In the beginning, I stopped numerous times to reflect on what I had on the page and see how I wanted to develop or alter my approach or to regularly pick up dropped pencils. I hope that when we go back Nadia might have made her way home, that the war will be over and that things can begin to be mended.

We get into pairs and then into sets, facing rows of four pairs, lined up along the sweep of tarmac to dance the Siege of Ennis.

Thank you for your wonderful comments about my walking drawing resource and it’s lovely that you’re inspired to try the process out. I took the train east to meet an old friend at the bar in Leith where she used to work as a teenager, those festival summers that she had recounted to me, over thirty years ago. The professor talked happily of topology as we made our way along the shoreline, of Moëbius bands and the Klein bottle, those enigmatic, endlessly looping surfaces that seem to deflect a defining of inside or out, of solid boundaries keeping things apart on one side or another.

The room was partitioned into small spaces by low walls of books to make separate enclosures for three of the five children. There it was — the motorcycles, then the long line of armoured cars supposedly flown in with the US delegation, shiny black, one squat with a chimney like an old stove, one rammed with men in special headgear bent over what must be weapons and suddenly the traditional long low limo, small American flags fluttering at the front, the flash of a face and white hair, the first face to look out our way, the American president.She has spoken and led sessions on Drawing and the City at conferences in Glasgow, Moscow and Paris. It’d be great to see any drawings that you make prompted by the resource and if you would like to contribute your own post discussing the ABE drawing processes and the prompt cards, then please let us know. The next night, back home after an eleven hour journey by land and sea, I look across the street to the house opposite.

As I watched the television Remembrance ceremony on Sunday morning I was thinking of writing something to do with war for my Letter from Glasgow. It got a new name — The Botany, to signify the ongoing trend for Botanical gins, served in big glasses, and also the fact that a little way up the canal from where it stood, boats used leave with prisoners who were being deported to Botany Bay.It makes me appreciate and be present in my environment and enables me to create a more ‘true’ account of how it feels for me to be in a particular place. This being a smallish city, most of us had come into contact with these places in our non musical life. After prolonged soaking in hot brine the swelling in my finger began to recede, but twelve days on there is still some numbness, the last pieces of thorn are still rising to the surface, tiny brown specks in the skin. They were trying to explain the long unwieldy detours to people who wanted to cross the road, except they didn’t know the shape of the city so had to be helped by other people who had wanted to cross the road, but like us, been brought to a standstill.