Lemon a day

 http://www.lemonaday-shop.co.uk/gallery-shop  size 4 in x 6 in 10cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper

After doing the blog last night I drove to London in that lovely time of day when the skys’ blue deepens to a rich turquoise and then Prussian blue. The light from the set sun was still bleeding up from the horizon and the sodium lights were lit. Orange and blue are very dramatic, after such a hot day the driving reminded me of the end of a days drive in Botswana when you were glad that it had cooled down and could relax on that account, but anxious to get there before all the light went and the cows ambled onto the road and sat down. Black and white cows weren’t so bad you saw them in the headlights but all black Brahmins were invisible until it was too late. A friend Tabo swerved one night to avoid a black cow on the road, as he came off the road onto the dust he saw three more black cows next to the first just before he hit them and rolled the Landcruiser.

This morning I woke up in my old bed at my mother’s house with the sun pounding on the window. We needed to go and choose wallpaper. There are so many truly disgusting kinds out there it beggars belief.

The design briefs must read something like:

See if you can work an oriental theme into a seventies dirty beige look with some of this shiny gloopy plastic finish the chemists have just come up with.

Or

It’s got to be big and swirly, we need four colour ways and they must all contain a browny beige, never mind about the drawing just trace it from a tablecloth or something. Work some teal in there it’s on trend.

I took mother some strawberries ,and when I was home this evening we had the summer pudding made yesterday with the help of No1 son. I should mention he has a bit of a pudding thing, one Christmas I was presented with a handwritten list of essential cakes and puddings to make it a memorable holiday-about sixteen.

The only surviving person to have lived in one of these houses ever since it was built went off today in a taxi to try out a nursing home. Both sad and difficult, but being cared for at home gets very complicated sometimes and there can be too many services needed to co-ordinate effectively. It goes without saying that they do not co-ordinate with each other it falls to the person arranging the care.

#87 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog