A writer plays hookey with a magic paintbox

At a time when I should be writing my book on human monsters — goaded on by the many ingenious suggestions from readers of this column — I have actually been painting. There are many reasons for this disgraceful irresponsibility. First, the delicious autumn weather and the tremendous rainbow of colours it has coaxed out of the generous earth. The greenies who accuse us of destroying our planet are too young to remember the Novembers of my youth, when blankets of fog, greenish-grey and poisonous, descended in early November and often clung to southeast England for weeks at a time, stretching from Berkshire to Essex, and particularly virulent in London itself. Its fumes killed off the very young and the elderly and made life a misery to all. The ‘London particular’, as Dickens called it, had been perennial since Shakespeare’s day, when sea coal from Newcastle was first burned by Londoners in large quantities. This fog was banished within a decade by the combination of smokeless fuel and the Clean Air Act, and November is becoming one of the clearest and finest months of the year. This enlightened alliance of ingenious and unhysterical science, and legislative wisdom by politicians who were not then habitual grandstanders on TV, ought to be a lesson to us all in these days of cosmic Cassandras and phoney physics. There is no need to destroy our economies to correct any imbalance — all we need are brains and inventiveness. Our rulers should follow my example (and Churchill’s) and study nature by painting it: there is no activity so conducive to calm and the nourishment of deep thought.

The second reason is that I have been given a 24-colour box of the best watercolour paints I have ever used. They are wonderfully pure and dramatic in their power and luminosity.