Perhaps you’ll think it odd that I became rather nostalgic yesterday as I was dipping a mop into a bucket of soapy water and sloshing it over the windows and outside walls of my old studio. It hasn’t been my studio and gallery for about sixteen or seventeen years but the building has belonged to members of my family for around twenty-eight years. My youngest brother Robert owned it first and he used the downstairs area as his piano workshop while I had the flat and gallery upstairs; then later our mum bought it and moved in upstairs, and I moved my studio/gallery downstairs. (Later still, I worked from home, and more recently Chris built me my current studio.)

The building, which still bears the “Porch Galleries” sign, is on the busy main road so, invariably, over time black dust from the traffic settles on the walls, and particularly on all the things that jut out from the wall like ledges, windowsills and door frames. Every so often, when I thought it needed a spruce up, a younger me used to put on an old top and pair of shorts and take a bucket of water and a mop… When you lift a sopping wet mop above your head to reach the high point of a wall the water runs down your arms…

The downstairs studio/gallery was renovated and turned into a flat many years ago; it has been a bolt-hole, a stop-gap or a first foray into living independently for various family members since its transformation.

So yesterday, as I was swishing the mop above my head and enjoying the feeling of power in my arms, and remembering that same sensation of water dripping down my arms, I smiled wryly to myself. It hadn’t been a good day and already I felt a little sad.

“There were times,” I thought to myself, “when I couldn’t stand out here doing this for more than a few minutes before some passing motorists would slow down and wolf-whistle. Ah, but you have to remember that you’re older now and you can’t expect to get whistled at at your age.”

Instead of shorts I was wearing three-quarter length bright pink pants and, over them, an apron that Mum had made for me.

“Who would whistle at me now?” I laughed to myself.

A few minutes later, as I was bending and sloshing with the mop, I heard a long loud wolf whistle. I turned around – it had to be for me – and a handsome man smiled at me from his car.

“Thank you!” I called back with a wave.

It was one of my old admirers from twenty-eight years ago. I continued my work with renewed vigour and half an hour later I received a nice little beep for good measure. Things are never quite as bad as they seem.