In the item below, written this morning, I was devoid of words of wisdom to pass on, but now inspiration has hit me and I am passing on a tip to help with oil painting.

If your paint is too thickly applied, lie newspaper over it to remove paint and then re-establish.

However, if you are out in the fields, quietly painting a landscape, and you realise your picture is a gungy mess, you can do no better than Freda (the protagonist in my novel The Pig and I). In her determination to create a masterpiece, she bravely slides her bare bottom over her overly painted mess, thus creating a painting of subtle beauty. This selfless act was inspired by her pet pig, Hermione, who, a few months earlier, had knocked her portrait of the local mayor off her easel and then sat on it, leaving a gross imprint of the mayor's face on the pig's backside and a work of art on the canvas. This set Freda on the path to success in the portrait painting world. A lesson to all of us.

On reflection, the newspaper method is best.