this one’s for my dad

‘Darn it anyway’ is sort of my mother’s catch-phrase, ’cause she’s too polite to swear for real. My dad once made my sister and me sit in the car for two hours, right next to a park with swings. He said there wasn’t time to play in the park, because the sunset was going to happen ‘in five minutes’. We did a lot of waiting for sunsets. It used to annoy me intensely, and now I’m always saying to Stuart, ‘hold on, I’ll be done painting this page in five minutes’. Dad’s taken an awful lot of good photographs. I’ve painted a few books. These things happen.

This is a tree in Highgate that we named the Bum Tree.