat, you wait for the action to begin, for the steaming brown liquid to splutter and roar into life, flooding the upper chamber, sending your senses wild with delirium as the smell of freshly brewed coffee hits, rendering you momentarily high. Then you take that first sip and it is pure bliss. Well, I don't know about you but that's what happens in my kitchen in the morning, whenever I get the opportunity...

Head Space Daily Image...

My gorgeous little, single shot, stove top espresso maker...

Head Space Daily Tune...

Motorhead - The Ace Of Spades


Something a little different this evening. I can remember seeing Motorhead perform The Ace Of Spades on an episode of The Young Ones and I also used it on one of my early promos for the movie 48 Hours. Now you know…

Head Space Daily Words...

I went into town today to buy some socks on Oxford Street. I got off the tube at Bond Street and walked my usual route down South Molton Street, did a left onto Brook Street, went past the Hendrix/Handel house, where shortly after, the street meets Hanover Square, which runs into Hanover Street, eventually leading on to Regent Street.  Whilst walking along Hanover Street, I went past an art gallery called Blain Southern. I’ve seen this gallery many times in the past but it has never occurred to me to actually go inside, so I didn’t take too much notice. Unless it is obvious that the gallery is for the general public, I am not usually that quick to dive in. Art galleries, I find, can feel like they are for a certain type of person – generally ones with money to burn – which rules me out. What attracted me to stop and look through the window were the bright colours from inside. Several paintings hung on the walls, depicting splodges of colour and along the wall, nearest to the window, was a neat column of brightly wrapped boiled sweets (See Daily Image.) The central support column in the room was encircled by the same multi coloured sweets and in one corner was a large pile of identical confectionary. The room was calling to me and after seeing a woman walk in off the street, I felt obliged to do likewise. The exhibition features a group of paintings by Damien Hirst called Visual Candy from the early 1990s and the arrangement of sweets covered by brightly coloured wrappers is by Felix Gonzales-Torres. It’s all good fun. The hand out that you pick up when you go in encourages you to pick up the sweets, take them, move them around, eat them, the idea being that they will be replenished at the end of each day and I suppose making the comment that art is always changing, evolving, temporary – or some such thought. Anyway, with the interactive nature of the exhibition in mind, I brought a pocket full of sweets home for my boys. My youngest son got stuck into his first boiled sweet and lo and behold, it pulled out a loose molar at the back of his mouth. Talk about evolution, that was performance art!! If you're in London, get yourselves down there, let your kids mess with some art, grab yourselves a boiled sweet and as the Arctic Monkeys say - suck it and see…

The Blain Southern Candy Web Page

Head Space Daily Image...

A column of brightly coloured sweets inside the Blain Southern gallery as part of their Candy exhibition...

Head Space Daily Tune...

The Velvet Underground - Candy Says


What with today's theme being Candy, and the recent passing of Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground's Candy Says is the obvious choice…

Head Space Daily Words...

Whilst working in Docklands, the coffee shop at Shadwell Station has become my early morning retreat - filling the gap between dropping my youngest at the child minder's house and catching the DLR to work - without which I would arrive in the office ridiculously early. A relatively long freelance booking at a company brings about routine and certain habits and my daily fix at Shadwell Station has been mine. There are coffee shop regulars who sit at the same seats. The studious looking, predominantly bald guy with a tuft of hair on top of his head, peering over his glasses to read his newspaper. The elderly man who always asks for the two greenest bananas they have in the shop. The mixed race girl ferociously tapping away on her i-pod, chuckling happily to herself at whatever she is writing; and the East End old boy, with lank greasy hair and bottle bottomed spectacles, who comes in around 8.45 every morning, loudly shouting greetings, commenting on the previous night's football and declaring his love for Spurs. It may sound like groundhog day but there is something comforting about this regularity. It never feels boring. Everyone is on their own daily trajectory, influenced by whatever mood they are in, if they are running late, whatever stress may be happening, or what the weather is doing outside on that particular day. The music playing on the stereo also differs from day to day. Fairly homogenous, inoffensive, mainstream fare. There was even a Christmas tune on the other day - a Frank and Bing number I believe - which is way too early but a reminder of what is around the corner. No matter what is going on in the world, the same people will be sitting in the same seats, having the same chit chat with the owner, drinking their coffees and eating green bananas and pastries. Seeing this slice of life every morning for the past eight weeks has certainly set me up for the day ahead...

Head Space Daily Image...

Goodbye for now London Docklands with your floating Chinese Restaurant, gigantic steel and glass buildings and your pigeons...

Head Space Daily Tune...

Al Green - I've Never Found A Girl

A cracking tune from Al Green's Let's Stay Together Album from 1972!!! A year before I was born…