A global view

I head down to the Globe, the reconstructed Shakespearian theatre on the banks of the Thames next to Tate Modern, to pick up some relatives who have come to stay with us. While the play finishes and the sun sets there's time to stand on the Millennium Bridge and feel the wind in my face to the sound of gulls. It's a dark, warm, rainy evening and as the light fades almost visibly, the lights from the office blocks opposite grow correspondingly stronger. The buildings gradually become almost featureless blocks of concrete, stone and glass.

In preparation for the mass exodus of the audience from the theatre, the doors are opened and a great belch of music, drumming and applause is expelled into the river air, attracting a cluster of tourists with video cameras who film the closing moments of the play through the doors.

Propelled by the tide, party cruisers head downstream to the sounds of more music and laughter.

The Thames is a slice of something really gorgeous running through this city.

From Waterloo Bridge

The South Bank is like the seafront of London, especially around the London Eye, where the air is rich with the sounds of international languages and the smells of fresh doughnuts and burgers. Shut my eyes and I could be back on Hastings pier - until Big Ben chimes.

At a distance, from Waterloo Bridge, the view is more contemplative. The Thames arcs past the Houses of Parliament, a great slice of nature meandering through the stone and concrete, its tides rising and falling sharply over the day. A sliver of sandy beach on the southern side survives from the time of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s. We passed it the other day and there was a full-on beach party going on there. The river is busy, particularly at this time of year, with tourist trips, but barges as well. Nothing like the massive tankers I saw on the Rhine the other week, though, which seemed to stretch from one bridge to the next.

What is striking about the view is just how modern most of the buildings are. The Shell Centre tower, Royal Festival Hall, the Festival Pier, the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridges, the London Eye, Millbank tower, Portcullis House, next to Big Ben: much of it has arrived within the last 20 years. Most of the parliament building is only 19th-century, so not so old. But it's unmistakably London.

Swiss perspective

Art Basel closed this weekend. It's the largest art fair in the world - nearly 300 galleries, 2,500 artists, 61,000 collectors, dealers, artists, curators and general browsers - and a market where there are still buyers. All the big art world figures are there, fresh from the opening of the Venice Biennale the week before, along with celebrity figures such as Roman Abramovich, Brad Pitt and Naomi Campbell. Sales are surprisingly buoyant, but is it a sign of the end of the recession, or the bounce of a dead cat?

I was staying in the medieval part of town; it's all narrow roads, steep hills, market places and tram lines. As well as working, I had time to visit some of the relatively new museums in the city. The Fondation Beyeler in the north, designed by Renzo Piano, is busy with visitors from the fair, which is a short tram ride away through suburbs and green, cow-filled fields. There's a huge Giacometti show, and an exhibition showing modern works with incredible sculptures from Oceania and Africa, which stole the show for me.

To the south, similarly handy on the tram, is Schaulager, which blew me away as a building, and which is worth a visit in itself, regardless of the great exhibition "Holbein to Tillmans". The building, by Herzog & de Meuron, looks like it shouldn't work at all - it's as if you have to walk through a deserted mud hut to get into the forecourt - but it does. What's the point of a gallery that threatens to overpower the works it is displaying? From inside it seems as if it continues upwards for ever, and the glimpses of the underwhelming industrial zone the building is set in pour in through the windows in a beautiful way. Spaces widen and narrow. Yet it isn't overpowering, and I see works by Holbein, in particular, and David Claerbout's Section of a Happy Moment as if for the first time.

Returning from the Beyeler, the tram passes the German railway station (Germany, France and Switzerland all share boundaries in the city). It was the scene of a moment of family history, where Naomi's paternal grandmother finally managed to escape Nazi Germany in November 1938, being smuggled from the Germany part of the station to the Swiss, to be ultimately reunited with her family exiled in London, where they flourished. Basel is an ideal place to consider the importance of the European Union, the unity of the countries that converge on it, and the outrage of Britain returning two extreme right British National Party members to the European Parliament in the recent elections.

By the pool

I've never found it so easy to sit by a pool for too long - some of the people staying at the same holiday village as us in northern Cyprus seemed able to nurture their tans from straight after breakfast until dinner, gradually shifting their sun beds over the day so they were in line with the sun, like human sun dials.

