Another memory of Crete...

...namely one of my watercolours.

I was sitting on a rock at the seaside - on Varkotopos beach, the little, rather scruffy town beach five minute's walk from my rented room - and the waves were coming in with just enough of a roll to make a breaker with a good crest on it. If you wanted to swim, you had to make the exciting and slightly undignified walk through the breakers first, to get into water deep enough to have only the swell. Then you could swim, in the rolling, warm blue. I had been swimming earlier and now I was drawing and trying to decide where I was going for lunch, and I saw this woman, elegantly dressed and with big sunglasses on, paddling with a studied stylishness at the water's edge. I thought "Sooner or later she's going to get hit by a big breaker" - and next moment she was. She had the good sense to laugh uproariously at herself as she pulled her soaked skirts up round her thighs, and I painted her quickly, to remind me of a happy moment.