Play It, Sam
Many years ago, when I first came to live in London, I fell in love with the work of the artist known as Patrick. A friend had bought a painted guitar from The Portal Gallery in London and I rushed to see if there was anything I could possibly afford. As fate had it, I found an exquisite little nude painted on a cupboard door and surrounded by flowers, paying the gallery bit by bit until it was all mine. I have it still.
The painter Patrick is also the playwright John Byrne, best known as the writer of Tutti Frutti, an immensely successful six-times Bafta winning 1987 television series starring Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson, and Richard Wilson, followed by countless other stage and television plays until the present day. For his entire career Byrne has moved from painting to writing and back to painting again - on the way designing record covers for Donovan, The Beatles and Billy Connolly and others.
All of this came back to me when I spotted this busker on London's Oxford Street, playing folk music on his flower painted cello. Of course I gave him his due.
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