“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

So Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities. It seems to be an adequate description of the past four months. The move of house has naturally brought with it a sense of new beginnings and possibility. On the other hand, simply the task of creating a new home has turned out to be immensely distracting and burdensome. At last, however, it does feel as if it might be possible to recover a sense of normality.

The most disturbing part of the experience has been the difficulty I have experienced in getting down to creative work again. I did make a promising start with a study of a fallen tree, encountered on a walk close to the house. My next endeavour, however, was a complete disaster, and after wrestling for two weeks with a canvas I knew to be unsatisfactory I finally covered it with gesso and abandoned it.

Hope springs eternal, however, and I have booked one of my periodic “retreat weeks”, in a cottage in the Dales, hoping to find new energy and inspiration.

The move has enabled me to look again at work I did a long time ago, and which I had almost forgotten. There are some quite encouraging pieces there. I can actually paint.