Low life | 9 August 2018

Me in a black polo-neck jumper looking sour; Oscar wearing a floppy hat; her youngest daughter nude and stooping to dry her feet with a towel; a mountain profile at dusk; a labourer’s stone hut in a vineyard; a copy of Augustus John’s ‘Robin’.

Strangely inspired by John’s ‘Robin’, Catriona first picked up a paintbrush 18 months ago, and these pictures, collected and hung on the wall of the local bar, comprised her first public exhibition. They will hang there for the month of August and she held a vernissage to celebrate the occasion. About 50 people turned up from six o’clock onwards and mingled with about an equal number of the bar’s usual clientele. Food and drink was a tray of nibbles and a couple of wine boxes on a trestle table.

It had been a day of insupportable heat. I’d spent the afternoon in the bedroom with the shutters and windows closed, and the curtains drawn, lying naked on a towel on the bed under a wobbling ceiling fan unable to speak or think or move other than to totter to the bathroom every so often and stand under a tepid shower. At six o’clock the evening air inside the bar was stifling still, and after a cursory gander at the paintings the majority of the guests sensibly fled with their plastic glasses of boxed wine to the outside terrace where the air under the trees was noticeably cooler. The conversational din made by the 50 guests, as they congratulated each other and themselves on surviving the afternoon furnace by standing in the shallow end of their private swimming-pools, was tremendous.

Cold beer, not wine, was what I wanted. Abjuring the wine boxes, I stood at the bar counter among the working-class regulars, downing one after another.