You know when you have to be up for a delivery and they are coming between eleven and twelve? So you think the latest I can get up is ten-thirty and you are ready at eleven with the door open – and they don’t come till after one and you think I didn’t get enough sleep and I could have stayed in bed for another two and a half hours. So next time you don’t set your alarm and they come on the dot at eleven and then you think, do they know?

We had found a nice blue shelf for the kitchen which looks great against the yellow wall as well as being practical in getting kitchen stuff off the floor. Also, an old cabinet for tea and teapots and coffee and coffee pots and cups and glasses, suddenly the kitchen is inviting instead of being chaotic, I could sit in there now contemplating lunch without bread and wondering why two rings on the cooker don’t work, almost writing a Kinks song or a Squeeze song, an English song.

Pedro came to finish the windows but didn’t have a ladder tall enough to get to the very top of the big front windows for dazzling perfection, but after five years of pollution and pigeons, it’s dazzlingly clean by comparison. I kept him up to date on the Champions League draw for his team Benfica – they got Inter, Salzburg, and Real Sociedad, could be worse, Porto got Barcelona, Shakhtar Donetsk, and Antwerp, hm, never good when you have to pay Barcelona. Liverpool got, oh, wait a minute, they didn’t qualify, damn.

Two seshes today, first with NJ Brian as we went over the mixes for the Valley of Salt project. Later Kent Jeff and his project which now has a name, but I’m not sure I can tell you yet, haha. But I can tell you that everyone gets more creative after summer because the beach turns to winter and it seems easier to write better the more clothes you’re wearing, hm, tell that to The Beach Boys, or Prince.

I was watching the tennis and I was wondering if there was a polite protocol when they walk back to their stations and arrive at the net at the same time? Has there ever been a tussle? Haha. I wonder has there ever been a tussle in snooker? I saw something today about the Nebraska women’s volleyball team match, attended by 93,000 people. I was wondering how many of them had a Syd album. But we just can’t compare art to sport, although somehow in Miami at the moment the people have gone crazy over the art of Lionel Messi. So art is appreciated by the masses but more in a sporting context. Did you read that piece about the boxer who walked out of the Oppenheimer movie because it was “Just talking”?

Music today has been The Kinks‘ Golden Hour Of The Kinks (1971). I spoke to Dare today and we were talking about the length of records and how much music you could fit on a side and he brought up this album. An absolutely essential and brilliant record.

Music Of The Daze