Gale force winds and slashing rain: it’s weather like this that transforms the umbrella into a clinical and indescriminate surgical instrument.

Colour & language … even though we are beautiful it’s another time of year when the A90 (between Inchture and Dundee) first thing in the morning smells of cheap aftershave (see: ‘Aftershave’; March 24, 2009) It also seems that “dipped headlamps” are a thing of the past, in all but the oldest vehicles? Taking Kathleen Jamie’s ideas about light and darkness (from the first story in her collection, ‘Findings’) a little further, it’s not only safe to say that “darkness” has been usurped by “the metaphors of darkness”, but that our attempts to banish the darkness by making light are no longer only about “being able to see” by extending the length of the day, but about ensuring that we can go faster through the day … and through our increasingly energy insecure lives: so the incremental adjustment “up” to the “angle of dip” of headlights.

Play Crack The Sky, Brand New / Gold Lion, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s / Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney / Iolaire, Iain Crichton Smith / Wind In The Wires, Patrick Wolf / Drag, Placebo / Crestfallen, Smashing Pumpkins / Red Right Hand, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds / Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down, Interpol / The Green Eye Of The Little Green God, J. Milton Hayes / St. Columba / Redemption Song, Bob Marley / Nightmares of the Ocean Lyrics, The Arusha Accord / 30 Secs To Mars, Echelon / Mechanical Angel, Henrikas Radauskas / La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf / Losing My Religion, R.E.M. / 99 Red Ballons, Nina / Coffee & TV, Blur / Satellite Heart, Anya Marina / Bliss, Muse / My Young Bride, Midlake / Beauty Of Uncertainty, KT Tunstall / Fairyland, Edgar Alan Poe / Banquet, Bloc Party / Blue, Joni Mitchel / Hits Of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg), Sonic Youth … so the third week of the “Colour & Language” project gets under way.

Rubik’s Cube, Athlete / Belong, R.E.M. / Send Away The Tigers, Manic Street Preachers / Balloons, Foals / Jimmy The Exploder, The White Stripes / You Are, Pearl Jam / Bullet To Binary, MewithoutYou / Sea-Fever, John Masefield / You Begin, Margaret Atwood / Dead Flag Blues, God Speed You Black Emporer / You’ll Rebel To Anything (As Long As Its Not Challenging), Mindless Self Indulgence / Hard Hand To Hold, Willy Mason / Pochahontis, Neil Young / Dulce Et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen / Stanley Robertson / Gotta Be Somebody’s Blues, Jimmy Eat World / Sunflakes, Frank Asch / I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, William Wordsworth / Crazy Man Michael, Fairport Convention / Rusted From The Rain, Billy Talent / I’m Glad I’m Me, Phil Boasta / Munkey River, The Presidents of the U.S.A. / Save My Soul, Kid Cudi / Havisham, Carol Ann Duffy / Mollie Hunter / Brain Damage, Pink Floyd … so the first week of the “Colour And Language” project starts: ‘A work on paper, or construction that emerges from a visual exploration of a poem or song lyric’.

Teeming with rain this morning, and dark too as I left the house with more of the same for a while now as the winter begins to take hold. It’s the start-day of the second week of the “construction project” with another wave of nearly seventy first year students. Last week began with “paper boats”—and another paper exercise related to the body—as a way of introducing (structural, strategic, aesthetic and material) issues of contemporary sculpture, installation and documentative practices. In addition to all the individual works that the students made, the week ended with a slow, silent procession through a shopping mall—as “a protective organism” for two of the group wearing “constructions” … this organism made it two thirds of the way through before agitated (and comically serious) security guards guided us to the outside through a side door, frightened that we were a threat to the (other) predictable consumers going about there material lunchtime business.

Not sure where we’re going this week, but we started out making paper boats again, and by the end of the day a working guillotine was in development.

I’m currently teaching ‘objective painting’ to groups of about 32 first year Scottish art college students. Each week, over a three week period, I have a different group and they work in the studio with me Monday through to Wednesday and on Friday of each week … It’s the start of week three … The first group returns in two weeks time and we’ll do something with sculpture and installation practices, and I’ll go through a similar cycle. It’s intensive and fun and exhausting and there’s a lot of good energy, but it can be hot and clammy in the studio.

The Musée de La Parfumerie Fragonard (39 blvd des Capucines) is housed in a former Art Deco theatre in Paris—it’s one of my favourite museums. Last year, in Dundee, I happened upon an enjoyable lunchtime activity: I began visiting the cosmetic area at Debenhams in order to “freshen up” using the different brands of eau de parfum in the shops range of free testers. On one occasion, carried away by the heady sweetness and my love for these expensive nectars, I overdid it and became for a time an indescribable and embarrassed pall of contemporary perfumery … (a stocky ape) stinking like the perfumer’s equivalent of a muddy palette, and wishing I could go home.

I now however have occasion to pursue this activity quite purposefully whenever the fancy takes me—in the name of art and poetry, and the scholastic search for truth in performance—before taking a little ramble through the town centre. Writing this from a table in Caffé Ritazza in the bustling lounge of Exeter Airport I’m smelling pretty nice—if intensely—of the combined fragrance of ‘Alien’ and ‘A (star) Men’, courtesy of the World Duty Free shop.

The other evening after riding the trails at Wolftrax, Lindsay and I were sat at the picnic table with a cup of tea talking bikes and trails while keeping a watchful eye on two of the young lassie’s that live local play that game where you have to get from one place to another without touching the ground; using planks of wood, bits of plastic … whatever is at hand. It was a beautiful warm evening, and they’re out playing, just the two of them, imagining, contemplating—this or that move—working together to help each other over who knows what imaginary abyss or hole in the earth’s crust … importantly they’re out in the world, feeling the textures of it’s fabric, learning to breath … It’s what I think we do when we ride trails: put sections, details, lines, experience together in creative ways so that in one sense we ‘don’t touch the ground’, and so that we can in another, play—and learn about our world—as we did as children.

Later, in a supermarket in Aviemore, we marvelled at the narrative possibilities of a man whose purchase on this Saturday night amounted to a bottle of cheap vodka and a tube of antiseptic cream.