Back to Work

It's one thing staying with friends and talking till the wee small hours, but it's another thing altogether to have them start cracking the whip and getting one working almost as soon as one is out of one's night attire, even if that happens to be closer to lunch time than one could respectably call 'breakfast time", but to be fair there was a repair to be made and a deadline to make it by.

I think it was fear of catastrophic failure that made me reluctant to want to start, but "Waiting" has been patiently waiting on the living room wall with a tear in his side and his stretcher removed for three months, pending our return. We had planned for the worst, a major reconstruction and surgery on the tear, a repaint and four days of hoping it would all dry. It would be a painful patient process, but after two cups of coffee I was ready to start.

Dume had kindly arranged for the stretcher to be repaired in our absence, and I could stall no more. I reached deep into my picture framer's bag of tricks learned all those decades ago in my first proper job, and my apprentice and I, within a few short hours were gazing somewhat in awe of our own ability, at a completed job with no discernible damage. Amazingly, by my quick calculation, that should have left us four days completely free until the opening of the exhibition grande.

But of course I had not considered that our hosts may have had other plans for us. After some detailed instruction about what we were actually looking for, and what might actually kill us if we got it wrong, they had the gall to send us out into the forest until late in the afternoon foraging for mushrooms and chestnuts.   A forest!  Foraging!   What if we were snorted at by a wild boar, or tripped by a mole?  

As if the foraging wasn't bad enough this evening they made us sit in front of an open fire roasting chestnuts and eating all those wondrous varieties of fungi gently sauteed in butter and garlic with a loaf of fresh bread to hand.

We thought life on the boat was tough!