47/49 Tanner Street, London, 15 November 2017

My journey to 47/49 Tanner Street is relatively short but as it involves walking across Tower Bridge, I allow extra time in case I’m unlucky enough to find it raised. It hasn’t happened yet, so again I arrived comfortably early. Co-organisers Xanthe Mosley and Cliff Barden were busy setting up the large but surprising warm ground floor space.

Checking back on my blog I could hardly believe it had been fully two and a half years since I’d last modelled at Tanner Street Life Drawing – albeit I posed here as part of a sound bath event for Spirited Bodies in December 2015. Where does the time go? This evening it went with pose times of 5-minutes, 5, 5, 5, 10 and 15-minutes.

After the 15-minute pose – a signature upright stance with one arm over my head and the other crooked behind my back – we had a break for tea and biscuits. One pose of 50-minutes would fill the second half. Xanthe asked what I had in mind as she liked to draw portraits. I settled into a twisted seated position that shared me in the round.

My left hand went numb within quarter of an hour of the pose starting. I was permitted to shake back life into it halfway through but subsequently realised I hadn’t returned it to its original position. Happily there were no complaints and the drawings were great; not least Xanthe’s portrait in her diary. Good to be back.