Tuesday was meant to be a painting day. Painting pictures, that is, not walls. It turned into a day of frustration and I’m trying to work out why. I did paint. I did do some fairly inadequate water colours. Three in the garden and one still life. The frustration was in their inadequacy. I knew exactly in my head, what I wanted to paint, or at least the direction I wanted them to go but I couldn’t get them out of my head onto the paper. So, rather later in the day than usual, I did a brisk walk round and round Cleaver Square, more than twelve times, more than four thousand steps. I came home and did another inadequate painting, a still life of a coffee cup and saucer two lemons and a baked egg dish, a study in greys and yellows, also inadequate. It still didn’t work.

And then I remembered a time in the staff room of the school where I was chaplain. As well as teaching Religious Studies I taught English – to junior forms. The text books we used were written by one of my colleagues, a brilliant man whose English text books were used throughout New Zealand. I went to him because there were no answers in the backs of his text books or in my book and I didn’t know all the answers so I asked him what I was to do.

‘All you are to do is to help the boys (it was a boys’ school) express themselves.’ ‘But they can’t,’ I said, ‘unless they know the correct spelling and the grammar.’ ‘Yes they can. Just let them express themselves.’ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I would love to be able to express myself on the piano but I can’t play the piano.’ ‘Yes you can, just sit at the piano and have a go.’ ‘But I can’t make the piano make the sounds I want it to make because I don’t know how to play.’ ‘Just press the notes and express yourself.’

There’s an exercise in frustration. Sitting at a piano unable to make the sounds one wants to make. I’m never going to be able to play the piano. Mrs Halfacre at the Kapai Guest House in our local village could play the piano. She could also play the harmonium in the village church and on Sundays she did. She gave me lessons, and I never practised and I can’t play. I can recognise the notes an I’m grateful for that. But, for me, if it’s not going to end up an exercise in frustration, I do need some technique. As a friend commented, ‘It’s only when you have the technique can you transcend it.’

I suppose it is possible to leapfrog into being a great creative artist. I rather doubt it with music, certainly not with the ballet, maybe with theatre – sculpture? Painting? I simply don’t know. Perhaps it depends on the person. I know that in being Christian I was always told to ‘take the leap of faith’ and I would say ‘show me where and I’ll gladly jump’. For me it seems to have been a matter of plodding on rather than moving with leaps and bounds.

And it’s the business of having a structure too, a shape, an order. Lockdown is not being easy. Well, some days are better than other days and I’ve managed to force myself out the door to do my steps – most days. There is, for me, a strange reality that I can’t do it on my own.

I remember talking to a man at the gym. I used to go to the gym when gyms were open, three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, after I’d been to church. This fellow gymnast and I began talking and he commented that all the exercises he needed to do he could do at home. But he didn’t. It was only because he had a routine of coming to the gym that he did the exercises. ‘I don’t even have to meet up with someone else,’ he said, ‘or talk to anyone. But if I don’t come to the gym I don’t do the exercises. Am I just weak willed?’ I suggested that perhaps he was just human.

I used to paint a lot – 50 years ago – and then I stopped totally. It was as if I had a blockage a big blockage in as much as I simply didn’t paint for 50 years. I bought paints, I bought paper, I bought pencils, I bought brushes but I didn’t paint. I tried drawing occasionally, just a sketch of two otherwise I didn’t do anything else with the paper and paint and all the rest other than to leave them in a cupboard.

Then three years ago I saw that the art school across the road from where I live, the City and Guilds of London art school, were having a summer school for a week. You could enrol. There were different possibilities. There was life drawing, wood carving, conservation, and there was still life. I telephoned to find out what the course was about, I didn’t just want lectures, I wanted to draw and paint to unblock the blockage I wanted art school to become a plumber, as far as my painting was concerned. It was an expensive course for a week, I thought, but I signed up and was looking forward to it.

Then I decided the whole thing was a mistake and that it was not a good idea at all so I telephoned again and said that, regretfully I must cancel as ‘something had come up’. The person I spoke to was sympathetic and understanding and regretted the course was non refundable.

Well the long and the short of it was that I discovered that I could do the course after all. And it was brilliant and I’ve been painting adequately and inadequately ever since. I do need some more lessons in technique but perhaps, as far as painting is concerned, my ‘leap of faith’ was simply to enrol and do it. Thank goodness for the art school across the road.