Malibu Fires RCA 2024/25 Acrylic and chalk on Canvas 2m x 2m
After a few years away from this diary I have decided, with so much going on… to make my thoughts and feelings public once again. I have a great deal to process, most notably the death of my darling Little Dog. The death of my brother Stuart, the destruction of everything in Malibu, the gruelling politics of fear now so widespread and the institution of The Royal College of Art.
So… let’s fire this baby up. See how she rolls.
In September 2024 I began the process of leaving Whitstable for the last time. On so many occasions I had resisted going back. I was living happily in Portugal in a lovely home and mostly enjoying my life post Covid, post near death experience.
The Little Dog was still alive but ailing.
I had visited Whitstable and made arrangements to stay with my dear friend who I found to be in deep trouble. Her late stage Parkinson’s Disease was limiting what she could do and despite her valiant attempts her life was shrinking. I returned to Portugal but she begged me to come help her. Yet again, I couldn’t say no. My alanonic codependency, my desire to fix… to interfere (masquerading as help) got the better of me.
So, I moved back to Whitstable where I took up the relentless task of caring for my friend with Parkinson’s Disease. It was a gruelling and thankless task. As much as I cared about and loved her, I hated the disease. I tried to create a safe and beautiful environment for her but by doing so made my own life very dangerous.
I cooked every meal. I sat beside her. I dabbed at her brow. I drove her, did the gardening, the laundry and unpacked the shopping. I really hoped God was looking down approvingly at this living amends.
However, I knew (apart from a container of possessions) I had no business being in Whitstable. Those I knew, had known all my life, would finish up their days in much the same way they had for half a century.
Return of the Native I am not.
In the past two decades I had lived in so many different towns of varying sizes before I returned to my ailing friend. I had lived In Hollywood, Malibu, Tivoli, NYC, Carmona, Tavira and bought land in Walford, Herefordshire… and each of those places with a varying range of money to play with I met the same kind of people. I met billionaires and paupers. I made 500k. I made nothing.
The same kind of people made themselves apparent in every town, in every city.
There was the return of the native on the hunt for answers, there is always a bent lawyer, a miserable divorcee… In every town there is a heartbreak. The same story. The same closeted sailor. The same rancid coke addict stinking of cheap, over cut drugs on their breath and skin.
In every town.
Every town has a respected few who have no damned reason to be respected, and a few who should be respected but never are. There’s always the blowsy blond who marries the local business man and drives a fancy car. There is the drug dealer and the dreamer and the goody housewife and those who live out their days crippled with debilitating illnesses.
There is a local girl with a head injury who just wants the best for everyone whose coworkers laugh at behind her back.
In every town there are a gang of thugs who get together on a Friday afternoon and eat sea food, drink too much and lie about the value of their jewelry.
The feminist art collective who draw each other badly.
There is always the lacklustre husband who returns to the barren ex wife he abandoned (cap in hand) from another who takes all his money but delivers three sons.
There is the 50 year old woman who writes to her boyfriend in prison for five long years but when he gets out he sleeps with her best friend and breaks her heart and her bank.
These dramas, unchanged since Dylan alluded to them from his sleepy Welsh village.
Whitstable. Wealthy married couples (gay and straight) buy terraced houses, hire fancy architects who strip out all non load-bearing walls revealing ‘volumes’ and when they are done… install thick, white plastic plantation blinds, blinding the house from the street.
As Whitstable prospered (because of Oysters not yachting) so the local football team Whitstable Town became the toast of the local league. I had many a moment in those Belmont bleachers, under the rusty gasometer, when I was a kid. Every Saturday.
David Roy my step father played for the town, respected for his scissor tackles and party antics in the bar afterwards.
He always has a bottle of wine in the boot of his car for the ‘ladies’.
After nearly 3 years of devoted service to my friend something in me broke. I was gasping for air. Whitstable became a desert with nothing to drink. I was thirsty for change. Tied to the antics of my sick friend and her sicker family.
I applied to the RCA after my brother Stuart, died. My younger half brother. His death inspired me to get on with things.
A lifeline from heaven… the RCA accepted me and in September 2024 I started an MA in Contemporary Art Practice.
The first thing I did when I arrived and given the opportunity, I cut myself off from David’s name. I took the name I was born with… before David Roy adopted me or even knew my mother or me.
Duncan Paul Spark.
It hasn’t been easy owning that name… Spark. Even though I hate the name Roy and all it means, I am used to it. I am used to that name. My Mother applauded me for changing it.
Then, unexpectedly, my mother had a massive heart attack whilst looking after her grandson. He saved her life. Called the ambulance.
My Mother couldn’t believe her heart had given in. She berated the universe from her hospital bed.
“I’m not fat! Why did it happen to me?”
My Mother, with her boyfriend Martin, watch right wing news channel GB News. They wind themselves up fearing ‘the immigrants’. They have a particular fear of Turkish Barbers and Taxi Drivers who they believe are gifted their barber shops and taxis by the British government.
