This blog is, like many things I used to do in the spare time I took for granted, suspended. That’ll be the baby.

You can find daily digital flotsam and jetsam from me on Twitter and, as proof of the offspring, on artley.net.

Normal service has, perhaps inevitably, been interrupted owing to the birth of Gigantababy. He has his own site at artley.net, which at least keeps his mother entertained during those lonely night feeds. And when she emerges from the baby dungeon normal service will resume here…

# 1 – I’m at work until 19 June.

# 2 – I’m due at the end of July.

# 3 – I don’t know if it’s a girl or boy.

# 4 – Yes, my bump is massive. Thanks for pointing that out.

# 5 – I haven’t yet decided if I will tweet the birth.

Next?

I have no idea, and didn’t want to know when we had the scan. Gather all your telepathic powers and place your bet… come the end of July, we’ll find out how good your instinct is!

“I’m on the inside, but I’ve managed to get a message out!

“I’m a foetus, and by June I’ll be an eight-month old foetus trying to raise £1,000 for Cancer Research at the Race for Life, a 5KM route around the Eden Project in Cornwall. I’ll have to do it with my Mum, of course, as I won’t actually be born yet. But I’d really appreciate your help with the sponsorship. On go on – just a couple of quid? Do it on justgiving.

“Love Boblet x”

I’m on holiday from 11-27 October. So please don’t email me until I get back – you’ll just add to my already horrendous email burden. Adios, amigos.

There was some kind of hoo-ha going on about how the medal tallies are being presented; should they be listed by the total number of medals, or by the number of golds?

I wondered if it should be done on a different kind of points system, so gold medals are worth three points, silver two and bronze one. That does push TeamGB down the list a little, but here’s how the top 20 would look as of today:

1 China – 111
2 USA – 97
3 Australia – 47
4 South Korea – 40
5 Germany – 39
6 France – 37
7 Russia – 36
8 Japan – 36
9 Italy – 32
10 Great Britain – 31
11 Cuba – 13
12 Czech Republic – 12
13 Slovakia – 11
14 Netherlands – 11
15 Romania – 10
16 Zimbabwe – 9
17 Azerbaijan – 9
18 Hungary – 9
19 Kazakhstan – 8
20 Norway – 8
21 DPR Korea – 8

Technorati Tags: Olympics

I’m going on holiday. Hence, I won’t reply if you email me or phone me. I’m going to the land where the Twitters cannot go. Bye bye.

I counted them; I have 44 pairs. That’s 88 shoes. Which ones shall I ditch?!

Again, thank you for your generous sponsorship. Mum and I raised well over £1000 and the majority of that came through people on Twitter. That’s a social media success story!I’m still trying to sort the video out but a glitch between Flip software and Macs means there is no sound. Grrr…

I’m British, so I can’t vote in the US election. But I feel so saturated with election coverage that I deserve to have some sort of vote, so this is the best I can do.

Place your votes now!

I popped out for some practical, everyday work shoes at lunchtime, and here’s what I came back with:

It’s Sunday, and I’m praying at the church of the ‘latter-day beatnik’ and ‘gravel-voiced, beer-stained bard of the barstool’ Tom Waits. He is one of life’s artistic spectacles, a pure visionary. Nobody does it like Tom Waits.

As described and describing in an Observer piece from 2006:

“Around the back of Little Amsterdam, near the ancient rubbish bins and the furniture that has died from overuse, we are seated at a rickety table, beside on old broken-down, rain-warped piano. Waits is drinking black coffee from a paper cup, wearing a suit at least one size too small, scuffed biker boots and a wether-beaten look that says, ‘I’ve seen it all.’ His hair is thinner now, but still has a mind of its own. His guitar is nestling in a case on the tarmac, on which rests a well-work porkpie hat. He could have stepped out of one of his own songs.

“‘Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them,’ he quips. ‘Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.’”

‘It’s all in there,’ he smiles. ‘Crop failures, Dad dying, train wrecks. It all gets handed down, and everything you absorb you’re going to secrete. A lot of those old songs stick to you, and others blow right through you, and some of them get trapped in there. You keep hearing them every time you sit down at the piano.’

