Wednesday, May 25

I got up early this morning and immediately noticed that the weather had turned hot and cloudless. I offered a silent prayer that this would not switch back to rain in an hour.

I started the day with a long and productive meeting with the VAKEN handbook team, which leaves me with a few tasks that need doing before next Monday, when I will lead a session where I sit in India and everyone else gathers in Helsinki.

At 13:30 I had an interesting conversation with Sophie Hope and two women in Belgium about “wpZimmer – an international workspace for the arts based in Antwerp”. They have a participatory event running throughout June, and they want to find a way to run it as a short series of Miaaw podcasts.

My prayer had apparently worked because when I went outside it felt like a hot summer day. I decided to finally walk to the beach again.

Just before Temple Place I pause outside Abhi’s cafe to photograph the surfer mural. The building offers more than juice and coffee: it houses the Kovalam Surf Club and has a few rooms for travelling surfers.

I will walk the entire length of Lighthouse Beach. I will not see Hari to wish him a happy birthday, and I will not see Lakpay, whose shop has shutters and seems completely deserted. Instead I will sit in Leo restaurant with a lemon soda, reading Tim Morton’s short book All Art is Ecological.

In fact, after one lemon soda, a plate of cheese pakora, and one beer, I will have completely finished the book while occasionally looking up and watching fifty or sixty mall fishing boats return to shore in long convoys.