Mafalda arrived today with a box full of doorknobs which signalled progress and immediately made me put on my Doors T-shirt. As it happened, she didn’t have the tools she needed to put the knobs on the doors (plus one door is off its hinges), so she was touching up bits of paintwork and said she’d be back tomorrow for this monumental day when the doors are alive. It’s the last stage of this part of Phase 2. We are €400 away from the goal in the GoFundMe campaign for Phase 2, and we estimate that the renovation has cost close to €20,000, so the GoFundMe campaign has given us nearly half, and we thank everyone for making this possible. Next is Phase 3, and we estimate that the costs of shipping everything, going to England to oversee the loading, the actual transportation and VAT on entry into Portugal and storage in Porto whilst we slowly move everything in, will cost about the same as the renovation, so we will see how much we think we can raise on our own and make the balance the GoFundMe goal. Then you are invited to the opening party, another reason to come and visit this Bohemian paradise.

Today we went to meet with Castro, he wants to put a show on for us here in Porto on the 30th November. We will keep you posted as to where and when we have confirmation. We ran around town in the heat and noticed the breeze was warmer than usual, I’m hoping we’re not going to get the krazy heat wave they’ve been having further south in Spain, Italy and Greece. Having said that, I talked to Andreas the mixer who lives in Gävle (two hours north of Stockholm by car) and it was thunder and lightning and torrential rain. He told me that in Sweden there has been no summer. Did anybody read about the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream? That didn’t freak me out at all.

We went by the record store, and somehow I went metal today and got the Paul Gilbert instrumental album and Mammoth WVH 2 (2023), EVH’s son. I also got the Nick Mason – See Emily Play/Vegetable Man (2022) 12-inch for the collection, a companion piece to the album, no new tracks but an attractive etching. In the future, will etchings be valued, will coloured vinyl be valued, will my two Bowie Barbies be valued? Will The Archive be valued in 2123? Will someone ask how come there’s so little hip-hop? Perhaps by then, there will be separate buildings for different genres and there will be a hip-hop building with a hip-hop expert who is desperately trying to get people interested as a swing expert might try to get people interested in swing today. What music will the youth of 2123 be listening to?