Anchor with watercolour splashes on a forearm

The boathouse door is blue now, or it was blue this morning. I went down with Mam's old tins after the rain and found the anchor you painted on the wall in March had run in the wet, pink and green pooling round the flukes as if someone had tipped the whole paint box over it. Dad would have sworn at the state of it and then laughed, because he always said the sea does the best work of any painter and never charges a penny.

I have not told the harbour master. He came by on Thursday asking whether the Margaret Ann had been sighted, and I said no, which was true, and he looked at the wall and said nothing about it, which was kind of him. Mrs Hale from the chandlery has offered to buy the door off us for a shilling, to hang in her front window. I told her it was not for sale, and she said that was exactly what she expected a Pennington to say.

I sat with the brush for an hour last night. The black line is easy. It is the colour that will not stay where you put it. Orange kept sliding under the teal, and the yellow went muddy the moment it touched the blue. In the end I let it do what it liked and only drew the rope in last, straight down the middle where the splashes ran fastest.

Come home when the tide turns, or write and tell me which quay you are tied up at. The anchor is holding, Tom. Everything else is just paint.