har-ish

I grew up around water, though not really the grand, intimidating kind. There were rivulets, little streams and irrigation canals around the places I grew up. They were part of the landscape, but somehow never quite part of my childhood.

My parents were rather overprotective when it came to water. Water bodies were expressly forbidden territory. No wandering into streams, no adventures in canals, no discovering what lay around the next bend. Even today, that fear of water has stayed with me. My greatest achievement in aquatic exploration is getting knee deep into the sea and deciding that I have probably experienced quite enough of it.

Perhaps because water was always slightly out of bounds, I developed a rather fanciful idea of what a beautiful water body ought to look like.

In my head, there was always a river or, better still, a glorious little rivulet. Not a mighty river. Nothing grand or intimidating. Just a really beautiful little stream winding through an impossibly lovely landscape, doing its own thing, and, for reasons that make absolutely no practical sense, there was always a lighthouse somewhere beside it.A lighthouse beside a rivulet is hardly a sensible arrangement. But who exactly is going to stop me in my imagination?

This drawing is my rather inadequate attempt at putting that landscape on paper. It doesn’t quite do justice to the water bodies I’ve carried around in my head since childhood, but perhaps that’s alright.

Someday, when I learn to use watercolours, I’d like to come back to this idea and materialise that landscape properly. The rivulet, the landscape, the impossible little lighthouse and all the other things that exist perfectly well in my thought kaleidoscope.

For now, this will have to be my first draft of a place that probably exists nowhere except in my head.