A studio!
A room at a local B&B!
Eight weeks!
It was winter,
depth of.
I stepped out of the taxi and wandered down the hill.
No one around.
Two neat terraces of red-brick cottages flanked the
sloping green down to the river where my studio was.
They were quiet, blank-eyed.
Quaint, of course, Ava – but eery.
I wonder if you know the place. Unlikely.
An eighteenth-century village on a river, on a huge
estate owned by – ah, what was his name – some lord –
where a few of Nelson’s ships were built.
What I didn’t know before I got there
was that it had been preserved –
a sort of fake museum village,
you had to pay to get inside.
In the summer there were re-enactments,
costumes, old boat building demonstrations –
but no one actually lived there. Or if they did, I
didn’t see them, Ava.
Can you imagine, owning so much land
that you can annex-off a village, keep the thing on ice –
of course you can’t.
But really, what a life! To be a lord.
Space and deer and wild horses
and enormous houses.
A palace. An abbey. A wood.
On the studio door was taped the key and a note that
said, enjoy! signed by the chairman of The Trust.
My heart sung, Ava.
The studio was small – wood-clad, big window, big desk,
little copper charcoal stove repurposed from a yacht.
I shivered happily. I lit the stove.
I looked out at the muddy riverbanks, the leggy birds, the
distant swans. I got my sketchbook out and sat there
trying to absorb my new surroundings best I could.
OK, I thought. Art.
