I tried painting from the allotment shed today.

It was a misty day and I wanted to try a range of blues and mauves.

It ended up looking like a smoking landscape.

I kept warm with a paraffin heater, and had to light candles when the light failed.

This is an attempt to work in acrylic and layer the paint differently. 

This was easier in the window - using white overlaying the existing coloured background.

Acrylic gets claggy so quickly that I really need to use a retardant or water spray. 

I find it impossible not to feel uneasy about the near universal immersion in a digital worlds.  Crudely hand-making things with paint and brushes seems a way of asserting a value in a different experience of reality. 

Delaine le Bas was shortlisted for this year's Turner prize. I saw her hall of mirrors a few days ago - and myself reflected in the surface of the walls.

The installation is theatrical and draws on Roma traditions and myths. The blurb says that she focuses on the themes of death, loss and renewal.

There was disturbance here in a good way, and with some humour. The transformations wrought by light on  the reflective surfaces were part of that.

I am wearing my red kagool, as per usual.

This is Russell Park this evening, about 4:30 p.m. The light is fading from the sky and the street lamp palely illuminates a lonely tree by the edge of the football pitch.

I must have seen this arrangement of muted colours a thousand times. There's something rather eery and sad about such abandoned scenes. The only folks about were home-going workers, youngsters and a few solitary dog-walkers - and me, sketching on a park bench.

​It was cold too. I couldn't stay long.

Both snaps are from June 1956 - me and my granny, my sister, my dad and a donkey. I think Queen's Drive was built to honour the Queen's coronation in 1953.

To me there seems to be something uncanny about the way these come to be here, a fact so unexpected by the people looking into a box brownie camera, imagining futures on Weston Sands all those years ago. 

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Actually my dad and my sister, Jo.

This is from a tiny black and white print, but it contains recognisable details - and, in the postures,  something of the emotions of the occasion, even from a distance of 68 years.

Another remarkable feature is the complete absence - on a fine day in June - of anyone else on the beach at Weston-super-Mare.

Hard for me not to sense the passage of time, not to reflect on what these people (aged 4 and 34) dreamed but didn't know of what the future would bring.

Both of them are now dead - but by no means forgotten.

How many other families can also find such 'snaps' in a drawer or envelope - and still feel them similarly evocative. On the back of this snap, my granny wrote: 'Not the flight into Egypt' - which tells another story.