Last week the Guardian refered to Martin Amis as “Britain's greatest living author” and now they’ve got some nutcase threateting to top her self. The Guardian is being a bit wankery by indulging this witless carping woman who frankly should be dead by now or if not dead then locked away – flinging books across the room in petulant refrain and demanding the greatest living author’s title should be awarded posthumously, seems to indicate some sort of psychological malfunction.

As for literary greatness – it’s near impossible to determine who’s geniunely great. Opinion varies. The popular opinion favours the ‘at the moment great’ that won’t sustain while the literary establishment puts forth the same-old same-old group of contenders that won’t go away. So really who gives a shit about who everyone else considers the greatest, as one respondent to such a question said: "'Best' is a game for six-year-olds and consumers with the minds of six-year-olds.”

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
Love has no ending.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Afica meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

Two bubble bellied, beardy, white-van-driving, brickies standing around Knightsbridge admiring Burberry’s window displays.

Always for the First Time

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time

André Breton (1896 – 1966)

A list of some of the world’s most expensive paintings and their owners' run of bad luck, from an article I found in one of those silly weekend suppliments.

Picasso – Le Rêve (1932)

Picasso's erotic dream of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, was one of his most memorable images. Its owner Steve Wynn, the casino king of Las Vegas, was showing it to guests last October. Gesturing at Marie-Therese's unusual face, he put his elbow through her forearm. The hole, recalls Nora Ephron, who was there, was the size of a silver dollar, with two rips. 'Oh shit' he said, 'Look what I've done'. The rest of us were speechless. 'Thank God it was me' he added. His Picasso - $7,000 in 1944; $139 million by 2006 - is now unsaleable, it's value probably less than $25 million, according to London dealers. 'Damage is one thing, but publicity is worse' says one. Wynn's sale of the painting to SI Newhouse, the magazine king of New York, was cancelled. The Dream becomes part of a life that saw Wynn spend more on art than anyone from 1994 to 1999 ($450 million), build the worlds most expensive hotel, the Bellagio in Las Vegas ($1,700 million), hit the skids, and sell the hotel and much of the art. And now this. Life is not fair.

Klimt – Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)

Klimt's famous painting was sold for $135 million in June 2006 by Maria Altman of Los Angeles and the decedents of the Bloch-Bauer family of Vienna to Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune and founder of the Neue Galerie of German and Austrian Expressionist Art, New York. So far, everyone is fine and well. But for the Bloch-Bauers, the seven Klimt paintings they owned represent a tale of 20th-century misery. The paintings were seized by the Nazis on the Anschluss in 1938 and gifted tot he Osterreichsiche Gallery (the Belvedere) after the war. Sixty-one years later, the Austrian government restored five to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006, but only after six years' legal argument.

Van Gogh – Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890)

Sold for $82.5 million at Christie's New York in May 1990 (now worth $127.3), this mournful portrait of the doctor who tried to cure Van Gogh after his year in the St Remy asylum - 'This man is sicker than I am' the artist declared - is currently unsaleable at any price. Its owner is unknown, but the picture is said (by the Met in New York) to be in Switzerland and to belong to the Barilla family of Padua who own a number of Van Goghs. Unfortunately, Dr Gachet is the subject of a claim of stolen goods, dating back to 1939 and its transportation from Amsterdam to New York for safekeeping (from the Nazis) by Siegfried Kramarsky for its owner, Franz Koenigs. Koenigs was murdered in 1941. After the war, Kramarsky claimed the Van Gogh was his, as security against a loan. Koenigs did indeed owe Kramarsky, a debt secured by paintings but Dr Gachet wasn't one of them. The issue is unresolved and Dr Gachet remains in hiding. The owner has refused to lend the painting for exhibitions.

