Marriage

There is no accounting for how young people make marriage choices. So often we make the wrong choices, often motivated by the wrong things. In my case, I have to confess, compatibility wasn't high on my list of priorities.

Anne and I went out for a couple of years then were married for three, before the whole thing fizzled out.

One of the unalloyed joys, and torments let it be said, of marriage is to have a woman you find stunningly attractive peeling vegetables in the kitchen - in the nude. I had this note pad, with the words "Pain in the ass" on the back at hand, and couldn't resist capturing the moment.

I can't remember when this was done, but needless to say it too places me in the fold of those men who too readily "objectify" women. As an artist trained in doing just that, it is pretty hard to unlearn the practice.

We had a spongy kind of couch, and that is where Anne was perched, reading. Note how large the foreshortened foot has become.

Speaking of feet, I seemed to do several drawings of them.

Sleeping feet, with their owner curled up on that same couch, and her profile lightly sketched from an earlier occasion on the right.

Same couch, same feet, different angle, different pen.

Given that her parents had an aviary, that was probably why Anne insisted on us getting a parakeet, which was incredibly noisy. We sometimes had to put it in the wardrobe to cut down the sound so neighbours in our block of flats didn't object. Once in PE and living in a flat in Parsons Hill, I was doing some housework with the thing on my shoulder when it flew off, our not having realised its clipped wings had regrown. Despite hours spent trying to get it down from a nearby tree, it eventually flew off, never to be seen again.

And so there was I, a tiny bird trapped in a marriage that would eventually end unhappily.