The cold disturbed the electronic lock on my car. It didn't want to respond to the signal from my key. So the painting had to wait till I'd been to the garage.

When I began, I covered the canvas with a green, close to the colour of the lichen on the fence and the apple trees. I added the reds of last leaves and mauves of twigs. The dark, wet branches gleamed. The washed-out sky arranged itself in off-white fragments. 

By around 3:30, most of the colour had drained to grey. I'd forgotten (again) to take a reference photo.

Bedford rooftops from Lurke Street car park, looking south over the Bunyan Meeting to the green sand ridge.

​This was the beginning of something after a long day.

This afternoon, the last of the sun slid horizontally across Mill Meadows and lit up this old plane tree and the bases and tops of the trees on the embankment across the river. A few minutes later, everything went grey and cold.

I liked the stark shadows and went back to work with ink and watercolour.

The bark of the tree really turned from green to orange in the last rays. It glowed against the purpled thicket of the far trees. The fallen leaves were gold. The sky was a soft blue, not mottled as I have made it.

This morning I hung 24 watercolours of Bedford in the foyer of the Quarry theatre. I shall add some canvases tomorrow, the exhibition will stay up until the end of January.

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I found a patch of sun to sit in while I sketched a chestnut tree at the foot of Bedford's 'suspension bridge'. 

I didn't draw first but just pitched in with watercolour. I learnt more that way. Including that it would have been better if I'd prepared a board or had an easel. Balancing palette and notebook on my lap is not the best. 

But, as so often, I was seizing the day and grabbing an unexpected free hour.

Not many leaves left now.

Carpe diem.

Too cold to be out this afternoon, so I went to see the exhibition of portraits in the Basement Gallery. There were oil paintings and busts of non-conformist Congregational ministers. I sketched John Leifchild.

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This is a loose copy of a painting by the Russian born, Ukrainian artist, Fyodor Zakharov: sunlight on silver birches.

A few months ago, I copied Isaac Levitan's avenue of silver birches - an exploration of tone and perspective.

After a frustrating time with representational stuff, I was attracted by Zakharov's loose and expressive brushwork. It's seems almost an early 20th century abstract in whites, blues, purples and golds.

Tres froid et plein air. Today, freezing by the river as the sun set and a big moon rose.

I'd been to the Eagle Gallery to see the impressive acrylic paintings of Andrew Naish.

​A busy cold day with making wreaths and mending clothes.

Reading the letters of Seamus Heaney and the novel of Sebastian Barry, 'Old God's Time': an Irish feast!

'Look left, look right, look left again'. That used to be the mnemonic for how to safely cross the road.

But maybe, looking at these four characters all 'looking to the right' only, that wise mnemonic might perhaps have a wider application. And I haven't even got to the fifth one.

These sketches are in preparation for a political painting - perhaps in the manner of Pieter Brueghel's The Blind Leading the Blind.

Shame I was too tired, after yesterday's 3-hour crawl back round the M25 from south London, and from planting broad beans this morning, to go out and sketch the last beautiful yellow leaves of autumn. That would have been far more therapeutic.

Instead I stayed in.

Tomorrow I go to school to catch up with an old colleague.

This sketch is a kind of waking dream - or nightmare.

On the wide-screen TV in the background, the news is playing, but no one is watching.

Above, a monster crawls out of the wall and a white bird gets ready to defend itself. Top right, two sea-creatures float in the air-waves.

In the foreground of the room stands the world-weary mother, clasping one child; her tired gaze engages ours.

Behind her stands a man, perhaps the father, her husband. Bottom left there is a girl who seems to be holding a cat. Her brother reaches out his left hand towards the cat.

A flower grows in a flowerpot, bottom right.

Tomorrow I go to see my very oldest friend.

Francis Bacon wrote that revenge was inevitably concerned more about past wrong than future peace. "Someone HAS DONE wrong to me, I WILL DO wrong to him." It entrenches behaviours rather than develops them. 

He also wrote that revenge tended to depersonalise its actions and to mask itself in numbers rather than openly facing the plight of individual targets/ victims and their families. 

Brandishing its 'wild justice', mindful solely of the immediate gratification of baser feelings, revenge commits to enmity. Far from speeding the resolution of difference, revenge delays it. Committing to friendship, on the other hand, seeks mutual understanding, promotes forgiveness and values the goodness in others.