If I'm packing for travel, the essentials are a passport, ticket, money, insurance, sketchbook and pens, a novel or two and a penknife. I could manage without a camera now, except it's good to have photographs of everyone having a good time, and being able to record the children growing up. The drawings can never do that. I'd sooner be without a novel than a sketchbook. The clock is ticking every day in terms of drawing. We may be out to relax, but coming home without drawings is too awful to contemplate.

So we sit by the pool for a bit, and the sun's not too hot, and the pool is quite cold, except we all go in, the kids particularly keenly. And then I have to draw, whatever is in front of me. I'm not sure it really matters at all what I do draw. If I had to spend time in solitary confinement I think I'd still manage to keep going. And then I read a bit, until it's time to draw a bit more, with a slightly uneasy feeling that the sun is drying out the pens, even though they are in the shade under the sunbed. But it's best to use them before they do dry out. Pencils are so much better in this respect.

By this time, we're about 90 minutes into the day. The world beyond beckons. How do people keep going by the pool all day? Some are evidently happy to lie low all day, on their own, with a thick novel and time on their hands. Perhaps it is because there is no extradition treaty between northern Cyprus and Britain, and the weeks spread before them. But don't quote me on that.

Slowing down

As part of Slow Down London, a festival that aims to help us all take things more calmly and perhaps appreciate life better for it, the Skylark Galleries on the South Bank are spilling out on to the Thames riverside walk to extol the relaxing benefits of the work of its artists. People will be around from 2-6pm this bank holiday weekend, from Saturday 2 May to Monday 4 May, in the gardens next to the Oxo Tower. See you there.

The tide goes out

Northern Cyprus is fantastically beautiful in many ways. The mountains that run south of Kyrenia, or Girne, are spectacular, with castles and ruined abbeys, olive trees and palms. But a mile or so towards the coast a tide of development has risen, and then fallen dramatically in the past few years. These unfinished buildings, that all show no signs of being currently worked on, are on a 15-mile stretch of one road. There are many more, hundreds more.

Being there

Google’s Street View was launched in the UK last month, with 360 degree views of 25 cities now available as part of its mapping service. This is handy for such things as checking what the hotel you are heading for looks like or whether your mate really lives in the mansion they are boasting about. And because most of the images were taken last summer, they offer a vision of that time before the recession, when we still had Woolworths and MFI on our high streets.

It’s also been handy way, I have found, of reminding myself when I get home of the details and surroundings of some of the places I have drawn. As I draw in ink on site and then work with colour back in the studio this can be a handy way of recalling how buildings look, and how the colours may work. It’s probably better to use images from a digital camera, which will at least be free from companies now collapsed into liquidation, but the online option is a handy alternative.

This system presents problems, of course, for the visual artist. For a start, Street View only offers the view from a road, so you are unlikely to quite get the panorama that may have grabbed you from a park, for instance, or pedestrian routes. It’s a car-centric view that it offers, and bike-centric to an extent, which is only a part of any town or city. I will find it much more useful when Google finally gets around to introducing Cafe View, showing panoramic views from cafe windows around the globe.

The other overriding problem is that there is nothing quite like the experience of being somewhere. Why add information to my drawings that didn’t grab me when I was there? Drawings don’t have to be comprehensive to work — in fact the opposite is true. Patience, energy, threatening rain clouds, the amount of ink a page can take, children who needing picking up from school: all have an effect on when I consider a drawing “finished”. Getting everything in has nothing to do with it.

My point is, Street View may be quite handy sometimes. That’s all.

Regent Street, London

James Hobbs: Skylark 2, 3-22 March 2009

I'm the featured artist at Skylark 2 at the Oxo Tower on the South Bank, London, from 3 to 22 March, showing prints and drawings, some of them so new I still haven't finished them. I will be at the gallery on
Thursday 5 March from 6-8pm
Friday 13 March from 11-6pm and
Sunday 22 March from 11-6pm
so drop in and say hello if you're passing by.
The gallery is open daily from 11-6pm, closed Mondays.

Skylark 2 Gallery
1st Floor OXO Tower, Riverside
020 7401 9666
www.skylarkgalleries.com
Nearest Tube: Waterloo/Blackfriars
A few minutes from the National Theatre
Entry free

Image: James Hobbs, Paddington Station, £320/£120 framed, £90 unframed.

