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I keep a biscuit tin of nails and screws on the studio shelf. Old Czech tins, the kind my mother stored buttons in. Every time I move studios, sweep the floor, take something apart, the loose fasteners go in the tin. I have never once bought a nail in my adult life. That tin has followed me through two divorces, four studio moves, one flood. Somehow it is the most permanent thing I own. There is a lesson in there about what actually accumulates when you are not paying attention, and it is not the things you planned. Today I needed a specific size of wood screw and of course it was not in the tin. It never is. You find the screw you needed three months ago, never the one you need now. That seems to be the whole system.

Admitting mine first. Years ago a dealer in Germany kept two of my pieces after the show ended. Not "storing" them. In his apartment, hung, where his friends could see. I found out from a friend of a friend. I never did anything. I did not want to be the difficult Czech. I still think about it in the shower. So. What is the thing a gallery did that was not just rude but maybe against the law, and you let it go because you wanted to be liked or keep the relationship? Late payment, work not returned, side sales, your name off the list, whatever. Tell me the story and whether you would tolerate it now.

Somewhere in the last year the old tuner in the studio stopped finding anything but Czech Radio Vltava, and at first this annoyed me because I like to choose. Now I don't touch it. It comes on when I unlock the door, goes off when I leave, and the whole day has a soundtrack of string quartets and a woman reading poetry I half understand because I am usually not listening. What I notice: the work goes better on the days I don't touch the dial. Not because of the music. Because the dial is one less decision, and I make enough of those dragging a rusted gate hinge across the floor to see if it belongs in the corner or by the window. I have a friend who works in total silence. He says the radio is noise. I think he is wrong but I would not argue it with him, he is bigger than me. Anyway. The station plays a weather report for farmers at ten past six and I have started planning my day around it, which is a ridiculous thing for a man who has not touched soil since 1989 to do. But the man on the radio sounds like he knows something I don't, and I trust him more than the gallery. That's the whole post, really.

Installed the room last week. Three hundred and some kilos of scrap, two doors off a demolished laundry in Žižkov, a church pew I have had since 2011, and about forty meters of somebody's garden hose. It works. You walk in and the light does a thing I could not have drawn. Then the email. Title and artist statement by Friday, 600 words, in English and Czech. I have been making this work for thirty years and I still write the statement like a man filling out a customs form. Everything true about the piece is in the piece. What is left for the paper is a kind of apology for it. So I write "the work investigates the residue of collective memory" and I want to go lie down. Possibly I should just send them the inventory. Two doors, one pew, forty meters of hose, and a note saying come and stand in it. But there is a young curator there who is very sincere and I do not have the heart. Anyway. Coffee first, then the customs form.

I was pulling rotten timber out of a skip behind a demolition site and there it was, buried under plasterboard. Old Czech welding mask, the glass is green-black and pitted, the leather's stiff as a board. Cost me nothing. It's sitting on a shelf now, facing the wall, and it's got more presence than half the things I've paid good money for. I don't know what it's going to become yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll spend a month figuring out how to use it and then I won't. That's the part of the process nobody talks about, the sitting around, the letting things decide what they want to be. My assistant asked me yesterday what I was doing with it. I said I was waiting. He didn't get it. Most people don't. But you people probably do.