James Daly is one of the many curious underworld figures who knew my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. It seems my mother first came across Daly when they were both scoring smack at 75a Cambridge Gardens in the early 1970s. The gear sold at this address was supplied by a former jockey of Australian extraction called Larry Benns. He’s been described to me as a hot tempered man suffering from low self-esteem who excelled at pissing off his girlfriends. The scene at 75a was intense, a number of addicts seem to have overdosed there including, it is said, one of Brenda Grevelle’s boyfriends.

While most women-in-prison flicks bore me, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1973) directed by Shunya Ito is a groove sensation. The plot is simple, Nami Matsushima AKA Matsu the Scorpion (Meiko Kaji) is betrayed by her bent cop boyfriend Sugimi (Isao Natsuyagi), who sets her up to be raped by his gangster cohorts. After Matsu is jailed for attempting to murder Sugimi, her only aim in life is to escape in order to fully avenge herself. The story is told largely through visuals and partially in flashback, with lashings of torture, nudity, beatings and lesbianism. A shower room cat-fight and other staples of this genre spin off into surreal flights of fancy, and much of the action is colour-coded – red for hatred, green for revenge.

After noticing that Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher is listed on the Wikipedia as a living person, I figured it was worth blogging this scumbag and his boss Detective Chief Inspector Victor Kelaher. I don’t want people to forget that Plicher and Kelaher were worse than slime; and it is still worth pointing out they got away with most of the shit they pulled, so much for so called ‘justice’. According to Wikipedia, Pilcher was born in 1936 and so if he isn’t dead yet, he ought to be very soon. And as far as I’m concerned Pilcher deserves to rot in hell.

Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia were an ‘avant-garde’ group active in the Argentinian city of Rosario in the late 1960s. The ground floor of the show currently dedicated to them at the Pump House Gallery focuses on their Experimental Art Cycle, ten pieces executed over six months in 1968. Among other things, Eduardo Favario invited people to a gallery opening, then locked the space in order to create a large crowd waiting to get in. Given that the Argentinian military dictatorship had made street gatherings illegal, this was considerably more provocative than doing the same thing in Paris or New York at that time.

After clocking my earlier blogs about Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, a couple of readers kindly passed on further information about this legendary criminal. As a consequence, I can now bring you a written statement in which Ray The Cat explains that he embarked on his career as a master thief in order to get his revenge on bent cops; these crumbs wrecked Ray’s boxing career by fitting him up on trumped-up assault charges. The story is best told in his own words: “I have never had much schooling but I have learned a great deal from life. From the age of 12 my whole dream was to have become the middleweight boxing champion of the world.