We have just got home from our visits to Plymouth and London, where we have been for a family celebration and a dinner with very old friends. Over a cup of tea, on our return, we sat down to go through our diaries for the coming week, just to make sure that we really have landed back on the same planet. Somewhat to my consternation it registered that next week I have to hang two separate exhibitions of my work. On Tuesday I will be putting up the display of my series of pictures responding to Italian experience in the Great War, which will hang in Bradford Cathedral. Then on Thursday it is the turn of the Bingley Arts Centre, where I will be showing a selection of my landscapes. I hope that most of the work has already been done, but there is always that sneaking fear that at the last minute I well realise that I have overlooked something quite important.
Talking of “gulping”, the hotel in which we stayed last night in London turned out to be run by an Italian family. What is it about Italians and breakfast? For some reason or another they really don’t seem to have caught on to the spirit of the occasion. Oh, there was breakfast all right, but it was more like something provided by a transport cafe, for a clientele of truckers, than something you might expect to be served in a hotel. As our fellow guests assembled, from France and the USA apart from anywhere else, you could feel the rising general spirit of mystification.