Late spring. Sitting in the armchair in the living room, I was chilly and disconsolate. My middle daughter was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and unwell. The pregnancy had triggered two serious autoimmune disorders. She’d been successfully treated for thyroid cancer a few years before, but this new disease was attacking her lower spine; she was exhausted and in almost constant pain. At times she couldn’t pick up her two-year-old daughter. I could barely afford to fill up the car, never mind pay for parking and a flight back to England, and every night lay awake worrying.

Beside the chair to the left, a live rock wall, and in front, a wood-burner. To one side of the stove, on a table-easel, was a framed print; the last and most optimistic in a series of allegories I painted during my immediate post-marital separation years. The five works depict the same semi-naked woman turning away from a sparse and gloomy interior towards a bright landscape (hope) in the distance, but with each new work, the interior became lighter and more colourful, and the landscape moved closer. Next to the print, a painted concrete cast of Tintin’s dog Snowy. On the other side of the fire, a plaster tortoise and a small copy in oils of the Victorian symbolist painter G.F. Watts’s ‘Delusive Hope’. Hope or, to the........

© The Spectator