Building in the City

On the bike, and down to the City. At the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters, close by Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Spitalfields, you can sense the squirming inside as they try to justify giving themselves the usual bonuses for – for what exactly? For doing so badly that it is now effectively nationally owned. Its former chiefs, and those of the equally unsuccessful HBOS, have just been quizzed by the Commons Treasury Committee. I don't get the idea they have lost too much sleep about things.


The new buildings still go up, too. The Pinnacle (barely above the ground but promising 63 floors), Heron Tower (36 floors), St Botolph’s (a piddling dozen or so floors)... all add up to more than enough office space for the city. Another site close to Spitalfields (and near the cheerfully named Frying Pan Alley), currently up to 25 floors and rising, is for student accommodation. This is more like it, surely? Who is rushing to get office space in the City at the moment?

Time

St Pancras railway station, gateway to Europe, and bits of England.

Looking out

It’s cold – it’s really cold, and the idea of standing around outdoors drawing isn’t doing anything for me. So it’s warm in comparison with Alaska, but you get the idea. And daylight is short. Winter can have the same effect on drawings as it does on lawns: it gets so darn cold and dark it’s hard for anything to grow with vigour.

Unlike lawns, I’m able to head indoors. Cafes often have those long, high tables running alongside the windows that are probably designed to squeeze more sitting customers in, but which are, more importantly, ideal to draw from. The seats are usually so hard and uncomfortable it’s impossible to relax too much or doze off, so you have to draw. There’s enough room to spread out with your sketchbook and skinny espresso macchiato fiordilatte on the rocks with a green salad and not feel overlooked.

The choice of what you get to draw is limited by these cafes’ locations, but there are so many of them around London that this isn’t such a major problem. Cafes usually come first: I haven’t seen so many closing in the teeth of the recession. Several years ago the Victoria and Albert Museum marketed itself as “an ace cafe with quite a nice museum attached”. Look at any National Trust property and the cafe is a prerequisite, regardless of the hundreds of years of history, intrigue and turmoil that the building may have been witness to. Cake is king.

Things have been improving with pubs too. The dingy old boozers with frosted glass and bands of drunken, smoking dockers creating enough fug to make even the view across the table difficult to make out have largely given way, at the expense of a lot of character, it must be said, for smoke-free wining and dining opportunities with clear glass to the world outside. The idea being that people, especially women, are more likely to enter a pub if they can see into it before reaching the door. Good news for the artist looking for shelter from the cold, bad news if he/she has any predilection for drink at which point drawing will go out of the window.

At this point it becomes a case of either how fast you work or how well your drawing stands up to high levels of alcohol or overpriced caffeine. Working indoors comes at a price.

At large

An age ago, when Zimbabwe still had a thriving tourist industry, and food, and a working currency, an economy, hospitals, schools, productive farms, a working population, and much more, we went there on holiday for a few weeks, and mostly did the kinds of things relatively rich western tourists do there: visit Victoria Falls, the Matopos and Hwange National Park. We spent hours out in the bush with a guide watching this parade of incredible wildlife go about its often bloodthirsty business.

Drawing wildlife has never really done it for me. Most of the animals one usually comes across in nature stay far away enough to make them turn into little more than ink blobs on the pages of my sketchbook. But in Zimbabwe we came so close to ridiculously huge animals - elephants, giraffes, buffalo, hippos, rhinos - often moving helpfully slowly, that they could register even on my A5 sketchbook.

I was reminded of this experience recently on a visit to Arundel Wetland Centre. There were no hippos showing their heads above the water, vultures circling over a kill, or giraffes heading down to the watering hole, but there was a great range of wildfowl, including sheldecks, shovelers, siskin, teal and snipe, not that I'd know what they'd look like without the swathes of information on hand in the visitor centre.

These birds couldn't possibly be recognised by the drawings I made of them through the windows of the cafe as we all sheltered from the cold. Most took somewhere between two or perhaps even three seconds to complete. There is a thin slice of time for the dark shape of the wildfowl on the bright, reflecting water to leave some mark on the retina before it is turned into lines on the paper. Look back and it's impossible to find the relevant duck among the throng milling about on the water. Markings, size, colour, bills, plumage and crests, all what differentiates one kind of bird from another, are turned into a few lines in a few seconds.