On booze: “One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keep people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out that it was liquor talking all along.”

On Leadbelly: “He died the day after I was born – 8 December 1949. I always felt connected with him somehow. He was going out as I was coming in. And, maybe we passed in the hall.”

“Someday I’m gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use tow sticks and something from a spider web. You gotta put it all in there to make a song survive.”

I’m running again. It’s 5km, at the Eden Project, on 15 June. If you’re reading this, you now know that I’m running and therefore have to sponsor me immediately before the guilt becomes unbearable.

It’s here, on the justgiving site.

Please, please sponsor me today. Just £1 from all my Twitter followers would more than meet my modest target.

Surely they mean ‘private’ bookshop?!

Hopefully this will end the bizarre comment thread here.

The best dog, ever.

We’re going to see Seasick Steve at the Albert Hall in October. I’m struggling to imagine him on that stage in his dungarees with his Mississippi beat box, but I guess that the point. He’s abandoned the US now and lives near Norfolk, I believe.

Old now, but still very funny.

I went to the mid-year preview show at the Royal College of Art last night, which had work from industrial design, architecture and what I think was called the design interactions course. (It was so I packed I couldn’t get close enough to read the labels!)

Butterfly clips – from the metalwork course

Pretty things - accessories from the goldsmithing course

Exhausted cutlery - love it

Write-down radio – combo radio and Post-It Notes on top, so you can make notes about good stations

Pop-out, flat-pack goblets – just loved these pop-outs for pimping up your beakers

Auto-erotic jewellery – the necklace tightens when you receive mobile calls or text messages

It has been a while since I updated this list, so here goes…

Things that really warm my cockles:

- The smell of new carpets, freshly cut grass and new Apple Macs.
- Piglets, hedgehogs, seahorses, elephants, rays, bears and whales. They make me cry.
- Proper decent cider, at room temperature. (Ice and lemon? Bollocks!)
- Powdery lavender-ish cornflower blue.
- Really fresh, lightly steamed green vegetables with salt and butter.
- Guy Fawkes night.
- The bones in tinned fish. Boiled bones – num num num!
- Horses’ muzzles. Come to think of it, horse smell too. (I’m not a horsey girl though, promise.)

Things that really get my goat:

- Small talk. Say something interesting or shut the fuck up.
- People that end sentences with ‘so’ or ‘or’. Try it – and then slap yourself.
- People that walk too slowly. That’s nearly everyone.
- When the bubbles go up your neck and behind your head when you lean back in the bath. I don’t know why either.
- Waiters that take plates away while other people are still eating. Come to think of it, I’d be happy if they left everything on the table till we got our coats.
- While we’re on the subject – bad table manners. And people that won’t hold cutlery correctly.
- The “that’s not art” statement. Why not just wear a t-shirt that say “I have no imagination and like all my answers on a plate”.
- Abi Titmuss. I mean is that the best we can hope to aspire to? What exactly has she done that merits that celebrity? Ditto WAGs.
- Trago Mills. Evidently Hitler has not left the building.
- Tuning radios and TVs.
- Pot-holing under water. I will eat my own arm before I do that shit.
- ‘Ambient’ music on websites.

I’m carrier bag free, and have been since Christmas. I’ve been an obsessive recycler for years, but recycling glass bottles really annoys me. What on earth is the point of smashing up a totally good glass bottle and remaking it as a glass bottle? It just can’t be economical to make one form new than to wash on used one, surely?

I have become obsessed (some would say a little late) by Seasick Steve. Dirty, raw blues is absolutely my favourite thing in the world. I heard my Dad playing Led Zep when I was small and wondered who Plant was doing an impression of, and then found Robert Johnson… you know the rest.He is, as he said himself, “the cat’s miaow”.

On Jools Holland, New Year 2006.

This year’s Christmas card idea started with the theme of recycling by using newsprint to make Christmas angels. And then I realised I could use the faces of people in the newspaper to become the angels, and so the Guardian angel Christmas cards 2007 were born.

