Soaking Sunday

Pouring with rain today, as I realised early this morning when a drenched Kook made black pawmarks all over my duvet cover, changed only on Friday. Freezing cold too. Winter is obviously impatient, considering the summer was hardly noticeable. Oh well. Girded my loins yesterday and struck forth to the Museum of London on the 100 bus which of course was rerouted just before my stop, but walked to Little Britain and fortunately found a Pret for coffee. Succumbed to a Love Bar(so many calories they don't mention the number) which is one of my recent weaknesses in the food line. Francesca appeared and we chatted until the meeting time. There were plenty of sketchers, half of who I did not see until our final pub meet at the Lord Raglan at 4pm. The place was rather dark, but I finally sat and painfully sketched a transported bay window from a Lyons Corner House with a ghostly 'Nippy' waitress, I think they called them, in a filmed background. Quite took me back, though I remember being in similar places called Fuller's, always painted white outside, which were rather good and famous for their iced walnut cakes. I was not entirely happy with the sketch so may try and get a bit more depth into it as it took me ages fiddling around with all the decorated bits. After this I just did a very different and loose impression of the main entrance inside before giving up completely. The soup I had for lunch was quite good. There were excellent sketches to be seen later at the pub, not surprisingly since many of the sketchers draw for a living and are designers, animators, illustrators and architects. Gives me a bit of a complex and I am so jealous of their excellent skills, but I soldier on in hopes of improvement. Must try and be less lazy in future. I always call the time when I have to reveal my efforts the 'moment of shame'. I may do a couple of prints of my Lyons drawing and experiment a bit further with the light and shade on these. We shall see. A surprise email from Nicos, my son's half brother who may be coming to London for a week on 14th November but we won't know until Friday. He might be able to get to my exhibition if he comes and it will be good to see him again. If he stays with me it may well be on the living room floor so I shall have to obtain a folding mattress thingy but won't bother to obtain one of these until I know for sure and am sure he has not had a offer of better accommodation.