I’m later writing this this morning. I’ve been out drawing, on a kind of ‘pub crawl’ of cafes in town sketching people queuing or sitting down drinking. We’ve sat in three cafes, all chains (they are generally better, I say generally, the first was, other two not so). I worked hard and watched the ebb and flow of my energy and my concentration. It was cold, the wind a sharp one. He read the paper and chattered to me, intermittently. He partners me in everything I do, patiently accepting and cajoling where necessary. There was a nice flurry in Caffé Nero and P was there, unexpectedly as we thought he gone to Newquay in Cornwall. I’m moonlighting, he said with the lovely twinkly smile of his. It took me a while to warm up with my drawing, I know when it is working but I carry RS in my head and know I have a long way to go.
I noticed the sign for the gift and tack shop just off the Prom and how the letters have either worn off (through to wind and rain etc.) or fallen off. So what should say AMBASSADORS now only reads ADORS.
We saw the young mother today who had hung her washing out along the hand rail. She was bending down over a pram trying to clean out the food that the child had deposited there. I’d called out to her yesterday through the window advising her against using the safety rail as a drying facility. I’d tried to do it gently. We of course thought she’d moved here permanently, with her three kids, but no, she told us she was only here for two days visiting her father who works in the hospital and that she was going back to Birmingham today. My train goes at 2, she said.
I saw the first law-breaker mobile home down by the harbour today. I mused over the fact that such flouting of the rules unsettles me. What harm are they doing? He gets quite exercised.
The slug trails along the pavements glisten quite beautifully in the moonlight.