Renoir – Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby's New York in May 1990 (worth $120.5 million today), this Renoir favourite is another version of the artist's work in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It was bough in May 1990 by the Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito of Shizuoka. Saito made his unprecedented art spend of $153.6 million in two nights in New York to restore face and demonstrate his power with the Sumitomo Bank in Japan, which had damaged his credit rating in the Eighties. Unfortunately, his miseries resumed thereafter. His Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Company fell in value between 1990 and 1992 from $5 billion plus to half as much. The board reduced the Saito family's power over its affairs. In November 1993 Saito was arrested in Tokyo over the development of a golf course; he was charged with paying a bribe of Y100 million (about £70,000) to the government of Miyagi to make illegal zoning regulations. He was found guilty but his three-year prison sentence was suspended on health grounds. He had diabetes, and died intestate in March 1996. Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette, valued on the books at $100 million, came on the market in March 1997 and was sold to an undeclared buyer for a price 'around $45 million', according to Sotheby's.

Picasso – Garçon à La Pipe (1905)

The Rose Period masterpiece was sold by the Whitney family of New York for $30,000 in 1950, to an unknown buyer; then for $104.1 million at Sotheby's New York in May 2004 ($111.2 million today) - when the underbidder may have been David Gaffen. The London art trade thinks the buyer might have been Philip H Niarchos, the Greek shipping heir. The painting was owned in the Thirties by the Mandelssohn-Bartoldy family of Berlin. The M-B bank was Aryanised by the Nazis in 1938 and its assets seized. The family's descendant, Professor Julius Schoeps of Potsdam, gave notice in 2004 that he is taking legal advice on whether the Picasso was a pre-war Nazi duress sale. The claim was dismissed by Sotheby's in 2004, but since another sale was withdrawn by Christie's last year under Schoeps challenge, Garcon a la Pipe is probably unsaleable until the issue is resolved.

Van Gogh – Irises (1889)

Sold for $53.5 million at Sotheby's New York in 1987 ($95.7 million today), this vivid study of the irises lining the drive of Van Gogh's lunatic asylum at St Remy passed from Joan Whitney Payson of New York to the Australian Property developer, brewer (Castlemaine XXXX), and media baron Alan Bond. Bond bid $53.5 million but was unable to pay, even though the auction house loaned him half the money. He never took possession the of the original and had a copy made. The dealer at Sotheby's who bid for Bond, the late Billy Keating, asked Bond repeatedly once the picture reached $40 million, 'Do you have the money, Alan?' Bond pressed on. Questions were raise in the Australian courts about Bond using company money (Dallhold Investments) to pay for private art purchases. In the early Nineties, Bond's empire tottered as banks called in his immense debts, and in 1994 he was jailed for three years for perpetrating Australia's biggest corporate fraud: he owed creditors a $1.8 billion. Bond went bankrupt but was bought out of bankruptcy in 1995. His art collection was auctioned in London: Irises went to the Getty in California for between $40 million and $45 million.

Aside from the fact that I can’t even comprehend some of these figures – and think that works of art shouldn’t be sold to fuckwit gazillionaires – I think it’s safe to say that we, my friend, have very impeccable, but very expensive taste. (see Klimt’s price tag)

I am officially addicted to Hipp Organic baby food – apple and blueberry dessert is yum yum yum.

In addition, thinking of relocating to Manchester on account of bad boy wordsmith Martin Amis taking up a teaching post at Manchester University. (No I don’t know him personally but now he’s back from Uruguay I’m hoping we’ll become very good friends indeed. Haha)

I wonder if they’ve got electricity up North otherwise keeping this thing updated might be very, very tricky.

P.S For my birthday I want two things: Martin Amis reciting Keats to me in a gondola in Florence. And 24 jars of Hipp Organic Banana & Rice Pudding.

Today has been wondrous and beautiful and unlike any other Valentine's day.

You’ve set the standard pretty high – it was the most original and imaginative Valentine’s Day gesture in the history of Valentine's Day.

I thank thee with a purple bunny.

I've been a good wife, the best wife your money could buy.
Linda Darnell – A Letter to Three Wives

The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither immoral nor illegal.
Clifton Webb – The Dark Corner

I can't change my feeling toward you any more than I can change the color of my eyes.
Paul Muni – I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

All you need to start an insane asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.
Eugene Pallette – My Man Godfrey

The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.
Eric Blore – Sullivan's Travels

'My nipples are sore.'

I Am in Need of Music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)

'I've never had a wank to The Clash, as it goes.'

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager”.

William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997)