Thanks to 123-reg.co.uk, my email doesn’t work. Use jemimakiss at gmail instead, anyone.

Technorati Tags: otters

You can’t go wrong with a hedgehog story.

Technorati Tags: hedgehog

I can see it! It feels like Glastonbury is always there, like a city I come back to every year or so | Arrive at noon on Wednesday and the Dragon field is almost full – already | Hardly any mud, just a few puddles and plenty of grass | Amazed that people bring suitcases on wheels. You’ll regret that on Monday… | My ninth Glastonbury – and seventh consecutive wet one | Always amazed at how superb the organisation is, dealing with 170,000 people | And always amazed at how huge it really is – 1,000 acres | A Mexican wave of cheering goes through the camp | Not in the spirit of things to fence of camping areas so that other people can’t walk through | Or to jump the queue for the toilet | Think the toilets are bad? Two thirds of the planet have toilets worse than these | Crashed out in the stone circle | Met friends at the cider bus | Partied at the quite brilliant Silent Disco | Organic full breakfast | Shiatsu massage | Shopping for even more waterproofs, mini stools (a secret weapon at muddy Glastonburys when there is never anywhere to sit down) and a sailor’s outfit for Will for Lost Vagueness | Beautiful handmade birdhouse in the Green Crafts field | Amy Winehouse was captivating | Lily Allen was “fucking shitting herself” | Rediscovered the satisfaction of manual work doing voluntary washing up for the Steiner School cafe | Hopi ear candle treatment and massage | Bought a turquoise, floor-length ruched Frank Usher evening gown for the Lost Vagueness casino | Watched Flamenco performers, pole dancers and burlesque trapeze artists at Lost Vagueness | Saw Mr Eavis, CBE, in the LV field | Bored of rain | Bored of mud | I thought ahead and brought bin bags for the muddy tent | The cabaret tent is the secret to a wet Glastonbury – hang in there for hours | I’m sure Ian Cognito played at my Freshers Ball – but he was rather nasty this time round and no fun | In the circus tent a guy is spinning two basketballs, one on top of the other, in different directions | Lime-green slingshot Borat swimsuit under a clear mac – not pretty | Candle-powered boats | Mexican hammocks | Shirley Bassey is a total legend – Big Spender was the song of the festival | Chas’n'Dave at 2am in the ballroom | Worried about the cows’ feet when they return | Closed with Woody Wilding: Staple diet of half the fucking world. Rice! | Trekked for an hour back to the other side of the site – that’s the price you pay for pitching | Walking on solid ground is a revelation | I love this place…

Technorati Tags: Glastonbury

Stelarc. There is no predicting what this man will do.

Nearly six hours on the phone, at least four sulks and several desperate pleas later – I have two tickets for Glastonbury 2007. I’d like to thank the Guardian’s sturdy web connection for muscling me through to the See Tickets site for a last-minute coach’n'festival bundle. I am £300 lighter.

No journo blagging here – just good old fashioned determination. See you in the Green Fields near the candle-powered boats. No sign of them just yet…

Yes, I have just spent two hours fifty minutes pressing redial on my phone and refresh on my browser to get Glastonbury tickets.

No, I didn’t get through.

And yes, I’m really pissed off.

On one hand, it’s good news for everyone that is going because it pretty much guarantees the weather will be superb. Six of the eight Glastonburys I’ve been to have been mud festivals.

On the other hand, I’m not giving up yet. Anyone with any bright ideas on how I can get in will gets to hear my festival performance idea with the working title “The Un-Brazilianed Brazilians”.

Technorati Tags: Glastonbury

I’m at the Popcorn comedy club in the Red Rose, Finsbury Park. Highlight of the evening was a ventriloquist called Nina with a toy monkey. She threatens to hypnotise the monkey with a lighter and he says she won’t be able to because it’s too cheap.

“But it can’t be a cheap lighter,” she says. “If it was you’d be able to blow it out.”