…from Cérét market for lunch last Sunday with Mary and Ann in Laroque des Albères. Can’t find the poppy jelly anywhere online. Anyone know where I can buy it in London?

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every nuance of solo vocals as they would be with dance music or theatrical cinema effects. Spectacular. And the Vivid team were really nice people. Laurence Dickie himself (most famous, maybe for the Nautilus) was running the demo.

Reported in The Independent today that the people behind the Yo! Sushi chain (overpriced mediocre kaiten sushi and loud house music) are launching a chain of pay-by-the-hour hotels in the UK. The love hotel concept fed through the Yo! aesthetic is a fairly depressing idea, although they are claiming that the inspriration is more luxury airtravel than Shin Okubo, so I guess we wait and see.

Since the 80s, Paul Spooner, Matt Smith and a few like-minded craftspeople have been turning out hand-cranked wooden automata which are in varying degrees witty, dark, twee and incredibly intricate. Once upon a time, their work lived at the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden, now long-gone. Since then I had lost track of the whole scene, but according to the Observer last weekend, this stuff is now considered very collectable. There’s a retrospective starting at Gallery 27 in Cork Street on September 20th.

Evidently Spooner’s intricate mechanisms are inspired by the four-volume Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors, edited by Franklin D Jones (Industrial Press, Inc, 1930). Still in print. I can see the fascination — just skip through to the Index pages…

Back in 1995, my Newton could do stuff like schedule meetings when I made a note that I needed to, say, meet Tim on Friday, and even made a good heuristic attempt at guessing which Tim. Here we are in 2004, and if I get an email from Peter asking if I can do lunch on Friday, Outlook can’t parse that and offer to put it in my diary for me. Progress.