When the student is ready the teacher will appear *

It is late evening and the children are in bed after their first day of school. I have been watching personal online fresh reports from the war-zone by a formerly retired freelance TV journalist famed for smuggling himself into the 1991 Gulf War by faking British Army identity documents. These two worlds - this one and that - seem so far apart it's as if they can't both be true. I hear the amusing but unusual scrunch of the artist's worn fingers on the TV channel changer as she searches for something other than her work to look at. Half-remembered soap stars flash insecurely across the screen. Ugly products people only think they want vie for approval. Like a ship, our modest but buccaneering household tries to understand the brand new current of the day and fails miserably. We have, I know, been only marginally rocked. But the artist kept forgetting things, at one stage almost our son. I cooked in the kitchen listening to our daughter reading and somehow ended up grating my thumb. (There's a rubber frog shot with holes lying on its back by my cup of tea and I think I know how it feels.) The artist, to be fair, has done much today; it's just a case of some necessary tinkering and readjustment. She has, for example, radicalised the large piece on the wall by bringing out more sun, illuminating some of the darkness, in other words, without sanitising the piece. And I was looking at the smaller pieces on the opposite wall. They, too, remain special. (It's late evening and the children are in bed but the artist's work is wide awake.) The artist may be sitting on the bright red sofa grazing the channels but her work knows what it is and what it wants. A good friend has just sent us a postcard with a 1773 self-portrait by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin. It stares out at us from the front of the fridge. It's like a secret ally and sits well, we hope, among its new friends. It is indeed a welcome guest in the recovering household and when I look at Monsieur Chardin's pastel blue eyes I can also see the artist's, which is strangely comforting.
* Lao Tzu