Here is an entry from my diary of Saturday 21st December 2013:

Portugal for Christmas. Without a story on the go, Paula will embark on a small portrait of me. I am eager to work with her for the first time in a while and collected her from Hampstead at 10.30. She was having a late breakfast. We arrived at the studio at 11.30 and I negotiated the complicated alarm successfully. I fixed decaf and herb tea and put music on: Rigoletto. From 12 till 2.30 Paula started making a Christmas card for a studio neighbour. I read the Guardian and scribbled a few notes on Yves Bonnefoy. At 2.30 we had lunch: Paula ate rice crackers and ham salad brought from home; I ate -- Raymond Mason-style -- a tin of sardines and pitta bread I found in the studio “kitchen”. We shared a packet of crisps. Paula slept from 3 to 4 and I read Proust. From 4 till 7 I sat for my portrait made in a new kind of paint on the market, water mixable oil with added linseed. She was not satisfied. On Monday she may do it again in pastel.”

Paula decided in the end not to do it again and thus it was completed in one sitting. I think it is the only picture she ever did in this new medium. A year or two later we looked at it and she liked it enough to have it framed and gave it to me. I remember

the day of that portrait as being particularly enjoyable, though typical: work, lunch, work, champagne towards evening, then later out for dinner and a movie or back to her flat, after picking up fish and chips on Fleet Road, to watch one of our favourite films, Top Hat or Singin’ in the Rain, before rest.