They say epics begin in the middle and you get to a point where there is a story of how everyone got there and now you know everything, you go on to the end. I have idea of the modern epic: begin in the middle, search back for the beginning, fail to locate it, acquire a certain competence and bebop forever.
So in the middle of my epic with lots of things having already happened, the significance of which I hardly realised, I fell in love with an artist. I knew this would happen, it was so obviously the next step. It was like being given the permission to create and play, whereas previously I thought my job in life was to think and explain things.
I also read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It's one of those books of which the title is so good you might not need to read the book, though there's good advice in the book as well. But it had an influence on the way I do art. Instead of setting up a still life and drawing it and drawing it until I know how to draw I looked inside myself almost for someone else who already knew how to draw. In fact there may be several of them. So the pictures I create always surprise me as much as they do other people. I write poems as well, but the pictures I create are not illustrations to my poems. They have a distinct set of moods which are celebratory, ecstatic, playful, cheeky, with a distinct amount of melodra. (A Melodrama has ladies tied to railway lines rescued at the last minute by handsome heroes and it's all madly overdone.) And, oddly, I don't get better or worse. It stays about the same year in year out. And sometimes pictures are finished before I know there is anything happening. That is really odd, but it does seem to confirm the idea that we only use 10% of our brains most of the time and occasionally I get to use 11%.
Anyway, it makes me feel young!