Watercolour flower on forearm

The lift is broken again, so I have been climbing to the fourteenth floor with the shopping and the paint tins, and by the time I reach the landing I have no breath left for swearing, which Mrs Okafor says is the only good thing about the stairs. I am writing because the man from the council finally came about the damp, and he stood in my kitchen with his clipboard and asked whether I had considered moving somewhere with a garden. I told him the garden is in the window box and it has survived three winters. He wrote that down.

The painting is going well. Mr Pritchard downstairs lent me his old watercolour box, the one with the cracked lid, and I have been trying to get the blue of the hydrangea by the bins right, but it keeps coming out like bruised plums. You would laugh. I sent a sketch of the bloom from the cherry tree on the car park to the shop on Harrow Road, and the woman there said she could sell a dozen of them if I made them small enough to fit on a card. So I am making them small.

What I really wanted to tell you is about the thread. Remember Grandmother's red silk, the spool she kept in her sewing tin? I found it in the box you left behind. I used it to tie the stems of the flowers I bundled for the lobby. The wash of violet and teal dried on the paper, and then I drew the red line from the base, a single thread running down, and I thought of her hands pulling it tight. The flower will not stay still for long, but the thread holds it.

Write when you can. Tell me if the sea air in Gdansk has finally made you stop complaining about the bread.