When my wife and I moved to Whitby in North Yorkshire we had intended to settle into a quiet retirement. She fully expected me to begin expanding my pass-time of painting into a more professional endeavour. The moors and seacoast around our house are inspiring and, for the first months of retirement, we went walkabout, she with the dog and I with my sketchbooks and watercolours. It all seemed idyllic but, in the evening I like to write a diary and I write about why I love to paint. Perhaps rationalising what you do is not a good idea but, for me, it is as much a part of the enjoyment of painting as painting itself. It transpired that my writing began to have an effect upon my painting. I would start the day with the intention of creating a nice watercolour of a scene I had sketched on my walks but what I had been writing about the night before held influence over the act of painting. The work became more and more erratic as the way I approached the act of painting took on a very aggressive slant. I did not seem to want to paint what I had seen with my eyes but something else that seemed to be emerging from then depth of my mind. After about a year I no longer walked the moors or the coast but got up, drank a coffee, and disappeared into my make shift studio in my garage. My wife began to despair because, when I finally emerged, I would be covered in paint and in a dishevelled state. Any attempt I made to explain what I was doing seemed to fall upon deaf ears. To make things worse my painting became irrational. I no longer painted recognisable images but just great sweeps of paint marks that, as my wife took great pleasure in pointing out, could have been done by a five-year-old. I can’t go back to painting pictures but seem to being driven on and on further and further from the reality of things. I know this is a strange tale but I am curious as to what you good people think. Am I beyond redemption?