I’ve been thinking about life afterwards.

I need a space of my own, a place where it takes positive effort to find me. I have such a space and at the beginning of the course I said that I would sort it out, in the third post on this blog, embarrassing, but not surprising – That Sunday Feeling…

That is what I will do. In fact, I have recently started trying to sort out the stuff which currently inhabits the space – a collection of this and that from our past and our parents’ past. I came across some of my old exercise books from school, covered in pages from Smash Hits magazine, which my mother would buy me on Fridays, which was shopping day, together with a yoghurt and a chocolate bar. I also had several pieces of fruit that were to last me the week, and which sat in the fruit bowl on the dining table, slowly decomposing.

My daughter couldn’t get over how neat my handwriting was. My handwriting is a standing joke in our family – I should have been a doctor, apparently. What I noticed was the frequency with which it changed – experiments in mark-making.

Neatness was something which was commented on and leaving space for your work to breathe wasn’t encouraged.

My sister had obviously got her hands on them when she was a child living out her dreams of becoming a teacher. She even gave me a lower mark than the teacher. But I’m glad to see that I had my priorities right at that age: I liked drawing, pop music, going to parties and discos, and also boys.

I suspect that I will discover a wealth of material to prompt further work. This is the right time.