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Bank Holiday weekend. Some slapdash and unenthusiastic DIY has been done. A dozen useful jobs out of the way, couple of hundred left to do.  I still managed to find a few hours to paint, and skivved off the work I should have been finishing to mess around with some little boards I bought ages ago. First trying out some paint effects I saw on YouTube. Chucking surgical spirit around on the dining room table was wildly unpopular, it turned out, and I had to pack up halfway through so we could eat dinner. Then painting on top with primary colours, no planning or sketches or reference, just playing about. A relief from the weeks of careful, meticulous work I’ve just finished, some of it interesting but more useful for the doing than for the results. Remembering it’s meant to be fun.

An old friend asks if her daughter can come over to do some painting. Her Art GCSE is looming and she wants some practice.
Of course she’s welcome, although I hope she’s not looking for actual instruction. ‘Fiddle about with it until you like it’ is the closest I get to a working method.
When she arrives, it’s watercolour she wants to work with. I yelp inwardly, because I haven’t used them much for years, but manage to rummage out some paper and brushes.
She hasn’t got a drawing or photograph to work with so we go with the standby – paint some fruit. Sketching a rough outline causes her no problems, but when she starts to paint she seems hesitant, unsure: asking often ‘Is this right?’ ‘What comes next?’
We talk about the impending exam. Ten hours over two days, working to a vague theme, some prep work allowed. Ten hours seems like a huge stretch of time but I can spend months on a picture, so I tell her to plan ahead as much as she can, it always takes longer than you expect.
Her mum tells me later that one of her teachers told her, out of the blue and two weeks before the exam, that she wasn’t competent in the skills she needed to pass the exam. Having never said so in the previous two years of teaching. Why would anyone do that? If this is how formal art education works, I’m glad I didn’t have one.

The soil here is clay, and dries in clumps the chalky grey-brown of spoiled chocolate, streaked with yellow. It gets waterlogged fast but is fertile, was farmed for thousands of years. Roman, Saxon and Iron Age remains were all discovered as the town was built, ridge-and-furrow fields and post-hole circles seen from the air.
Behind the next street are the scattered remains of an orchard; apples and plums peering out of hedgerows, a pear tree decades older than the house whose fence now encloses it.
There must be a dozen villages, some medieval, caught like flies in amber within the tracts of modern housing and logistics centres that spread inexorably across open ground, the houses ever smaller and more densely packed; the warehouses growing like Alice until you can probably see them from space.
The villages are now desirable enclaves, expensive non-estate luxuries that their original inhabitants wouldn’t recognise – centrally-heated, double-glazed and burglar-alarmed, cottage gardens replaced by block-paved driveways. In a town built to service the movement of goods and people, they offer the sense of stability, the notion of permanence. Roots, even if they aren’t your own.

“I didn’t know you were a painter,” is something that people say to me quite often, in tones varying from mild surprise to a kind of indignation, as if I had been concealing this behavioural flaw, sneaking around furtively messing with brushes, and now they have caught me out. I’m never quite sure how to answer – Yes, but my smock is at the cleaners? I’ve been working undercover? Did you never wonder why so many of my work clothes have paint on them? Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s contagious?
So yes, my first instinct is flippancy, but it does make me wonder – what is it about me that makes them think that it is so unlikely?
Another one that comes up quite often is “I don’t know where you find the time,” but that’s  easy to answer: skimp on the housework.

The thing about hitting your head against a wall, as the saying goes, it how nice it is when you stop. Day two of a week off work and already there is progress. The relief of not having to drag tired grumpy kids from their beds and pack them off to school is no small thing, and while there is going to have to be some clearing, cleaning and going to the shops, there is also time to read, paint, update website and just hang about. Of course it’s pouring with rain, but if you can sleep late and eat pancakes in your PJs things are looking up.