Estuary Moon by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; watercolour; 2018. I've been busy decorating my art studio, stripping off old wallpaper, mending dents and holes with Polyfiller, (one and a half tubes' worth!), and then climbing up and down an ancient step-ladder in order to paint the walls with three layers of plain, pristine white. The job is not quite finished; one small wall needs a final coat of paint and its skirting board doing with white gloss, and the door frame needs white gloss too, but the end is in sight. Photos to follow once it's completely done! I've also been pulling out armfuls of forget-me-nots from our garden. There are supposed to be 74 official species of forget-me-nots, some of which are very pretty. Unfortunately, we're lumbered with horrible hairy things which self-seed prolifically and swamp all the other flowers and, once they've bloomed, flop over, turn brown and go brittle. Pull them out then and the spiny hairs cause a nasty rash. ...

Abstract Landscape; watercolour; 2017. The 70th annual exhibition of the Deeside Art Group took place earlier in July, and so I headed off to Westbourne Hall in West Kirby to see this.  My personal favourite piece in the show was Tony Jalland's The Lost Brooch , which was a beautifully observed gouache painting of shells with, as the title suggests, a brooch tucked in amongst them. Having left Westbourne Hall, I then saw a small exhibition of print art at the library, then headed off into the sand dunes on the beach to do some sketching.  There was hardly anyone around, but the minute I was sprinkled with flaky pastry crumbs and escaping custard from the cake I'd treated myself to, about  a million ramblers promptly trudged past.  Liverpool Waterfront 2; oil on canvas; 2017. Here's the next in my series of paintings themed on the River Mersey, which I completed recently.  This is not a good photo but you can get the general idea, at least.  A p...

Peacock King Jigsaw Puzzle While you're waiting for Fabian, the fourth novel in the Artisan-Sorcerer series, to become available - and it is coming soon! - have a play with this on-line jigsaw puzzle of the Peacock King, who features in the forthcoming book.  (The image is in much better focus on the jigsaw site). One year ago, we moved to this house.  It's incredible to realise that this little anniversary has arrived already.  Moving here was one of the best decisions we've ever made.  We're both still in love with the place. Last Saturday we scraped off old wallpaper in the dining room, up to the level of the picture rail.  Recently we had some repairs carried out on one of the walls in that room, and now the new plaster has had plenty of time to dry out properly.  Sunday saw me unravelling the mysteries of how to hang 7ft strips of patterned wallpaper without getting it in a glorious knot, tangled round the stepladder or stuck to the wrong bit...

I have been waging war on the kitchen ceiling, polyfiller and spatula at the ready. The job would be so much easier if I could levitate. This would save having to climb up a stepladder and twist half-upside down so I can smooth away miniature potholes which bring something of a lunar texture to our temple of culinary experimentation. The house acts like a magnet for moths. There was a large, fat orange-brown one flitting round earlier, and snoozing on the ceiling is a particularly beautiful moth which looks like a Spanish lace fan. No wonder so many have been hanging out in our house--the bats are out in full force tonight. I've been photographing a few things in the garden, and have also begun weeding around the grove--which is badly overgrown with mare's tail. I've yet to find anything which can kill off mare's tail without destroying the soil for years to come. Anyway, the good news is that my Lady's Mantle has re-established itself under the contorted hazel-...

A pleasant weekend; Cat arrived, limp with a heavy cold but happy that her studies and exams are over for the summer. She carried off some of the books I'd piled up, having had another major clear out of works which I have no desire to read again. Some books can be returned to indefinitely over years, decades even. Others are a once-only experience. I can't see the purpose of storing objects which attract more dust than interest. I'm in the process of making more space in the front bedroom as this is to become "my" room. My office will probably be in there eventually, plus more space for my painting and needlecrafts, plus (more importantly) a dedicated meditation area. I already have ideas for the decor but first I need to find new homes for that "really useful stuff" which all homes collect, like DIY tools and half-empty tins of paint. How many DIY tools are in your home, and how often do you actually use them? And when you come to use them, isn...

The phrase, “It’s a simple job; it’ll only take a minute” must surely ring alarm bells with any householder. Perhaps the phrase has been cursed by some long-forgotten sorcerer with a grudge against DIY. Employ this phrase, and you are bound to invoke some form of calamity. We decided to swap the downstairs furniture around, which also involved moving the TV from one corner to another. It all sounded so simple. However, in doing so we managed to “zap” the TV and wipe its memory. Could we retune it? No! We could get Sky 3 perfectly, but all other stations were half-hidden behind a dense snow-storm effect. When we originally bought this TV, we tried to tune it in for an entire weekend. In the interests of P&Q (Peace and Quiet), I called out a local technician, a young guy who’s made a business from setting up other people’s electronic stuff – TVs, hi-fi, digi boxes, DVDs etc. So I called him again and, as before, he had everything running smoothly in ten minutes flat. He also up...

Having been silently nagged out of enjoyable languor by the length of the lawn, I hauled our mower onto the grass in readiness to restore some semblance of respectable order. That’s when I discovered that one side of the mower’s handle was hanging off. Now how had that happened? It had been attached when last stowed away. I would have noticed, otherwise. Somewhere between the lazily waving grass where the mower now sat and the cupboard where it usually rested was the widget which held the handle on. Could I find it? No, of course not! Despite spending over an hour rummaging around on my knees looking for the black plastic screw-like widget, it remained in hiding. Using the mower with only one side of the handle fixed in place would have been hopeless, if not possibly even dangerous. And naturally there seemed to be no way of using some other cobbled-together device to hold it safely and securely together. “Oh well,” said hubby, later that night, “it was on its last legs anyway....

The electrician was here at 10am, to see if he could discover why the downstairs power kept blowing. Four or five times in the last two weeks, all the electrics for downstairs have blown out, each time when we were right in the middle of cooking dinner. As this hasn’t happened before in all the time we’ve lived here, we figured we had better call in an expert to take a look at it. There are some things you just don’t mess with unless you really, genuinely know what you’re doing. An electrical power supply is one of these. So the electrician deduced that too much power was going through one fuse. How come it hadn’t blown before now? Well, the only thing we can think of is that we have a new deep fat fryer which is more powerful than previous types. Each time the electrics had blown, we’d been using that – at the same time as using the oven, hob rings, kettle, two lots of ceiling lights, the electric fire and running the DVD player and TV, plus the music system which the TV speakers wo...

Today it isn't raining. This may seem like a trite observation, but for the last month this occurrence has been rare. And so my two adorable little monsters are currently sitting on the step to enjoy the…. Well, the insipid greyness could hardly be described as sunshine, but it’s more cheerful than the recent monsoon conditions. You’ve heard of the usefulness of chocolate frying pans, no doubt. But have you heard about vacuum cleaners that can’t cope with fluff? Well, you have now. We, unfortunately, are the “proud” owners of one such gadget. To be fair, maybe it was never designed to tackle the kapok innards of toy fluffy zebras. And no doubt toy fluffy zebras were never intended to be disembowelled and trampled into rugs by an enthusiastic puppy. I even picked up the bigger clumps of kapok by hand, but the pesky vacuum still jammed. So there it was, upside down on the operating table – I mean “dining table” – so I could unscrew its various bits in the hope of hooking out the bl...