As a young child I enjoyed painting, but all I ever seriously wanted to do was dance. So I danced, and I danced, and I danced my socks off. I trained hard and became a professional dancer, working in theatre, films, and television. Prancing about to great music was wonderful, and I thoroughly enjoyed it all: the cameras, the lights, the action. I even got to boss a lot of other dancers around when I became a choreographer for many television series. 

Then time passed, and the lot of many a dancer befell me – the impact of time, and with advancing age and accompanying decrepitude, I realised sadly that my dancing shoes would have to take a rest. Then I remembered the promise, half made to myself in jest in my youth, that I would paint when I was too old to dance.

So I rummaged in the attic and searched out my old box of paints, and with forgotten excitement and thrill I remembered that first childish painting of so many moons ago. I sorted through dried up tubes of oil, savouring the lingering smell of linseed, turps, and old oil paint, evocative of great masters and wondrous masterpieces. I shivered and felt again that frisson of anticipation when a big white blank canvas confronted me. Oh, the hope, the expectation, the possibility of what this bare blank expanse of primed space could become by the mere act of meaningful lines drawn with a piece of charcoal and daubing some colour upon it! Nor, I thought wryly, would the canvas complain at the sagging face that peered into it, nor would it matter that the strokes were done to the tune of  creaks and groans.

Nowadays I sit down at my easel, and I want to paint really badly.  No! I don’t mean that. I mean I want to paint really well: not badly, but fervently. Yes, fervently,  and with gusto, and before time makes the brush in my hand wobble and shake involuntarily. I admire the white surface before me, and I start to paint. I paint and paint and paint. I twiddle my bare toes happily. The shoes are off. 


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