Who’s eating my favourite lizards on Lake Como?

The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work.

This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como, which I have now been visiting for the best part of two decades. I look at it very intently, and necessarily so, for I paint it in watercolour every day I am there: at least one picture in the morning, and another in the afternoon, sometimes four per day. I have probably done over 200 watercolour drawings of the lake and its surrounding mountains, its skies, little ports, forests, groves and meadows, each dated. Although I have given many away, and sold some at my occasional shows, I retain scores, and thus can compare the evidence not only of the endlessly changing light following eternal rhythms of the time of day and the weather patterns, but the occasional physical events which leave their permanent marks.