Meanwhile Embassy Signs Ltd. of Bellenden Road have, after some adjustments I made to the prototype, produced, in laminated plastic with perspex slide, a handsome multiple of my favourite device. I can't do better than quote my original description from 1965.

A shop that I pass regularly on the way to the studio had a small red and white plastic sign saying C LOOPSEEND. Since the shop sold yams and sweet potatoes I assumed that this was the name of the proprietor; the double vowels suggested Dutch however and I was puzzled each time I passed it.

Having seen this name for about a year and having thought it odd but probably liable to rational explanation, I suddenly came across its double in a second-hand shop in Ipswich in 1965. I was about to ask the shopkeeper whether he was any relative of his namesake in Camberwell when I noticed, in the back of the shop, many piles of similar nameplates, each bearing the inscription C LOOPSEEND.

For some reason I made no enquiry in the Ipswich shop but asked instead at the Camberwell grocers.

'Is this the name of the shop or a brand of banana or what?' and received the reply:
'No, it's broken, mate. There should be a sort of panel thing what goes over the top covering the letters so as you can sort of slide it along like, to make it say open or closed.'

I had failed over a long period to connect this sign with either its combined and opposing messages, or with the hundreds of complete examples I had seen in almost all the shop doorways in England.

My delight in the discovery has in no way diminished since I first introduced it into a painting (A Little Art History) shown in my first one man show. Indeed it has taken on new resonance as it reflects aspects of philosophy, science and politics that I have encountered thereafter. I'm certain that uncertainty has no more eloquent emblem.

C Loopseend, plastic and perspex, h15cm x w39.5cm x d2cm 2007.

The germ of my painting had been lying around the studio floor for two or three years, a left-over panel half used for a portrait sketch. I had idly taken it up from time to time, improvising on it with colour mixed up for a working day gone by (artists are great recylers). Shapes emerged and were cancelled out. Eventually some of these shifting clouds resisted change until the whole panel, though not resolved, drew to a halt. It hinted however at possible extension, looking now like a unit extracted from a larger work. I got Andy to make a panel of the same size (24.5cm x 30cm) and then watched the work spread, as if with relief, into the offered territory. Its shapes now suggested a yet bigger field in which some kind of calligraphic abstraction might... and yes, suddenly the dread tingle, the warning signal of the artistic imperative, the other side of whose alluring coin is inevitably long, lone sessions of excited anxiety. I ordered another panel...

Not, you might think, a surprising or original thing for an artist to be doing. But it is a long time since such a proportion of each working week has been spent on a single painting.

'Meanwhile' is a word I use all too often here to draw attention to the projects that interest me and are still in progress, some since the sixties and early seventies. In addition there is almost always a portrait on the go, for portraiture, especially in leaner times, has been my financial life-support system.

I do not yet know what size it will be or how long this painting will take, nor do I have a title for it or can exactly say what it is about. I shall refer to it (in occasional progress reports) as 'my picture', the ever present 'meanwhile' of my current working life. Here is a detail. More to come.

Another photographer, Heini Schneebeli, virtuoso imager of artefacts, is in the studio office at the moment taking pictures of Akan goldweights from my almost embarrassingly large collection. These miniature bronzes (often referred to as Ashanti weights), each an unique lost-wax casting, reveal a whole civilisation in miniature. They show every aspect of human activity from copulation to music making (as in the trumpeters above) and the animal world in all its variety. The abstract weights make a comprehensive inventory of ornament. We are making a book to be published by that guardian angel of almost all my printed work, Hansjörg Mayer, who on our first meeting (in a Corsham pub over forty years ago) announced himself my publisher.

Traders using goldweights 19th C. Photographs: Heini Schneebeli 2007.

CRUMBLING NEWS: a small announcement of a curiosity to come, made topical by my just having painted (if only to postempt another design offered by the publisher) its title page.

For quite a few years now a little South London enterprise has been brewing in which the haunting still-life tableaux of photographer Bruce Rae have provoked appropriately atmospheric poems by Terry Jones. These texts in turn have been worked over (as one might say) by me to provide a further twist of reflection.

Publication now threatens - probably towards the end of the year in a limited edition...

Watch this space.

The current June/July issue of Art in America features TP's extensive article on Hogarth.

A brief birthday calculation tells me I must get moving again with A Humument. The goal is to revise, edition by edition, the first working of the text as it appears in the first 1980 trade edition (which is itself substantially a reprint of the Tetrad Press limited edition of 1973). With bursts of activity as each edition approaches I have replaced over half the pages with new versions. 163 pages remain to be reworked. Since I announced my intentions in 1980, I have averaged only seven or so pages a year. At that sluggish rate I would have to live to the extremely unlikely age of ninety three with a steady hand and my wits about me to complete the task, so I must get a move on.

All this but a prelude to showing the first page done in my seventies, revisiting the first page of all which started the work in 1966. Here is that early version, appropriately retaining some of the original drawing, seen through a burnt hole in a newly extracted page.

Twenty five years ago Bill Packer, reviewing a show of mine, characterised my attitude to my work saying I was like Little Jack Horner. It upset me at the time but I now see it as a fair observation. It is in that spirit of self congratulation I produce this present plum to show pleasure in demonstrating how great lines of the future (here from Beckett's Worstward Ho) lie latent in Mallock. For the connection with my own work see the lithographic portrait of Samuel Beckett.

Although in the first ten years or so of work on I relied merely on stumbling across names and particularities I eventually got Andy to make, in a little index book, a handwritten concordance; monkish work in those pre-computer days.

It has stood the test of constant use though physically it is now even more battered and ageweary than its user.

But suddenly as an extremely welcome 70th birthday present I have a finely bound, smartly printed, book version thanks to the kind thoughts and diligence of John Pull and the indefatigable Patrick Wildgust.

Thus I've been able when thinking of commemoration, celebration or topical reference to look up a key word like 'seventy'. However I still rely mainly on serendipity, having chanced on 'ted heath' ("who is Ted Heath, mummy?") and 'bush' in my aleatoric trawl. It has offered me no 'blair' of course and (not for that reason alone) I'm glad to see the back of him. Welcome twelve-times-cited Brown!

To anon & Mike C : Feel free to talk on this blog however critically (or opaquely).

Re the Summer Exhibition I hung rooms I & II & can't answer for anything else. I don't really like to comment on another artist's work unless I am really excited by it as I am with the whopping Kiefer in Gallery III.

Lots to report but I've been more than a little fêted for the amazing achievement of reaching the age of seventy on May 24th or, according to my mother, May 25th, a date which Birthdays of the Famous tells me I share with Cilla Black & Dante Alighieri, in that order.

TP's works this year are congregated in Gallery 2. No coincidence since this was one of the rooms he was responsible for hanging. As mentioned they feature The Library at Elsinore and the pair of Periwinkle weeks. Also Superjew, a collage from American comics. The three prints are together in the left hand corner of the adjacent print room. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is open from Monday 11th June until 19th August.

Superjew, comic collage, h43.5cm x w35cm, 2007