There is a soft bleating sound outside. It is dark. The bleat is a muffled staccato amongst the mating calls of frogs and cane toads. The amphibians are happy. We've had another flooding day. The creek, which has not stopped, broke its banks again and washed over the paddocks. We haven't even been down the back to check. R panicked a little and moved the cars to a neighbour's house. Of course it didn't come to that. Still, the peach paddock was completely underwater and when we did take the cars to the neighbour she had a river coursing beneath her house. I rode the bike up the road this evening as the rains have passed and everywhere is a sibilant murmur. The roads shimmer beneath a patina of water, the verges gurgle, the ditches guffaw. I have never seen water like this in all the time we've lived here. R is sick of it - and so was I for a day or two but, like a demented pendulum, I have swung back the other way. I found I remembered the drought too well, the promises made that I would never be sick of rain if and when it came. Give me rain any time over drought - even if the road, which the council has just repaired, has washed away again - in the same place. No doubt, there will be another cave in at Jackson's Yards. Can't see for myself for the causeways are impassable until the water subsides. But that will only take a couple of days. At least this time we have the phone. We lost it for over a week and as we have no mobile reception here R was feeling the loss. Not me. I hate phones and would happily never answer another.

The preceding paragraph was written days ago. It was as far as I got. Have been very slack about writing here even though I think of it often. Very slack in many ways.

But not with art. After finishing the previous drawing, and so scared that I would not have another idea and would be straining for days to give birth to some stilted over-wrought and ultimately worthless idea I found instead, to my great surprise and delight, that another idea bubbled up almost immediately. There is no greater pleasure than having something on the go. White spaces, whether it's a canvas, a drawing paper or a virginal manuscript is one the of the most disheartening prospects one can face. The idea came so quickly and went so well that for all intents of purposes I finished it yesterday. I'll live with it for awhile before the final cut but basically it is done. And I really like it. I love the concept. It is a drawing of a woman smelling/kissing a cat's head, much like I do Matisse. He doesn't like it if I try and kiss him from the front. Maybe that big face looming in is just too much of a good thing, but he always sits still when I kiss him between the ears from behind, so that both of us are facing forward. And of course, when he is kissed like that I get to inhale his lovely cat aroma. So that's what I drew but what makes the picture is that the cat is part of the woman. The cat's eyes line up where her mouth would be, the 'M' on his forehead, makes the dip above the lip (there's a word for it which I can never remember). Had to make the pupils horizontal rather than vertical but that works too.

Now, of course, I am bereft of any idea whatsoever for another drawing. Just have to trust that something will bubble to the surface. I notice that I am looking at 'things' differently, seeing them with, dare I say, an artist's eye? Everything is, I know, stored away for future reference. I suppose I am just looking more consciously. Some of the best images are those in which I can't even tell what I'm looking at. Television, surprisingly, is a good medium for creativity. I am often looking, not at the characters, but at the background of whatever is on the screen. There is artwork on television that isn't featured as art - it is in the pictures shown on the wall of houses, in sculptures, in landscapes and costumes. As I said before, sometimes I see something and my mind can't interpret it, can't label it, yet is is beautiful as a collection of colours and shapes and lights and darks.

So I must trust that this 'feeding' of the creative well will foster a new idea when it is again faced with that dreaded blank page.