Sorry I haven’t written or posted anything for three weeks! I hope nobody minds or misses the posts too much, though I miss being creative and having something to blog about! Not being able to do anything besides work and recover from work is making me cranky.

I get up at 5:30 a.m., these days, work till 4 p.m., and then invariably find myself alongside half a dozen bearded men in greasy Safety Orange work gear, having a shot or four of rum at the Dinah Beach Yacht Club before rowing home at half-past-six in the evening. By then I’m too tired (and slightly tipsy) to do anything but make some salad and have dinner with Kris. I stumble to bed by 9 on most nights.

So I’ve become part of that bleary, grey workforce that leans against a bar at the end of the workday, reviving its lagging spirits with a fiery liquid of one kind or another. “Work is the curse of the drinking class,” and all that…

But it wasn’t always this way! Rum used to be something I imbibed as I sat on a beach, digging my toes in the sugar-fine sand, some pencils and a sketchbook on hand, an interested man making flirtatious conversation close by…

My brother, Bruihn, visited me while I was living on Malapacao Island, and because he’s an amazing artist—and paints as easily and effortlessly as the rest of us make cups of tea—when I asked him to paint a sign for the bar I was going to start up “one day”, he dashed The Drunken Mermaid off on two planks of palisander wood in a couple of hours.

Here’s an old ‘postcard’ for ya, “from where I’d rather be!”

Weird dolls, familiar sentiments…”Strange As Angels” by Brian Uhing