I mentioned this image in the group meeting. It is a photograph of an unopened card written by my mum for my 60^th birthday which won’t happen for a while yet. My mum accidentally wrote it to me instead of my sister last year. It occupies a bookshelf in my house, waiting. In the meeting Mariette commented how it relates to questions of measurement that I have been exploring elsewhere in the blog and the residency. Its writing prompts a judgemental measure of what is incorrect (the wrong day, the wrong year, the wrong person) but, in another reality, it generates a different measurement of time. This is what I love about it. In many ways, the unopened card is an adherence to rituals; to processes; to obligations. At the end of the day, it is just a birthday card, like the multiple others I have received from my mum over the years. Yet, it sits in-between time, in front of architectural journals from up to three decades ago and below a book on Healthy Scepticism from this year. And at this time, it contains precious time; a time when many things might happen.

I devised a performance piece that had instructions for what to do in the case of different eventualities, who might open the card and who will be thanked for the love it contains. The unopened card makes me think about three people and their connections to each other. Perhaps when it’s opened it will have been written to my sister after all. It is a deeply sentimental, bittersweet and poignant object, and I wondered whether to post a picture of it because of that. But after our conversation I post.