It's rarely successful, drawing like this. I can't imagine an ornithologist would be able to recognise any of these. Birds are rarely bird shape at first glance, to put it badly: they swim away from you so the shape of the head is lost, or hunt for food under the surface of the water, so that a simple silhouette becomes a kind of visual nonsense. There's time for something essential to be put down, but nothing more, not for me anyway. After making works about the inertia and solidity of architecture, there's something very enjoyable about this.

Art Basel Miami Beach

I’d never been to Miami Beach before, so I had no idea whether the people around town were any different to those that spend the remaining 51 weeks a year there. But when Art Basel Miami Beach descends upon this stretch of sandy shoreline so far south in the US that people are lazing on the beach well into December, there’s the sense that something special is going on, and that artists, dealers and collectors are out in number.

The art fair is the largest of its kind in the US, with about 300 international galleries showing works by 2,000 artists in the outsize convention centre, attracting a further 20-odd satellite shows around the city. There’s art on the beach, in hotels, up palm trees and anywhere else you can imagine. And even in the current economic climate, there are those who are ready and willing to buy it. Lots of them.

I’m there working with The Art Newspaper, which publishes a daily edition at the fair. This means working late, until the early hours, giving me some time to be around the city in daylight hours. The area’s art deco architecture takes me by surprise. In the UK you may come across a classic art deco building here and there, but the South Beach area seems to have whole streets of them, hotel after hotel, with palm trees lining the pavements. And whereas so many such buildings in the UK give the impression of having been “improved”, ie, had their art deco features, such as window frames, ruined in the name of maintenance and renovation, in Miami they have stood up to the passage of time so much better.

Unperturbed by the vast quantities of outsize, ambitious, multi-disciplined, opulent, attention-grabbing and wincingly expensive art on show around me, I spend what moments I can drawing in my simple little A5 sketchbook with a simple black marker pen. I have no plans to make a film of my drawings, make a series of ceramics about them, have a panel discussion with Julian Schnabel, Yoko Ono and Ai Weiwei about them or enter into discussions with the Guggenheim or Cartier about how they can present them. I just go about making small, squeaking, often uncertain marks with my Edding 4000 to represent the wonderfully foreign environment I have found myself in.

It’s sunny and hot, and therefore easy to find cafes with outdoor tables to sit at. But what I make seems to have very little in common with what is on show at Art Basel Miami Beach – this is hardly surprising; they are making thousands of dollars from this and I am not. In the fair, there is plenty to see and plenty to be moved by. The tour guide standing before two recent photographs by Cindy Sherman spoke fluently about the “brutally honest” figures with plucked eyebrows, sagging necks and ageing skin, despite their obvious wealth, before it dawned on him that he was describing most of the women following his tour just as much the subjects of the photographs. “And yet they remain endearing,” he rallied, less than convincingly, to the shuffling of feet.

Small and black and white drew me in – Brice Marden’s works in ink on paper, and Olga Chernysheva’s photographs of old rural Russia at “Russian Dreams” at the Bass Museum of Art. I’m not sure it pays to be understated in a city where so many are clamouring for attention, but it certainly worked for me.

Joining Skylark

Skylark is an artist-run gallery on London's South Bank, with two spaces, one at Gabriel's Wharf and the other on the first floor of the distinctive Oxo Tower, between Tate Modern and the National Theatre. I've just been lucky enough to join the 29 artists, which means that I now have a space to show my work in Skylark 2 in the Oxo Tower.

I'm still a bit green - I spent my first day manning the gallery on Saturday, and have only met one or two of the other artists involved - but it already gives me that feeling I only get when my work is hanging on a gallery wall. I don't expect things to fly off the wall in these weird economic times, but there is always that promise in the air, a promise that can never be present when the work is in a box in the studio or on our own living room wall.

The advantages of showing in such a gallery are obvious: it's a professional space, marketed well, with all the benefits of a group, rather than solo, enterprise. And the South Bank is central and busy, with plenty of people walking along the bank of the Thames wandering in to the gallery on impulse, as well as those who have made a special trip. And the work on show is gloriously varied, and all the stronger for that. Best of all, the river runs just outside its window, busy with traffic, ebbing and flowing, the city's life blood.

Remembering Dave

Remembering my late and much-missed brother David Hobbs, who would have been 50 this week.

