enforced loitering

and some of the things I play with during seemingly incessant waiting

Time was when I would read books at airports. Trouble is, if a book is really interesting I can become lost within the pages. I was so engrossed in a book while in a holding area in Atlanta some years ago that I completely missed the gate change announcement and as a consequence missed my flight to New Orleans. Happily the airline personnel took pity on me and slipped me into the next available flight for a consideration of an extra USD $50. Still, that’s $50 I could have spent on catfish and grits, and I was late getting in to my favourite city (sorry, San Francisco, New Orleans has taken top spot now but truly I was faithful to you for forty years). The video above is of neither of those places, it’s London.

I like to draw, and have filled three notebooks on this three-week trip, mostly with scrawled notes for the books I am working on, as well as outlines for future online classes, so I didn’t want to purchase yet more paper to take home. I have enough there already. Besides, I prefer to draw landscapes than people or built environments.

Other activities include the making of string (a length of string can be an interesting way of recording a flight) and sewing, but on the day I began writing this post I was too tired for either of those amusements.

So I have been taking guidance from David Hockney and playing on my iPad. My doodles will never achieve the acclaim that those of DH generated on the same app (Brushes) have, but I find they lead to interesting possibilities. Ideas for abstract paintings can be explored without wasting paint and often expensive substrates; and colour combinations explored for intarsia knitting if that is what floats your goat. It becomes particularly entertaining when you make screen-recordings of your colour explorations.