LEARNING TO PAINT AT FIFTY I should say at the outset that I have no talent for drawing, and never did. At school, my art teacher returned my efforts with the kind of pained smile usually reserved for the recently bereaved. So when, on my fiftieth birthday, I enrolled in a weekly painting class, it was not because I harboured any secret gift. It was, if anything, an act of rebellion against the very sensible voice in my head that had spent three decades explaining why such things were not for me. The first few weeks were humbling. I had imagined — without ever quite admitting it — that some hidden ability might suddenly reveal itself, that the brush would somehow know what to do. It did not. My early efforts were, by any reasonable standard, dreadful, and the gap between what I pictured in my mind and what appeared on the paper was almost comic. What surprised me was that I did not mind nearly as much as I had feared. There is a peculiar freedom in being unmistakably bad at something you have taken up purely for its own sake. Our teacher, a patient woman named Marion, had a single rule: we were forbidden from apologising for our work. The first time I instinctively began to explain that my lopsided bowl of fruit "wasn't really finished", she stopped me mid-sentence. Most of us, she observed, spend our entire adult lives doing only the things we are already good at, and call it being realistic. We had come to her class, she said, precisely in order to unlearn that habit. It took me the better part of a year to grasp what she meant. Slowly, I noticed that the rewards of those Tuesday evenings had remarkably little to do with painting. I was looking at the world differently — pausing to see how shadows fell, how a particular grey was really a dozen colours at once. My pictures remained, frankly, mediocre. But I was no longer in any hurry for them to be otherwise, and that, I began to suspect, was the whole point. People sometimes ask whether I will ever be "any good", and I find the question oddly beside the point, rather like asking whether someone who enjoys singing in the shower intends to release an album. I paint because the two hours it demands are the only two in my week when my mind is completely quiet. If that is not reason enough, then I have yet to discover what would be.