“I really like that painting of the drowned lady,” said one of the four visitors to my studio last Thursday afternoon. He had a strong Liverpudlian accent.

He was no connoisseur of art, or women, come to that – the painting in question depicted a mermaid! In fact he was not even a guest. Just minutes earlier I had been lost in my own little world of painting whilst listening to an audio book when I had been startled by a girl, accompanied by three boys, knocking on the glass door to my studio.

“What are they doing down here?” I thought to myself (my studio is thirty-eight steps down from the main road… and they were strangers!).

“Can I use your phone to call my mother? We’ve been attacked by a gang of older boys,” said the girl (a sullen blonde of around fourteen years old).

No sooner had I nodded than the oldest boy (perhaps fourteen but younger looking than the girl) opened wide my door and the four barged into my studio. The boy who liked “the drowned lady” was twelve or thirteen and had big ears, which looked rather prominent owing to his new ‘short back and sides’ haircut; the older lad, too, sported a similar new haircut. The youngest, a boy of eleven, wore round tortoiseshell spectacles – he put me in mind of “Piggy” from “Lord of the Flies”, but he wasn’t fat.

According to the gang of four in my studio they were on holiday staying at a local caravan site and, having been down the town to have their haircuts, on their way back to the camp site they were assailed by twenty-one sixteen year old schoolboys…. at five-thirty… in dear little old Dawlish town! Apparently yesterday it was even worse – the older boys had been kicked and punched to the ground… and not a mark on them!

They asked several inane questions, and some searching ones, and the oldest boy clearly wished to enter the main body of our house – I had to close the door he had opened. At length the girl spoke to her mother who agreed to come and pick them up and my Chris came into the studio.

“I’m going to start locking my door from the inside,” I said to Chris upon returning from the roadside, “let’s be very vigilant for a while.”

As much as I didn’t trust the kids, I thought their main purpose was to con the girl’s mother into giving them a lift.

Whilst gardening the following afternoon I noticed that our two bikes, normally chained together, had been separated. I assumed that Chris had unlocked them in order to oil them before taking them out cycling, therefore I didn’t bother to mention the uncoupling to Chris.

Yesterday afternoon, upon arriving back from shopping, Chris discovered that his bike was gone. The “Golden Sands Holiday Park” is as big as a town. We didn’t locate the bike, the mother’s car or the band of accomplished lock pickers.

The police informed us later that there has been a spate of similar crimes in our area during the last few days. On the basis that neither we, nor the police, ever expect to see Chris’s bike again, we went out this morning to find a new one. My mum accompanied us and kindly insisted on buying her son-in-law a beautiful blue bike with butterfly handlebars, so now Chris is quite pleased with the outcome and we plan to register particulars about our bikes with the police.

On our way home we called into my niece’s place for a family lunch and we related the tale of the missing bike and the most likely culprits.

“I had heard about some recent incidents,” said Lizzie (whose husband Martin is a police officer), “in fact, one of my friends who has a hairdressing salon in the town told me that, on Thursday, a couple of boys ran off without paying for their haircuts!”

It’s a small world and Dawlish is a pretty small place.

“The Drowned Lady” – unfinished.

In my vast experience of children (well I did have one and three extra who I love as my own… and I was one myself!) I would say that it’s rather uncommon, during a family gathering, for a child to think “I wonder if anyone would like me to make them a cup of tea?”. So when my Supergran mum says loudly to me, at said family gatherings, “Wouldn’t you think Daniel (now aged eleven) would offer make a cup of tea to save his grandmother’s legs?”, I always reply in the negative. Likewise, I’m never surprised to find that the great-grandsons have not rushed to do the washing-up of their own accord. I reckon they are probably no better or worse than I was at their ages and therefore it’s a bit much to expect such grand gestures without first being asked (or cajoled, or threatened).

Of course, Supergran is our family matriarch (not to be confused with “The Matrix” in the film of the same name which, according to Wikipedia, is the name given to a simulated reality created by sentient machines to subdue the human population – quite the opposite of my mum then). The grandmother whose legs she would like to be saved is my sister, but I hasten to add that Mary looks nothing like the archetypal grey-haired granny in a rocking chair (although she did break her leg badly last year).

Yesterday evening Chris and I went up to see my niece Liz and her husband Martin. All day long I had been working on a drawing of Rosie, their youngest child, which was to be a present for Martin’s birthday. Unable to frame the drawing in time for his birthday, I had taken a photograph and turned it into a card for him with the promise of the framed picture to come soon. Unfortunately, I was a day out – it was his birthday the day before – and instead, we should have gone to see my sister-in-law, whose birthday it really was, but by then it was too late. So we’ll have to see Fiona tonight and carry on with this day out birthday thing.

