The heating in my studio is a joke, an old gas thing that takes two hours to do anything, so from November to March I paint in the cold. I used to hate it. Now I think it's the best thing that ever happened to my glazing.

Cold makes the paint stiffer, so I work the first hours with a loaded brush and very little medium, thin and dry-ish, and I get edges I could never get in a warm room. By the afternoon when it's finally tolerable I'm doing the soft passages anyway. So the day has a shape whether I plan one or not.

The problem is the hands. I have a fingerless glove on my brush hand, a fingerless one on the other for the palette, and a scarf I will not describe. My daughter saw a photo and asked if I was homeless. She's fifteen.

This morning it was eleven degrees in there. I did a passage of a forearm and it was the best thing I've painted in a month. Then I went inside and drank a coffee with my hands around the cup like a peasant.

Curious whether other people's spaces impose something on the work like this. Not the romantic version, the annoying version that turns out to be useful.