************

Think of a building with lots of paintings and sculptures in it. No, not a gallery, or a museum. Hospitals. They are a great place for showing art. And because they are stuffed with people day and night they are busier than most galleries. All those lovely long corridors of otherwise empty wall space, and people with a bit of time on their hands ready for the kind of boost in morale that medication alone can not always deliver.

For one reason and another, I have found myself in hospitals too frequently in recent years. I'm lucky in that, rather than being the inmate, I've been visiting sick friends and family, or else, more positively, in a maternity ward with Naomi and a fresh daughter. The art on display seems to have become better, and is often by well known artists. It doesn't just affect patients; it also has a great effect on visitors and staff.

Research certainly shows that anxiety and depression in patients are reduced when they are more exposed to visual art. More than that, certain post-operative patients actually left hospital an average of one day earlier when they were exposed to visual art and live music. Although we're some way off being prescribed paintings on the National Health Service, that's just the kind of result that must have hospital accountants rubbing their hands with glee. Because of this positive feedback, most hospitals make the most of art's beneficial effects. The charity Paintings in Hospitals loans works to about 250 healthcare establishments across the UK, and depends upon artists donating or loaning works of art to supplement the work it purchases. Your local hospital will almost certainly have a scheme of some kind.

The chances of making a sale at a hospital are perhaps slimmer than Keira Knightley in Lent, but there are other advantages to having your work there. One is that it is likely to be seen by more people than it would in a gallery, and many of those people would never dream of setting foot in a gallery, particularly a commercial one. And because of what they might have been experiencing, the people who see it are open to being moved in a way the artist could never have expected.

A painting hangs in my parents' home that illustrates the healing power of art in hospital. Our family had become regular visitors to an Exeter hospital where my elder brother David fought what turned out to be a losing battle with cancer. These weren't always unhappy visits. There was usually something to have a laugh about, however grim things were. And, over the years, just as we got to know the magnificent nursing staff that cared for him during his stays there, so we got to know the paintings that were on the walls that led to his ward.

The journey to the hospital to see him on the day he had lost his fight for life was, as you may well imagine, not an easy one. The landscape of our lives had changed for ever. But walking through the hospital my father — not, he would agree, an artistic man, and not given to voicing opinions on art — pointed to a framed work as we turned into the ward, and said: "I have always liked that painting." It was a painting of the River Tavy slipping through the bleak, wintry wilderness of Dartmoor, and for whatever reason, it had spoken to him.

A couple of weeks after the funeral came my father's birthday. What can you give as a present to a man who has just seen his eldest son buried? We bought him the painting he had admired, and it now hangs over our parents' fireplace. It offers a kind of healing. Not the healing we would have preferred, but healing nonetheless.

In perspective

I’m sitting on the top deck of an 88 bus having had to rush back to one of the offices where I freelance in order to pick up a memory stick I had accidentally left on the desk there. It’s a handy device when you find yourself working on a variety of computers in a working week, but it's also handy to misplace and the idea of losing it is not one to contemplate; most of the information on it is backed up in other places, but there would always be that lingering feeling that I’d lost something irreplaceable if it did go awol.

The files that I was most concerned about not losing were a handful of images I’d been working on that I was due to be emailing on to someone. I had the original drawn versions safely at home, but I’d been grappling with IT problems and I’d invested a lot of time in getting the images to the state they were. Was I feeling a bit foolish about losing something so important to me? As I’m musing on this, the bus passes the Home Office in Marsham Street, a department with a history of losing vital data that put things into perspective.

Hopping off the bus in Regent Street, I nipped over to Sotheby’s to see Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, the show of work by Damien Hirst set for auction, sidestepping the usual route of selling through galleries and heading straight for the buyer instead. This is another chance to get things into perspective. The sale rooms are buzzing, from the foyer where we all get our bags checked, to the many rooms overflowing with spin paintings, preserved assorted livestock, bling in cabinets, and collaged butterflies.

To fill the space with a lifetime’s work would be an achievement, but everything I see is dated 2008. Then again, he does have a team of workers making the work for him. And after regularly seeing estimates of £2.5m to £3m for some of the works, it doesn’t take long for the £20,000 estimate for small butterfly works to look rather, well, cheap. It doesn’t take long, either, to see everything in terms of its price tag rather than the quality of the work. That, and managing to keep prices high as well as bring so many to the market, seems a particularly Hirstian achievement.

