Dear Friend,

At the end of August we completed a wonderful Writing your Life Stories week with Jo Parfitt, full of laughter and tears as our lovely participants shared the ups and downs and the emotional highs and lows of their lives in the ‘safe haven’ of the Watermill. Our thanks to all for a delightful week. Pictures above show some of the group on the steps of Verrucola castle and one of our guests, Rebecca Morrison, finding a quiet spot to write on a Watermill roof terrace.

Now we are welcoming a group of people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty! Yes, they are the participants on Rebecca de Mendonça and Nel Whatmore’s exhilarating pastels week. The pictures below show Bec demonstrating on location, again at Verrucola, and Nel pastelling (is that the verb?) one early morning on another roof terrace.

We’ll be following that with five painting weeks, with exciting new tutors as well as old friends, another writing week with Jo and a knitting week with the lovely Lisa Richardson. At the moment, all these 2018 creative courses ae fully booked! There will probably be one or two cancellations, however (there usually are a few), so if you’d like to come on any course, we’ll put you on a waiting list and let you know immediately a place becomes available. Please click here for details of the remaining 2018 creative weeks.

As for NEXT year, bookings are already flowing in. We’ve already taken more than 130 bookings for 2019, out of a potential total of 240 or so.

If you want to be sure of a particular tutor or a particular bedroom next year, NOW is the time to secure your place, especially with our tempting offer: if you book a 2019 course now, you can have a place in 2019 at 2018 prices. Again, there are more details and links below. This offer was to end on 1 September 2018 but, as we are undertaking major changes on our website, we won’t be publishing our full 2019 website until the middle of September so we’ve extended the offer until 15 September 2018.

In this month’s newsletter there are also stories on:

• In a café chantant with Dad
• A reminder of the Watermill photographic competition
• More intriguing Watermill sketches from Robert Christopher
• A gift from the heart from a painter to a writer
• Exciting yarns.
• Not tales of derring-do but tempting to knit
• A preview of our 2019 creative courses

Happy reading....

We’ll always have Posara!

Bring a partner: there’s plenty for them to do

Why not bring your friend or partner? They don’t have to participate in the course, but they will be able to enjoy the wonderful hospitality of the mill and, whenever they want, to come out with you to our beautiful locations. We also offer a range of Alternative activities for partners on all our courses, as well as a generous £GBP 250 discount if they share a room with you.

Save the first waltz for me!

We were recently in Paris to see our younger daughter Lara, who has an internship at the Louvre, and one evening Lois led us to the Northern neighbourhood of Belleville which, she assured us, is the new Montmartre, or rather, how Montmartre was decades ago before hordes of tourists despoiled it.

Belleville, birthplace of that Parisian sparrow Edith Piaf (supposedly born under a lamppost in the Rue de Belleville) is now home to many artists, attracted by cheaper rents and unmodernised property, as were their late 19th Century compatriots. It’s a multi-ethnic community and rather ‘edgy’, with shady male characters lurking in shadowy corners, and when we took an aperitif, we were not entirely comfortable.

Our goal was La Vieux Belleville, a café chantant (singing café) and once we were inside all was wonderfully transformed.

The café, I suppose, held some 40 or so people and we sat cheek by jowl, so we were soon in conversation with our neighbours, a retired trombonist from the Opéra and his wife, before Minelle, the accordionist came on to play. She distributed the words of popular French songs and we all sang along lustily. Our best efforts, of courses, were reserved for Je ne regrette rien, where were rolled our r’s with relish: “Non, r-r-r-rien de r-r-r-rien; non, je ne r-r-r-regrette r-r-r-rien.”

As we sang an artist in a beret sketched us. A very perspicacious man: he annotated my sketch with the words ‘a distinguished English gentleman’. But the pièce de résistance was undoubtedly when Minelle announced that there was free wine for members of the table who got up and danced first. Lara and Bill were on their feet before anyone else had a chance to move! That’s them enjoying the first waltz above.

Toulouse-Lautrec, thou shouldst be living at this hour, we have need of thee.

Don’t forget the Watermill photographic competition

We are still taking entries for our Watermill photographic competition. And it’s human life that interests us most!

First prize in the competition goes to the photograph we judge to be the one that most reflects the ambiance of the mill and we are particularly interested in shots that show our ‘students’ in action, both at ‘work’ and play. Like the elegantly composed picture above of some members of Jo Parfitt’s writing group arranged on the castle step at Verrucola, taken by Melanie Legge. We like the animation in everyone’s face as Nicole Tyszkiewicz and Caroline Rixon listen to Lyndsey Hydes reading one of her pieces on the vine verandah (below left). Picture also by Melanie Legge.

And how about this group of painters searching for the perfect venue in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, on Terry Jarvis’s painting, taken by Michelle Kent (above right).

The winner of our photography competition will be offered a free week-long creative holiday at the Watermill in 2019, of his or her choice, subject to availability. There will be five runner-up prizes, of £GBP 200 off a creative holiday at The Watermill in 2019, subject to availability.

You can find out more by clicking here. Please join in the fun and submit your best photos taken during your visit this year (or in a previous year).