Shuffle on this mural wall

I am going back to the war zone in a host of weeks. I have just received confirmation. But I will leave it at that. It can sit there in the background like a new character in a play who doesn't really say anything but has, you feel, a great deal of thought. In the meantime life as a man married to an artist looking for a show continues and this is what I am here to concentrate on. Indeed I breathe what lungs of support I can every day into the body artistic. With admiration comes I hope encouragement. (With this artist I do watch.) I watched her disappear into the cold grey day today in order to work further on her volunteered mural at our children's under-funded but cheerful primary school for example. I shook my head at the window and really wanted a gallery of people to witness this. I saw the mural for myself later when I went to the school to pick up the children and the artist passed me, shivering on her way back home, happy enough, relieved a gallerist is coming to see her work in the new year. It looked magnificent. It is a signifant and generous gesture. It is like Julian Opie meets Michael Craig Martin meets the artist. Instead of just being the generous gesture it is, it also now holds it own very much as a genuine work of art. It is like the acceptable face of socialism. It is like the good side to conservatism. It is all things to all children and yet entirely original. Just the parade of them all, the long and the short and the tall, all the different children, in different poses, stretching along the great white wall as you enter the playground, is like watching angels play. Nor is at all self-conscious. I was there to take the children to the dentist. Bombarded by dental questions on our way down the hill, I marvelled at both child's tenacity and fact-finding skills. Once inside the actual surgery for example my five-year-old son pointed to the fire extinguishers and asked what they were. When I told him what they were, he then pointed to the running man figure in the fire exit sign and asked me what happened to the people having their teeth fixed when there's a fire. Later I sat with them as they were lowered one by one into the high-tech dental chair where their little mouths were lit and picked and toiled away at. They were very brave and I think admired the specifics of dental work. Just like they admire their mother when she comes up with her amazingly intricate details. The artist is in the detail.