Who’s eating my favourite lizards on Lake Como?

The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work.

This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como, which I have now been visiting for the best part of two decades. I look at it very intently, and necessarily so, for I paint it in watercolour every day I am there: at least one picture in the morning, and another in the afternoon, sometimes four per day. I have probably done over 200 watercolour drawings of the lake and its surrounding mountains, its skies, little ports, forests, groves and meadows, each dated. Although I have given many away, and sold some at my occasional shows, I retain scores, and thus can compare the evidence not only of the endlessly changing light following eternal rhythms of the time of day and the weather patterns, but the occasional physical events which leave their permanent marks. The great merit of topographical art is that it forces you to examine carefully and record accurately what is before your eyes.

Thus, although the great limestone cliffs which slope diagonally across the lake and plunge into its depths look strong enough, they are in fact subject to decay like everything else. As professional builders say of the structures of old houses, they grow ‘tired’. Attacked by frost and occasional snow and ice, and ravaged and infiltrated by heavy, stream-forming rains, beaten too by the hammer blows of brazen summer suns, immense particles of the rock lose their grip on their parent mountain and suddenly, without warning, lurch into the abyss and come thundering down into the lake, carrying the soil and trees, and any buildings in their path, with irresistible force and catastrophic consequences.