We're all working on a summer holiday

I had wished to make a relaxed trawl of an interview with the artist about the implications of being a mother working at home while the children have their school summer holidays. Well, what better answer than the fact the artist is now too busy working? I don’t know how she does it … well, I do actually. It’s called industriousness. An absence of sloth. Activity. I don’t mean to suck romance from the bite too much but there is not a lot of laughter from the grafter right now - not when there's work to do. Nor is this mania or obsession. It is mission. The children, meanwhile, having just come back with us from an Olympian tour of the park, watch their grandfather’s work instead, a primary coloured sunlit DVD about a previous summer holiday, the two children’s birthdays to be precise, while the artist returns to her well measured working of the paper on board screwed to the living room wall behind me, creating in the process a kind of figurement of sense, while all around the little bones grow and the little brains yield more and more. Another thing: we walk just about everywhere - we don’t have a car - so physical exercise and therefore physical fatigue in this house is commonplace. A good thing, mind, even if it does double the effort required for the artist to continue working. Actually you can tell children who spend too much time in cars and not enough time walking or cycling. They look stiff, their hips in particular, and they do not like anything agile. Or is it our state schools and their lack of large grassy playing areas because they have sold the land to the private schools next door? (Where you can't play anyway in case you fall and break a bone and the parents sue.) Who knows what some of the little people will be like as adults. Mobility and disability frames by their forties? The artist's father has a rapt audience with his film. Maybe that's how you deal with them when their mother is an artist and father writing this down: you have a grandfather who makes films you can watch over and over. (They smile at their on-screen grandmother.) Bed, children. It’s getting late. (Dad.) You should be in bed by now. (Oh yeah.)