Days and Moments to Remember

Florence and Mum, February 2007

Today has a particular significance as it would have been Mum's 93rd birthday. The poignancy of the date was brought home an hour or so ago, when I had a telephone call from an 83-year old acquaintance of hers, calling to wish her a happy birthday. How much I wished I could have brought her to the phone, but she now only speaks to me in the dead hours of night.

View from my Window, Lincoln College

Time seems in very short supply now that I have returned to work. I'm grateful that my three fairly arduous days a week in Stamford are ameliorated a little by a fourth day day in the congenial surroundings of Lincoln's Cathedral Quarter, working in the top floor studio and darkroom of the old School of Art. In my own student days, the studio was the base room for an architectural technicians' course, run by Edward Albarn, a grand old architect who taught us unruly painters the more refined skills of perspective. He once lost a bet to me when, while drawing a two-point perspective drawing of a church with tower as a class exercise, I thought I could see how you would plot and project the conical spire and its details. He bet me a substantial sum of money that I couldn't do it without being shown, but I could see that the solution was fairly logical and was very embarrassed to prove him wrong. I hate to be made to look like a smart-arse, then as well as now, and refused to claim my winnings though they were offered. They were funny old times and the building still remains chock-full of so many happy memories.