A couple of days later – the auction is spread across two days to the accompaniment of meltdown in the financial markets – and the 223 lots have gone for a total of £111million. Financial crisis, what financial crisis? Where do I fit into all this? Where do any of us fit into it? I email my images, now backed up, and have interest from another gallery to show my work. Life, somehow, goes on.

Rain stops play

The wet weather sketchbook: I nearly started one of these again this summer. I had one about 18 years ago when I was in the Lake District for only a few days. The rain was incessant then, too, and rather than take a perfect, dry, empty sketchbook home, I took a battered, stained, warped, torn, and yet full one home instead. Even a pencil doesn't get a firm grip on wet paper, unless you're using about a 16B, so the results were less than great. A coat pocket with a sketchbook sticking out of it becomes a funnel in a downpour, which only added to the problem.

I cycled through part of the Lake District this summer with brother and brother-in-law, going from Whitehaven to Newcastle, from west coast to east coast, which would be impressive if it was the United States or Australia we were talking about, but it's only about 140 miles in this rather thin part of the UK. Thirty-odd miles on the first day in relentless rain meant the sketchbook stayed in the bag — we wanted to get to the B&B to dry off rather than have me sit around like some pretentious idiot pretending to be like Turner strapped to the mast of some ship in a storm, or whatever it was he did. I bet the crew weren't too impressed with what he was up to.

Camping with the family in August wasn't meteorologically ideal either. The ground became a little soft for trifling things such as tent pegs, which had interesting consequences. But we stuck it out, because camping is still just so great, even in the wet. I didn't resort to a wet weather sketchbook then, either, not least because the marker pens I use now would take to damp paper in an even less successful way than pencil. But it didn't rain as much as all that. It sounds bad from inside a tent, but it's not, if you're outside.

A rough guide

With a few days to draw a series of landmark scenes around London, I've found myself rubbing shoulders with international tourists seeing the side of the city that only tourists do. At Tower Bridge I spent a couple of hours working by the railings in front of the Tower of London, the water lapping against the pier, the only suggestion that the city is overflowing with cars being the stream of tiny vehicles crossing the bridge. The river is hardly teeming with craft, but it's lively, and it seems like the natural way to get around.

A yacht comes in, and the bridge opens, the first time I have seen it happen in all the years I've lived in London. A family visiting from Pakistan watch it as it happens, having been in town for all of a few hours, thinking it as regular an event as traffic lights going red. At Buckingham Palace, too, I am there for the Changing of the Guard, which I probably saw when visiting London from Cornwall as a boy in the 1960s, but never since. There's the band, horses, coachloads of French schoolchildren, and American tourists, who, I can tell from their well broadcast conversations, know much more of Britain's history than I do.

Becoming as much a fixture of the cityscape as lampposts and railings as I stand and draw, I come to be seen as a dependable travel guide: I offer suggestions for trips down the river to an Israeli couple; highlight the main points of interest in Trafalgar Square to two young women from the US; suggest the shortest route to Oxford Street from Piccadilly Circus; and tell the story of Ken Livingstone's downfall as the city's mayor on Westminster Bridge. Few want to engage me in conversation about what I am doing in the sketchbook. Not that I'm complaining.

The bard's bar

Somehow, post children, I haven't got to the Shakespeare in Stoke Newington as much as I once did, and instead seem to find myself passing it with a small daughter in tow on my way back from dance or "movement" class, going at such a slow pace that I have time to look through its windows and remember the times I would go there with my late, great brother Dave and listen to its incomparable (then, at least, and perhaps even now) jukebox, sup dark beer that somehow has a way of tasting better because there is no carpet on the floor (I don't know how this works but it is a theory that demands further investigation), and wait for the toppling of the Tory government to gladden our hearts further.

I spend some windswept mornings drawing it from a variety of angles at a time when it is shut and therefore impossible to take refuge in. The drawing is for some friends who have left London for the country, friends who evidently managed to spend more time there than we have, building up the kind of long and enduring relationship with it in a way that calls for a print of its exterior to be hanging on their wall. And the walls of their friends. As they are from the acting and theatrical fields, it's a more than suitable pub for them.

And anyone else who goes in it.