My youngest daughter is dressed and ready for school but is already in her own world. It’s this morning, around 7.00am. The air in the house is thankfully cool and vibrant once again after the humid torpor of the past few days that rendered us all mute and distracted from the normal family sensibilities. She stands in her bedroom lost in thought and looks out of her window to the back garden below and the fields and woods beyond. The sun is streaming through and bathes her in its muted warmth. She lifts the recorder to her lips and practises the piece she’ll soon be performing at the summer fair. I’ve been away on business for what seems like a lifetime and it’s my first opportunity to hear her play this particular melody. She doesn’t see me hovering at her door. As she plays her head bobs slowly and assuredly and I look at the shadow cast on the wall behind her. It is festooned with prints and postcards she has collected of Albert Irvin’s child-like abstracts and Gary Hume’s minimalist birds of bright colours, mingled with her own rainbow artwork of puffins, pufflings and assorted panoramas. With her red » Continue Reading.