Tuesday 7 July:

Another day and another starting with a dawn harbour walk. Actually, weather-wise it was a slightly disappointing start to the day… the sun was just emerging as I made my way to harbour but, by the time I got there, cloud cover had taken over and so my walk finished on a fairly dull and overcast note. Of course, a little frustratingly, the sun re-emerged within a couple of hours!

It’s noticeable that there’s a lot more traffic about when I’m on my dawn walks these days. There are also three people I regularly see most mornings (all walking along the harbourside in the opposite direction to me). I always exchange a smile and a greeting with a woman in her 50s/60s (and she duly reciprocates), but there are two other men (one in his 60s, the other in his 30s) who almost seem to go out of their way to avoid any eye contact with me! 

Fresh tomato on toast and espresso breakfast then, sometime after 9am, coffee with Moira indoors and I spent much of the morning continuing to experiment with wax/watercolour patterns (the results were colourful, but uninspiring… but good fun!).

This week’s Drawing Group theme is ‘Birds’ – so I ended up finding a photograph of a puffin online and producing a quick sketch of that (again, not particularly inspiring, but I was keen to ‘show willing’).

Read more of my ‘Black+British’ book (it’s a very long book and I’m just half way through).

Resonate ‘virtual meet up’ in the evening (‘The Church: What’s Next?’)(the final one of term)… interesting but also somewhat frustrating (virtually impossible to get anything like a ‘proper’ exchange of views – some interesting people dominate the evening, while other interesting people don’t get a chance (or simply decide not) to contribute. Think I’m lacking the necessary energy and passion!

Watched the last of the ‘Black+British’ documentary series… very powerful, depressing and encouraging (all at the same time!).

Image: early morning fisherman at the marina.