Saturday 26th May

And very good advice it was too.  Given me by my only ever Art teacher Jack Trodd, way back in the mid-sixties, that wonderful decade ( if only we had known it at the time) when anything might be possible.  Jack Trodd wore tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows, smoked a rather fruity tobacco in his meerschaum pipe in class, was in his late fifties and was a bit of a peadophile.  Also a damn good art teacher, who let us lower sixth formers do what we wanted, including smoking cigarettes in the back of the Art room, where the seldom-used potters wheels and piles of drawing boards and easels were stacked.  He used to teach me how to do a watercolour wash, me standing next to him, watching as his sable brush drew a line just beneath the dark water line, drawing as if by magic the water margin a quarter inch down the page and leaving behind a residue of colour, the wash, as the base for the layers of watery paint to sit upon.  While concentrating fully on the task in hand Jack would also be adept at running his hand up the back of your knees, and under your grey flannel shorts, and right up to the peachy cheeks of your bum.  He never seemed to want to go any further, which was both a relief and a mystery; maybe he got off on just touching your arse, and didn’t need to actually touch your willy, who knows?   I didn’t really mind, as I was learning about Art at the same time, and nothing of any consequence actually happened.  Jack was quite high up in the Scouts, and it seemed from my experience that most of the Scoutmasters were closet boy-fanciers anyway.   To today’s generation, who know all about peadophiles, the internet and the dangers to young children it may seems strange that in fact there were loads of them around when we were growing up, the vast majority, as I suspect now, never really got up to anything that much, but a bit of touching up was quite normal behaviour.  We kids never told anyone, because it didn’t seem to be doing any harm, and anyway, we were only kids, so who was going to listen to us anyway.  But I did learn about perspective and how to draw the human body, and how to draw faces from Jack, and yes, the best advice of all – never show an unfinished painting to women or children, still holds true.   Happy days on the whole.