I wasn’t really concentrating on my drawing yesterday afternoon in the café at M&S. We go there in the afternoons when I’ve spent the morning writing so as to keep my drawing practice alive. I’m usually tired, as I was yesterday and my head was full of the piece I’d just written for my writing course. He was reading it out and we were editing it together. The café was busy and full of the kind of faces and bodies that I like to draw – characterful faces, mostly elderly, and all taking their slow time over lunch. This man sat across from us with his wife on one side and his two friends opposite. I observed him from the corner of my eye as he ate a bag of crisps. The doing of this task absorbed all his attention. (His wife was eating one too and both ate with their heads raised in the air, munching.) After he’d emptied the packet (he checked several times, even pouring the dregs into his mouth) he smoothed it out on the table, rolled it flat and then twisted it into a bow. Beautiful.
