A writer plays hookey with a magic paintbox

At a time when I should be writing my book on human monsters — goaded on by the many ingenious suggestions from readers of this column — I have actually been painting. There are many reasons for this disgraceful irresponsibility. First, the delicious autumn weather and the tremendous rainbow of colours it has coaxed out of the generous earth. The greenies who accuse us of destroying our planet are too young to remember the Novembers of my youth, when blankets of fog, greenish-grey and poisonous, descended in early November and often clung to southeast England for weeks at a time, stretching from Berkshire to Essex, and particularly virulent in London itself. Its fumes killed off the very young and the elderly and made life a misery to all. The ‘London particular’, as Dickens called it, had been perennial since Shakespeare’s day, when sea coal from Newcastle was first burned by Londoners in large quantities.