Freeze

The artist's parents - a good trip - have left and the sister is now to stay one night. (It is like one of those holiday photographs sprung to life again in sudden adulthood.) The central heating in the meantime has shut down and I am sat at home with the two children now wrapped up in a kind of Dickensian spirit to counter the cold. The fact the artist is out with her sister is a good thing. Both are working mothers and deserve their space. The fact some of us have colds already is not a good thing. However, the children enjoy it when there is just me. Not as much, but enjoy all the same. I tend to spoil them. We bond. A shameless bond. I draw the line only with sweets and encourage creativity. My idea of what creative is however bears its own reflection and no one else's. It stretches for example from refusing to let the 5-year-old play killing games instead of chasing games on the computer, to allowing the 8-year-old to copy my signature as if researching some kind of genetic sub-text. Our optimism gets the better of us - I suppose because we are those kinds of people - and we keep trying the central heating over and over again. This includes turning on the so-called hot tap in the bathroom sink and parking a protruding finger beneath the flow and closing one's eyes in hope. Only it seems to get colder and colder. It also includes that classic switch-it-all-off and switch-it-all-on-again malarkey. It's enough to freeze your words off. There were no plumbers available, you see. Not unless one was prepared to pay the earth. (It is the coldest night of the year.) No, we will simply have to wait until the morning. (Keep the faith.) I came back from town a few hours ago and am still wandering the flat with a scarf round my neck. Occasionally I look up at some of the artist's work and feel a kind of warmth. (Hang on a minute.) I rub the little people's backs. (I don't believe it: it's come on again.) We're chilling.