Work and Weekend

I am now working on our first brief, its a thematic approach to illustration. We are each given a word (mine is crime) and we set about exploring the subject matter relating to it. Its a simple and very necessary approach to illustration, find existing methods and develop them as well as finding new ways of expreesing the old. For those of you that I have worked with in class you maybe surprized to hear that I am using a pencil, yes I know how to hold one and whats its for. I thought it was time to go back to drawing and set aside my computer for a while (well I am using it a little bit). I haven't quite entred the full spirit of HGK by working live in the studio, but small steps and I'll try it out this monday.
I have plotted out a few ideas and am reasonably happy with their present status. Mike has suggested that the way to fulfill this brief is to truely participate in the theme= commit a crime. I may be back in Bath before long.
The weekend comes around, and after pottering around with work during saturday we head into the forrest at Gutsch again and have another fire and beers. A German student comes this time (Felix). We sit talking and drinking in the darkness, except this week we have neighbours. 10 meters away sits a group of local Suisse, we can see each others fires but not each other. If I were in England I would feel uncomfortable being so close to others in the middle of nowhere. After a while they come over and ask if we have knife, we do and they take it, when they return they offer us some barbecued pork, which we greedily consume, they continue to come back and forth offering us alcohol and more. We finally join them and they lavish us with pineapple more beer, guitars and anything else they have. Only a few speak English, we sit listening and chatting in the dark until 3am and they leave us to the fire to try their luck in a casino. I feel my faith in strangers restored, they were some of the nicest people that we've met here, and I couldn't even see them properly.
Today is sunday, I put away my work and start to write the last two weeks of this blog that I should have been writing every other day. Hiromi and I have a quite cafe lunch in a little square, we hire a pedallow and go out onto the lake. The weather is baking hot, though the mountains still keep their snow. Out on the lake it is cooler and we bath our feet in the cool clean water. we watch boats to and fro, birds paddle and dive, the city looks much different here this low and far out. I don't want to leave here.