Every week I cycle to Rye, up through Ore, down Battery Hill to Pett Level and then along the coast and through the bird sanctuary to Rye Harbour. It’s a fabulous ride and most of it is downhill or on the flat. I meet my Friday lunch buddy and then I peddle home, inland through the countryside; out of the back of Rye and along a track and onto Dumb Woman’s Lane (you couldn’t make it up… not now anyway). There are four hills on my way home. I do it to get a bit fitter which doesn’t work because I invariable reward myself with a brace of apple donuts from Jempsons in Rye (once I managed to resist the temptation in Rye but by the time I got back to Ore I burst into the COOP and bought a pack of five apple donuts. I ate them all).

I cycle the same route every week. People have suggested that I might try other routes but I don’t want to; I like that I know every bend, drain and manhole cover along my route, that I know that I can take the bend at the bottom of Battery Hill without even touching the breaks, that I can stick out my arm and run my hand through a rosemary bush in Winchesea and that I can now get up the third hill without wishing I was dead.

It might sound dull but in a world that seems to want only novelty I don’t.

Similarly in my work I paint many of the same objects on the same three shelves, two of which have followed me to France and back and from studio to studio for forty years.

As I paint a familiar object again and again the experience is richer.