Little Grapefruit reaches Douglas (not Douglas Kanning, The Benefaktor), eventually.
Listening notes: Enjoy Hans Zimmer’s piece The Docking Scene, from 2014 film Interstellar. Listen out for the Harrison and Harrison 1926 organ, Temple Church, London, played by Roger Sayer.
Share a blood orange with a friend, as they’re in season. The limited period that they’re available in the shops most likely dates this piece to January or February 2025.
Listening notes: Listen to Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, from Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde (1966) Think about being stuck in the middle of anything. And day dream about shaggy dog stories.
Listening notes: Hunt down A Camp LP (2001) by A Camp. Listen all the way through, while remembering lessons in algebra. Paint in the outline of a sketch of Manannan, his arms and hands mere tendrils of mist, enveloping an unsuspecting ferry, approaching Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man. Think about white horses in the Irish Sea, carrying St Patrick to Peel. Read about Nina Persson, Niclas Frisk and Nathan Larsson. And remember the late Mark Linkous, AKA Sparklehorse.
Listening notes: Fellow Travellers by Web Web and Max Herre (2023)
Listening notes: sit under an apple tree on a golf course looking out to sea, on a non-playing day
Count the rooks and think of other sedentary (i.e. non migratory) bird species.
Then count the apples on the tree.
Sing the opening bars of XTC’s song Rook (1991), but adapted to work as a round. The rooks might caw the chorus.
This is diversionary activity rather than anything more meaningful. It is a way to pass the time while waiting for the next ferry.
Listening notes: check out clarsach players The Willow Trio: Oystercatcher. Take some time to sketch out an autumnal tree with a 4B pencil, ready to paint when you have time.
Listening notes: Put on Hilbre Island by Don Woods (2021) and check the tide timetable to plan your own visit.
Listening notes: Listen to Lou Reed’s 1982 LP The Blue Mask. Think about blue ocean and a cloudless sky, or mist hanging gently on a calm lake. Drift awhile in an influenza fuelled fever. During the song Waves of Fear imagine Little Grapefruit on a grey-green stormy sea, with no escape.
Apologies for the intermittent posts. Blame university deadlines and a trip to Edinburgh to try to work out the origins of the different types of teabag envelopes my mum used for her writing (with no conclusion, as the shops she frequented during visits to the capital change supplier with price fluctuations). Flu, contracted I suspect on the bus, has led to a battle for an extension to my assessments.
FIONA FINKS 15 December 2025
Listening notes: search out Manannán by Hildegard von Gynku. This was released this year (25 July 2025). It is only a minute long. I do not know if mum knew this piece of music. She disappeared less than a month after the track was released.
Manannan was renowned as a warrior, king and god of people living around the Irish Sea. He leant his name to the Isle of Man.
My mum put bookmarks in favourite volumes. These are little green tea labels on thread, pulled from the used tea bag, or a whole green tea envelope, unfolded. She placed a couple in a book about Remedios Varo. I have catalogued each of these fragments of writing, however apparently trivial. During my archiving I spotted the mention of another Hildegard: the rather more famous one from Bingen, Germany (1098-1179). She was a remarkable woman, composing, and writing extensively on a range of religious and scientific topics. A large amount of her published material and papers survive.
My mum appears to have seen echoes of Hildegard of Bingen in the work of Remedios Varo (Catalan artist, exiled to Mexico 1908-1963). I can see similarities between an illumination in Hildegard’s book Scivias (1151) and some of Varo’s paintings. I see from a Google search that others, including Francisco Rabasso Rodrigues commented on parallels between the two women, noting Varo’s “esoteric practices, and her relation to time as circular or simultaneous”. I learned about this when reading about a manuscript Varo prepared on a sculpture called Homo Rodans. She penned that essay under the pseudonym Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, fictional anthropologist. Going by the sketches I have found as bookmarks, my mum appears to have found the same Wikipedia articles as me.
We will perhaps never know what my mum planned with her Little Grapefruit At Sea sequence. Her opening sentence in the excerpt I am sharing today frames this as a beginning, but written in the past tense. It refers, however, to events we have already read about in previous posts, some of which were written in the present tense. The ordering of these pieces is therefore challenging and up for interpretation. A loop of time perhaps, like Varo.
The Catalan artist also features in the forthcoming book GANTOB’s 25 Paintings, contributor copies of which are currently in the possession of The Benefaktor, who has also gone missing, last heard of on the Isle of Man in October 2025.
FIONA FINKS, 13 December 2025
Listening notes: While you have Big Star’s Radio City (1973) on the turntable, listen to the track What’s Going Ahn.
Reflect on how you would leave things if you knew that you wouldn’t get a chance to come back to them.
Gillian Finks left her papers in a mess. This story will need editing (eg for tense, grammar, spelling). This particular green tea slip is particularly sloppy. It’s almost as if she was on the ferry with Little Grapefruit and Michelle, writing it leaning on the railings, looking out over the Mersey, pencil falling off the edge of paper as the ship slipped out into the open sea.
GANTOB blog 