After its hothouse incubation in the seventies appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second but it's quite an amazing number and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

I was a little doubtful about the propriety of going to the Mammoth Cave without a gentleman escort but if two ladies travel alone they must have the courage of men.

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.