This quotation by J B Priestly is new to me and as soon as I read it I wanted to write it out. At these challenging times (April 2020) the words hold just the sort of promise that we need – tomorrow is a new day, a fresh start, and those wonderful words ‘with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning’! What could be better than that. I seem to be writing out a few long narrow pieces lately, and when I wrote out these words to see how they would ‘fall’ on the paper, they followed that pattern. I wanted to emphasise some phrases more than others – ‘a new day’, ‘a fresh start’ etc, and wouldn’t normally have written them in alternate lines like this, but that is just how it happened; and, of course, that ‘bit of magic’ needed to be different for significance! To add emphasis to the initial and the top lines I added a few flourishes.

The piece was written out on vellum for The Prince of Wales, President of the Heritage Crafts Association, to thank him for his kindness in suggesting his own President’s Award – an annual award for endangered crafts as identified in the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Endangered Crafts. It was a beautiful piece of vellum which, once prepared, took the writing and paint very well.

As it was for The Prince of Wales I wanted to make it personal to him and so checked to ensure that he was as keen on red squirrels as ever, I was told that indeed he was. If newspaper and magazine articles are correct, His Royal Highness encourages them to come into the house at Birkhall. So at the top I painted a tiny red squirrel no more than 10 mm high eating a hazelnut. (Sadly the magnification doesn’t really show the detail of each hair being painted separately.)

Then at the bottom of the writing, to round it all off, I painted a squirrel looking alert, as though it was watching The Prince of Wales, and it is holding tiny Prince of Wales ostrich plumes in its paws to make it personal to him.

We don’t really get feedback on whether royal gifts are appreciated (or even seen) but I do hope that, if he sees this, The Prince of Wales’ spirits will be a little lifted by the words by J B Priestly and by his beloved red squirrels themselves perhaps bringing that ‘bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning’.