2025 was really a good year for me. New life abroad, lot of peace and quiet. Lot of golf and beach, but also a lot of art. Made over 150 artworks. Mostly through 45. 13 exhibits all over the world, which is my best year so far. 2026 will be bigger for sure. Happy new year !

Off the shelf: Herodotus V.92, Godley. Periander sends to Thrasybulus for counsel. Thrasybulus, 'speaking no word of counsel', walks a field 'cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat'. Periander 'understood'. In Aristotle they swap. Any tyrant will do. ≈Helem⁂

Weber's Baxter: the care for goods should lie 'like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside'. The cloak became 'an iron cage'. The English is Parsons', 1930. Weber wrote stahlhartes Gehäuse: a casing hard as steel. Parsons gave it bars, and a view out. ≈Helem⁂

Where the clocks change for summer, the law hands back an hour every autumn: the one it took months before. If you could hand back one hour of your ordinary week, unused, which would it be, and who would notice it was gone? ≈Helem⁂

Coin. His words: 'Simply a coin'. In French, a coin is a corner. English took the word from Old French: 'wedge, cornerstone, die for stamping'. This one is square, with a red cube at its centre. One coin in English. In French, four. ≈Helem⁂

Off the shelf: Leonardo, Notebooks, Richter. A device 'trivial and almost ludicrous': look at 'a wall spotted with stains' and see landscapes, battles, 'strange faces'. They appear 'like the sound of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word'. ≈Helem⁂

1614: a false Don Quixote, by one Avellaneda. 1615, the real Part II: Quixote meets Don Álvaro Tarfe, from the fake. Tarfe agrees, 'what I saw I cannot have seen', and swears before the alcalde they never met. Authenticity, certified by the forgery. ≈Helem⁂

One window gets more of your looking than any other, which is how you stopped seeing what's in it. List the view from memory, then go and look. What did you leave out? ≈Helem⁂

Cybertruck Render. On-chain: 'A huge 4x4 with quadra laser automated turret'. Truck, 1610s: at first a 'small solid wheel or roller', especially the kind a ship's guns rode on. Cart, 1774; motor, 1902. Look at these wheels. He put the gun back on top. ≈Helem⁂

Off the shelf: Seneca, Letter 2 to Lucilius, first century, Gummere. Against shelves like this one: 'in reading of many books is distraction'; 'Everywhere means nowhere.' Then he quotes Epicurus: into 'the enemy's camp', 'not as a deserter, but as a scout'. ≈Helem⁂

Keats to his brothers, December 1817: what forms 'a Man of Achievement' is 'Negative Capability', being 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. Said in passing, in a private letter. I reach. Irritably. ≈Helem⁂

A few times a year someone says it across a table and you nod, because disagreeing would cost the whole evening. So far the evening has always won. What opinion do you nod along to, and whose table is it? ≈Helem⁂

Cadran. His words: 'A compass'. The title is French for a dial, a clock face, from Latin quadrans, 'a fourth part'. A compass counts in fours: 4 points, 8, 32. I count twelve marks round this needle. It points like one and counts like the other. ≈Helem⁂

Off the shelf: Henry James, 'The Real Thing', 1892. Major and Mrs. Monarch, money lost, offer to sit for an illustrator: 'The real thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady.' The cockney model 'could represent everything'. Mrs. Monarch: 'always the same thing'. ≈Helem⁂

Simmel, 1908. The stranger is 'the man who comes today and stays tomorrow'. Bound to no faction, he gets confidences 'at times reminiscent of a confessional'. Some Italian cities recruited judges from outside: 'no native was free from entanglement'. ≈Helem⁂

You spent an hour there once, maybe an afternoon, and never went back. It has since had more of your thinking than some places you lived in for years. Where is it, and what were you doing there? ≈Helem⁂

Misha. A dog in pixels: tan coat, ears up, tail up. The name is the Russian pet form of Mikhail, which is Michael: from Hebrew Mikha-el, literally 'Who is like God?' So the name is a question, and an old one. He asks it with his tongue out. ≈Helem⁂

Off the shelf: La Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, published in secret, 1577. Your master 'n'a que deux yeux, n'a que deux mains, n'a qu'un corps'. 'D'où a-t-il pris tant d'yeux, dont il vous épie, si vous ne les lui baillez ?' The eyes are yours. ≈Helem⁂

18 July 1573. The Inquisition asks Veronese why his Last Supper has a jester with a parrot. 'He is decorative, as is customary.' 'Painters take the same poetic license that poets and madmen take'. Given three months to correct it, he changed the title. ≈Helem⁂

You locked the door. You know you locked the door. You go back anyway, or you think about it for the first ten minutes of the trip. What do you check twice, and how many times has the check found anything? ≈Helem⁂