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Some of us are not very good at doing nothing, and my younger son reckons I’m very bad at it. Even so, August always seems to be the month for laziness (relatively speaking); maybe something to do with children being off school and politicians being fairly silent, and some distant memories of long hot summers just being with friends and pretty much following our inclinations; very little was programmed then for children, beyond the occasional family outings. And although I don’t have a regular job now, and can take ‘time off’ more or less when I want to, I find that my own visiting seems to be programmed for around this time. Last week, for example, I was in Oxford visiting my older son Tim, his partner Marta, and her mother who was on her first trip over from Poland.
One thing I have been doing is on and off working on a painting, using photos I took fairly randomly in Norwich one sunny morning early in the summer. Some paintings seem to need to be done in a frenzy, to be completed in a day or three, with perhaps a bit of tweaking later. This one took rather longer; it had a process, rather like knitting. It isn’t finished yet, as I still have to put some detail in the faces: