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Wednesday January 26, 2005

Nutcase

I made up for yesterday's chilly outing by staying home, venturing out only once for a head-down stroll along the lane and back, just for form's sake. Some days I have the impression the local weather gods are having the kind of fun in which us poor humans tend to find ourselves shunted to the sidelines like unwelcome guests at a party. Unwelcome in an don't-care sort of way. The sort of way an extremely large rock might feel about a gnat.

So the rest of the time I played with stuff, with my PDA, with a new poem, and with several sheets of inoffensive watercolour paper.

I'm at a genuinely lovely point in Project Watercolour. It still doesn't matter what the results are like, and I still don't have to 'finish' anything. Just splash the washes on to the paper without regard for hard edges and run-outs, and have fun. Particularly, have fun. I seem always to learn more, learn different, learn deeper when I have a smile on my face.

I'm getting there but, bad weather or not, as soon as my monthly pension cheque hits the bank I'm going to go shopping for new brushes. I shall get myself two new round sables, one large and one ridiculously large, and a quarter or half-inch flat, made of a springy synthetic/sable mix. Oh, and a modest stack of 6x4 watercolour pads.

There are two popular sayings that provide an itchy boundary to my predicament:

1. It's a poor workman that blames his tools
2. Give us the tools and we'll do the job

And that, to my way of thinking, proves more than adequately my theory that an aphorism isn't worth the nutcase that holds it.

Sailing home