I’m in Letterkenny. I drove up yesterday morning, examined yesterday afternoon and again this morning. Crashed out in the Radisson Blu hotel this afternoon and I’ll be examining all day tomorrow, driving home tomorrow night. Sunday will be my first day off in two weeks. This is the pre-Christmas examining hump.

Didn’t really do anything creative yesterday apart from these doodles in short breaks between candidates. I wasn’t all that happy with my clothes on the line in my gouache painting the other day so I thought a bit harder about trousers and shirts and what they look like.

Then this evening I was messing around with watercolour pencils. The first thing is abstract, sort of inspired by the stained glass I saw in a funeral parlour in a Netflix sitcom we’re currently watching, called The Kominsky Method, starring Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas. Phew.

For years (yes, YEARS), I’ve been thinking about creating a something involving a spoon carved from wood, some coloured stones and the representation in some way of a liquid in which the stones sit and which seems to spill from the bowl of the spoon. In my mind, the spoon has been a ladle. To do this would require a piece of wood with a very distinctive shape. So, now, I’m thinking of a much simpler spoon, flatter and easier to do. Here’s a very rough representation of my current plan.

Now it’s after midnight. I’m in the Radisson Blu hotel in Letterkenny. I’ve been in non-stop chat with a couple of examiners for the last five hours. I’m tired but my room is very close to the lift, so that’s going to be noisy. Plus there’s a Christmas party going on downstairs and, although I’m on the third floor, I can hear the thump of drums and bass quite clearly. I’m going to be examining for about eight hours tomorrow. Then I have to drive home. Arse.