Perhaps the most magical address in London is 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields, otherwise known as Dennis Severs’ House. I wrote a piece about its Christmas display for The Times several years ago (unfortunately not now available free online), but I hope to write again about its “everyday” face soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading Severs’ own description of it and its (re)creation as a piece of living history, simply titled 18 Folgate Street. The book is as delightfully nutty and eccentric as the house in the flesh. (Although I have to confess I’m not entirely convinced by his naive-style collages.)

Yet it does explain the house very well. Indeed if I had to sum it up on one phrase it is in his definition of atmosphere as “the space between things. He created what might be called an imaginary theatre display – a whole family lives – eats, sleeps and breathes – in the house, but they’ve always just left the room before you entered – leaving a scent, a half-eaten apple, or other similar signs of their presence. READ MORE

Anatole Kaletsky is always worth reading (even if he always delivers his copy 10 minutes after the absolute, final deadline) – here’s his take on the economics of 2006.

Combining these three negative factors, a significant global slowdown in the year ahead seems almost certain. But a mid-cycle slowdown is very different from a late-cycle downturn of the kind that presages outright recession. In the case of Britain, which was the first of the major economies to tighten monetary policy and experience a slowdown, the worst may already be over. Assuming the Bank of England reduces base rates to around 4 per cent by late summer, I would expect a return to trend growth of around 2.5 per cent and a stable housing market this year.

So not too bad for the UK, but I’d be more worried in the US – which matches my entirely lay view – those deficits have got to bite at some time.

Unfortunately, however, for the environment it is almost certain to be another bad year. Today’s news: fires and record temperatures in Sydney, and the biggest whale slaughter in a generation.

Traditionalists often complain of the lack of craft in modern art, yet the photographer Tom Hunter, in his composition and use of light, shows an equivalent level of skill to any “Old Master” with horsehair brush and oils. There is something astonishingly painterly about his work with a lens.

It is thus something of a shock to come suddenly upon his show at the National Gallery. Walking into the Sunley room, your gaze is attracted by the distant prospect – several galleries on – of Van Dyck’s famous giant equestrian portrait of Charles I. Then you look left, to an image that seems very familiar; a young woman stands holding a letter in the light of a window.

Looking closer, you realise that while you might well have seen it before, this is not the familiar Vermeer painting, but Hunter’s Woman reading a Possession Order, which was modelled on it. Made in 1997, and winner of the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award the following year, it is a highly accessible, yet highly effective, image. Instead of the rich bourgeois setting of the original, this is a dilapidated Hackney room, and beside the woman is not a bundle of richly embroidered cloth but a baby, who looks anxiously at his straight-backed mother, who is carefully holding herself together. READ MORE

Now here’s some depressing news …

Two Booker novels, submitted anonymously and unidentified to publishers and agents, got almost universal rejections. As someone who refers to JK Rowling getting six rejections just a little too often, I’m not surprised.

Then, if you’re suffering from New Year-itis you mightn’t want to read this one: if you’re British you probably noticed that story about the single mother of five who died by “falling out of the loft while getting her children’s presents”. You have to wonder why that story was allowed to run in that form (surely an off-the-record word from a policeman would have stopped it … then again perhaps not, given the desperation for a story), because it looks like it is much darker – a case of suicide.

Then, one of my predictions for 2006 – we’ll see a lot more attacks from the “old” media on the “new”, like this:

There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere — the big-bang “electroniverse,” where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of “blogs” (Web logs) and “bloggers” (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new “citizen journalist,” I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

Well except in sentimental, and unfactual, Christmas stories …

Imagine that you are told that the whole of London is about to be destroyed. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, all of the treasures about to be swept away. You’ve got a magic wand and can save just one room. Which would you choose?

Oddly enough, I think I’d chose Gallery 46A at the V&A – the Cast Court – which contains not one original object, but crams into one room an entire art history of almost two millenniums of Europe in a mad, exotic menagerie. There are tombs, fonts, doors, panels, freestanding statues and crosses, portrait busts, monumental memorials. The originals were in bronze, in stone, in wood, but here they are in plaster – that fragile but infinitely malleable magic dough – carefully copied and coloured, preserving every crack and grain, every indentation left by weary buttocks over the ages; not quite real but not quite fake. READ MORE

I made a resolution many years ago not to make new year’s resolutions, and I’ve kept it pretty successfully, but I decided this was a good point to put off procrastinating and join the Green Party.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, hanging back because I don’t really see myself as the joining sort, and, let’s face it, they do have a very specific image that I don’t quite see myself as fitting – but the need to do something drastic about global warming is just becoming overwhelming.

The Guardian today has a fascinating interview with a palaeoclimatologist, whose speciality is the Jurassic.

“A few years ago people were saying, ‘OK, well, we’ll look back a million years or so, something like that, to see the effects of climate change’,” she explains. “They thought that we’d still be in the kind of world that we currently know. But now we think that for a vision of what the Earth’s going to be like in a couple of hundred years, we may have to go back to a time before the ice, to when it was a greenhouse world. Because if you look at the figures on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s rising very, very fast. It’s beyond the levels of CO2 that we classically know from before the last ice age. If it keeps accelerating at this rate then in a matter of just a couple of hundred years we’ll have levels of CO2 that we last saw at the time of the dinosaurs.”

And when I wrote to Camden Council as a leaseholder in one of their blocks – in response to a statement that they were going to let an electricity contract – asking about using green alternatives, I got back the standard letter about it being too expensive but they were still looking at it. So they’re going to let a five-year contract to traditional suppliers.

I look around at all of the flat roof-tops around me, from four storeys to 17 storeys, and wonder how many wind turbines (and solar panels) you could put on top of them that have – according to this site – at least neutral cost implications, and considerable environmental benefits.

There’s a council election next year; I think a few Green councillors would be a very good idea. Might concentrate some minds among the staff.