Then, in January 2024 my younger brother Stuart died. His heart gave up. He was two years younger than me.
Did you know he was jumped in Joy Lane? People… stopped their car, leapt out and the men punched him and the women hit him with their shoes.
Stuart was never the same. Unsurprisingly, he too struggled with his mental health. He was fearful and paranoid but refused to get help. He was sure they were out to get him. Run him down. Ever vigilent he told my mother they followed him, they were waiting for him to make a mistake so they could get him.
Stuart and his family left Whitstable and moved to a semi-rural part of Kent and kept goats.
Stuart didn’t want the doctor or the ambulance to come the night he got sick because he was sure they would come, hiding in the ambulance. It sounds terribly sad. His wife had begged him to call an ambulance but he refused.
A few weeks before Stuart died my Mother was staying with him (unable to be alone in her flat after her first heart attack) watching TV with Stuart’s wife and daughter.
My mother told me this story with the same crumpled face and indignant tone she had when she reminded me in the hospital she wasn’t fat and didn’t deserve a heart attack… she, is as it turns out, is perpetually indignant.
Anyway, they are watching TV and TV Chef Ainsley Harriet is preparing some mince meat. He is kneading the meat and breadcrumbs with his bare hands. My Mother says,
“Look at that, that’s disgusting, his black hands in the meat.”
The family were aghast. They told her she couldn’t say things like that. Even Stuart told her off. What? My Mother could not believe her son wasn’t defending her. He understood what she meant? Didn’t he? Had the world gone mad?
My mother was outraged they had challenged her racism.
Then Stuart died a couple of weeks later. And she said, rather coldly,
“Well, his paranoia got him in the end.”
Twenty or so years ago… and it might have been more. I was in a car with Stuart and he said,
“You know what David did to us. He should have gone to prison.”
“What did he do to you Stuart?” I should have asked. But I did not.
I froze. I stayed silent. It was a terrible betrayal. I betrayed him to keep my own position in the family as the only abused son, the only victim. I was not prepared to share! In fact, Stuart was giving me the opportunity to reach across decades of hurt and share some kind of support… or something. I did not. I stayed silent and we never spoke of it again.
I regret this terribly. I might have been the only person he could have spoken to.
On the order of service for his funeral there was a picture of him on a bench in his garden with his goats.
Goats on his lap. It made me cry but only when I couldn’t be seen.
I wrote two commisioned movies in 2024. One about a nuisence gangster and the other about an estranged brother and sister. I think one of them is getting made. We will see about the other one.
Oh, he’s a late bloomer they say.
In September 2024 at 64 years old I made the last, greatest bloom.
I went to the Royal College of Art to make conceptual art. From September 2024 to March 2025 I was perhaps the happiest person I have ever been. And, save for a few moments with occasional personalities, I kept on top of my resentments and anger and shame. I worked diligently in the school Herzog and De Muron designed and embraced every second of any chance presented to me.
I cast in bronze, I painted, I made sculptures out of body bags. I emroidered and knitted and painted some more.
In 2024 Palestine overwhelmed me. I had to stop looking at dead children in Gaza. I revisited Picasso’s Guernica to make a series of works in response to the horrors of Gaza.
Then, out of the deep dark ocean, two things happened in January 2025 which shook at my foundations.
The Palisades Fire began burning in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025, and grew monstrous enough to destroy the Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu.
The fire was fully contained on January 31, after 24 days.
A series of wildfires in Southern California driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, burned 23,448 acres, killed 12 people, and destroyed 6,837 structures, making it the tenth-deadliest and third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive to occur in the history of the city of Los Angeles.
One of the 6,837 structures burned was the beautiful house on Hume Road, Malibu… along with all of my neighbours homes, burned to ash in the Palisades fire.
As of today I have not really processed this.
I have seen pictures and videos.
I have pictures of the house, the garden, the view and the dog. Everything in those pictures is gone. The view, the furniture and the beautiful garden I spent years and years tending and brush clearing and landscaping and loving and loving and loving.
Do you remember before I bought it? I would drive from Hollywood up Sunset the long way through Bel Air to Malibu and sit in the garden of a house I didn’t even own and look at the Ocean? It was so magical. Watching the hummingbirds dart into the fleshy white cactus flowers.
Malibu Cactus Flower Erased 2024/25 Mixed Media 1.5m x 1m
I could have bought the house in Silver Lake but I didn’t. That house is still standing. Hume Road looks like an atom bomb hit it.
Everything has gone.
That’s enough for now. There’s loads to write about. I’m here for another two weeks. I’ll try and write every day.
I’ve touched on some of the themes I’ll be exploring in more depth these coming weeks. Notably, my time at the RCA, looking after my friend, the death of The Little Dog and my health which seems, at long last, to be defeating me.