Even before sitting down in Lizzie’s lounge room she offered us a cup of tea, which we declined because we had only just finished our dinner and were full. Whilst we were all chatting Charlotte came down from the bathroom and I beckoned her to sit on my knee for a cuddle; she was in her pink pajamas, her hair was damp and she smelt of all things nice – like soap, shampoo and powder. The boys are of an age when they hate kissing and cuddling aunties but the girls, at one, eight and ten, are still a joy to hold. The average cuddle lasts about two minutes and then they are off. At the allotted time Charlotte dashed off to do some Kung Fu dancing but nobody took much notice and she disappeared into the kitchen.

Charlotte made rather a dramatic entrance back into the lounge. The eight-year-old stood coquettishly, her head at a beguiling angle to the side and her hands held together in front of her – she may even have coughed to get the attention of all. Once assured of everyone’s full attention she smiled and asked:

“Would anybody like a nice cup of tea?”

Mine was perfect – half a cup of very weak tea produced exactly as instructed.

It just goes to show that Supergran (the Matrix matriarch) is right after all. It appears that young children really do wonder if anyone would like a cup of tea. I wonder if that applies also to older children… l believe I shall be quite disappointed tonight at Rob and Fiona’s if my nephew Tom, aged twenty-three, doesn’t think to ask if we’d all like a nice cup of tea. And he can jolly well save our legs and take the “crocks” out to wash them up!

It’s strange how the drive home to Dawlish from Sidmouth seemed so much shorter and quicker than the outward bound journey…but of course it was shorter and faster without the cyclists, then the Crusader caravan in front of me all the way to Exeter; and, nearer to my destination, there was that little detour I made owing to a wrong turn. Admittedly, I wasn’t used to driving Chris’s big Renault Velsatis (favoured by French presidents). It felt rather big for me (even though I have quite a big bottom) and I haven’t driven an automatic since April… also it has a funny key that looks like a small credit card and a starter button like old-fashioned cars used to have (thankfully, not a crank!) . However, I managed to avoid killing any of the many fast, but not so fast as a car, cyclists and the Velsatis took me, in stately fashion, to stylish Sidmouth where I was to lead a “workshop” in the art of painting water in acrylics.

Relieved to arrive intact and on time the day just got better and better. The artists were not only friendly and kind but also intelligent and talented. Any nervousness on my part (“A captain with seven children…”) quickly disappeared and soon I felt as though we were old friends. As a matter of fact most, if not all, were not complete strangers to me because they had come along to my art demonstration last year, and I knew Tony back in the days when he was a young antique dealer (if that is possible) and I was younger still, working in my boyfriend’s antique shop.

“I knew Tony over thirty years ago,” I began to a group of ladies, “when he was dashingly handsome with lovely pink cheeks and thick black…”

“Curly hair,” he laughed.

“But you still have pink cheeks,” I added.

Sadly Tony has lost most, if not all, of his luxuriant locks.

Driving home in the afternoon sunshine – now quite at home with the car of French presidents, and also at home with the East Devon area where I had lived for over four years during my early twenties – I took pleasure in remembering my first car, an old Austin 1300 which had to be towed home on several occasions when it had run out of oil and overheated (it drank almost as much oil as petrol). Those were the days! The steering wheel used to start shaking at 85 mph and other more experienced drivers warned me not to exceed 95 mph or “The king-pin might break” (whatever the king-pin is!) – not on the country lanes, of course… it wouldn’t have been safe to drive at more than 60 on the narrow lanes. It’s all much more sedate these days – I don’t think I exceeded 50 on the main roads today.

Observing the sign for Budleigh Salterton, I was reminded also that I had nearly all my learner driving experience on the stretch of road from Woodbury to Budleigh Salterton – alone with my old boyfriend’s ancient mother in the passenger seat. She still had her driving license (though she’d never taken a test and hadn’t driven for twenty years!) and she was the only person available to sit in the car on those summer evenings long ago. I didn’t pass my test the first around. “Don’t talk to the examiner” people advised. As a result I was so nervous that five minutes into the test my left leg began to shake uncontrollably (it couldn’t have been the right one, which I might have been able to conceal). Next time around, heeding the advice of my boyfriend’s old mum, I wore a pretty see-through blouse and talked incessantly about my need to pass the test. The examiner felt so sorry for me that he let me reverse around a corner again. Eventually I managed not to drive onto the pavement and I passed.

It took five minutes less driving home, then five minutes more to park outside because since the Main Roads Department widened our pavement into a pedestrian and cycle track there is now less room on the road for traffic and nobody wants to stop and let you manoeuvre into a space… if you’re lucky enough to get one. But I didn’t get stressed – I’d had such a good day.