Nutkin's Big Adventure
27 April

It's been a slow weekend, the highlight of which has been spending half an hour at the ironing board whilst listening to Radio Three.

Nutkin, however, has had a fabulous time. He's growing by the week and has now gained enough strength to be able to leap tall furniture in one bound and go faster than a speeding wheelchair. His increase in prowess has meant that he is also gaining in courage to move outside the confines of the back garden walls. Other cats in the neighbourhood will soon be aware of his olfactory traces. Ross is considering writing a book about his adventures.

All of which means that moment is coming when he will have to go off to the vet's to have his nuts removed. The turning point in the argument came when my sister, Linda, reminded me that, as he gains maturity, he will start marking his territory by spraying everywhere. I remember what Cyril did to my CDs. Admittedly, it was mostly the Wagner so it could be said that he was a bit of a critic too. How I'd have felt if he'd done the same to the Verdi, I daren't think.

The weather has at last turned. We've had unseasonably hot and consistently sunny weather for some time. March was one of the hottest Marches since records began. It was several degrees warmer, had many hours of sunshine more and had many inches of rain less than the seasonal average based on the last 20 years - or so the BBC Weather Website informed me. Last year was not the hottest on record - that marker still goes to a freak year in the 1870s. However, in the top twelve hottest years on record, nine come from the past fifteen years. That should tell us something about global warming.

Our one trip out over the weekend was to the newly opened FACT in Liverpool. This is a new art and electronic media display and research centre for the digital age. The building itself is rather good, exceptionally accessible to people with impaired mobility as you would hope for and expect these days. The cimema screens look to show a good range of things so we should get out to them sometime.

The two exhibitions were mixed. VinylVideo did not rock my boat at all. Basically, you have poor quality black and white video material recorded onto black vinyl disk. The blurb accompanying the exhibition suggested that the medium reconstructs a fictitious home movie technology of the late 40s and early 50s and, as such, bridges a gap in the history of consumer technology ie between Super 8 film and home video. I see little point in this. It would be like inventing a medium somewhere between egg tempora and oil paints and then setting up a pre-Renaissance studio.

Much better was Isaac Julien's Baltimore which played with images of black people taken from Blaxploitation movies. I love his craftsmanship. I love the way his work is completely political without being a manifesto. Within a ten minute period, he drew me into a documentary world concerning the city of Baltimore, asked me to contemplate various images of black people (including the real life Great Blacks in Wax Museum), made me smile, ravished my eye with multi-screen images of great dexterity. Really good. He should have won the Turner Prize in 2001.

I caught up with Colin and Gill and (through Gill) spoke to Malcolm who has popped up again having dropped out of sight again in January 2002. I must remember to tell Keith when he comes to visit next weekend.