Sixteen and Six Feet Tall

I swore up and down that I was going to turn out to be five foot ten. After all, my mum is five six, and dear old dad is an even six foot.
But no, I got the rubbish short person genetics. I prefer to give my height in centimetres. One hundred fifty-nine, to be precise. And that is where I will leave it.
I have only recently stopped resenting being short. I'm not even that short. I'm average. In just about every way, which also pleases me. But I fit into small spaces, and because I walk quickly, this helps when navigating through the Holiday Rush which is now occurring in all public places.
Yes. I am painting. I am. I'm actually managing not to rush myself through a portrait.
I am also coming to terms with the fact that I run through sunglasses at an alarming rate. I just broke my second pair of mirrored aviators in as many months. This doesn't fix the fact that I have sensitive eyes, and don't like bright things.
In other news, I LOVE MY EASEL!
I had one a while ago, something like it, given to me, but it was missing bits, and it didn't have a watercolour telescope arm thingie, which is sexah beyond words. And it only weighs about two kilos, and folds up to the size of a toothpick.
Everything Winsor-Newton does is magic. As goes for Derwent.
Oh...shite. I promised myself I'd do watercolours over the weekend. I have a beautiful Eurasian boy to paint, and I have shamelessly neglected him. Well, at least I kept busy.
I want to leave you with a thought. This is someone's favourite poem. It isn't mine, but it is someone's.
It's called Five Ways to Kill a Man, and it was written by Edwin Brock.
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.

You can make him carry a plank of wood

to the top of a hill and nail him to it.

To do this properly you require a crowd of people

wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak

to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one

man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,

shaped and chased in a traditional way,

and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.

But for this you need white horses,

English trees, men with bows and arrows,

at least two flags, a prince, and a

castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind

allows, blow gas at him. But then you need

a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,

not to mention black boots, bomb craters,

more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs

and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly

miles above your victim and dispose of him by

pressing one small switch. All you then

require is an ocean to separate you, two

systems of government, a nation's scientists,

several factories, a psychopath and

land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.

Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see

that he is living somewhere in the middle

of the twentieth century, and leave him there.