After the first class was finished, the day wasn't over. I had another one to hurry off to - but the second one was in Inverness. It had been a late booking, so there had been limited time to plan for it, but - with a couple of tweaks to the arrangement - I made it. It had been scheduled for 7PM, but there was no way I was going to get to Inverness before 8PM, - and there was definitely no way to arrange for alternative models and tutors to cover it - so it was put back to 8:30PM. And without the aid of a tutor.
I booked a bus to Inverness and caught it at 4:20PM - meeting Alison at the bus station on the way. She brought the sketchpads and charcoal from her own class with her, so I could add them to what remained from my class, in case I was starting to run short, but there was little to worry about there. I had judged the amounts very carefully.
It also gave me a chance to catch up with Alison and find out how her own class had run. I had relaxed a lot, when I found out that her model had actually turned up, but it was still valuable to find out just how good he had been. She thought he looked good, with the only real problem being a mild language barrier which meant she'd had to prompt him once or twice. Beyond that, it all went well. Her class was a little on the shy side.
Then it was off to Inverness. Fine weather, almost all the way, then - just about an hour out of town, there was heavy mist gathering above the trees. Then, suddenly, I looked up from my book and it was snowing - shortly before we left the Cairngorms National Park, I think. I wasn't sure whether the weather change was geographical and we just travelled into it as we headed north, or whether it was just turning bad in general. The fact that we left the snow behind as we headed south again this morning definitely suggests the geography, though.
Despite that we still got into town a little earlier than planned and I caught a taxi to the Beauforth Hotel. I met two of the girls at the reception area and they took me to the room where the class was being held. They had apparently booked a class with someone else, who had let them down late in the day. I never did get all the details, although I was curious about them. I imagine it was a competitor who possibly chickened out. But not before he had made them get all the supplies - sketchpads, chalks and pencils. I could have come up with nothing at all, and still been able to carry out the class, because they had covered it all themselves.
Suddenly, I was feeling very bad about how much I had charged. Because of the transport, the limited time available, the logistics, the co-ordination and the fact that I was going to have to stay overnight, I went for the highest price and I based that on a minimum of eight people attending the class, so I was even more surprised to find that it was just six people. I couldn't refund anything at this point, because it was negotiated through an agency, but what I could do was relax into it. I had no reason to hurry off after the hour was done and it seemed that they had no pressing appointments, either. So I told them that as long as I could come up with fresh drawing challenges and as long as our attention spans could cope, then we were just going to carry on and enjoy ourselves.
The smaller classes are a lot of fun, which is something I didn't anticipate when I first started this job. They're more intimate and there's more opportunity for conversation going on. In the larger classes, they can be a bit more chaotic - which is also fun - or they can be surprisingly subdued, because the girls sometimes haven't all met each other before and these classes are their opportunity to get to know each other. This is the smallest class I've ever done, and the banter among the girls was very good-natured and friendly. They were mostly from Aberdeen, although a couple of them live in Edinburgh, now. In Niddrie - which was a bit of a shocker, because I know that area from back before it was flattened and rebuilt. And back then, it was not a pleasant place. Key scenes from Trainspotting were filmed there.
(On an unrelated note, my cousin and I were having a few drinks one night and we got into an argument about the scene in Trainspotting where Renton overdosed and was dragged out into the street. I believe that scene was filmed in Niddrie - he believes that Niddrie had already been flattened by then, and that the scene was filmed somewhere else. The debate got very heated. I have it on video, because I wanted to film one of our drinking sessions. It's very entertaining, in a volatile, NSFW, sweary kind of way.)
I broke out the props again for this class. The Dalek is a master touch. You could bring out anything - the most sinister piece of fetish equipment imaginable - but as long as the last thing is a miniature Dalek, it makes all the preceding stuff seem completely cool. At one point, I posed for pictures with the Dalek held at crotch level, to provide a bit of coverage. Then I looked down and adjusted it and insisted on a new set of pictures, because it had been facing the wrong way. One of the girls laughed and asked if it was because it had been looking at me, but I had been more concerned about the direction its gun was pointing.
One of the girls in this group had already attended a life-drawing hen night and had been very entertained by it. I think it was her idea to go for it again, so I'm very glad that I managed to make it work after the other guy backed out on them. When she first mentioned it, I wondered if she'd been to one of my classes, but she said she'd done it in Perth, Australia. I suppose she'd have recognised me right away, if it had been one of mine, though. She asked about the challenges I was going to do, so I think she was hopeful that it would have a similar feel to the class she'd done before. She specifically mentioned one where people would start a drawing, then change seats, but leave their drawings behind - then continue on the piece of paper that the previous artist had left behind. I was really pleased that she mentioned that one, because I've done variations of that challenge before, but it had been a while since I'd used it. I've built up a lot of drawing challenges that I can call on, but there's never enough time in any one class to do all of them, so - inevitably - a few of them can be forgotten for a while, then suddenly resurrected for a specific class and this can make them feel very fresh. Other challenges can be set aside because the dynamic isn't quite right or because there aren't enough (or there are too many) people in a particular group, or they're too similar to a different challenge. This one, though, had simply been forgotten and so it was fine to bring it back. I'm not sure that it was entirely as she anticipated, but there's only so far you can stray from that particular concept, so I'm sure it still worked.
Another cool thing about this group was the easy flow of it. There were a couple of times when I realised that we'd naturally fallen into conversation between challenges. I was standing around, completely naked, and talking to the girls about various things, rather than doing any poses and had to give myself a nudge to "get back to work". It was almost like I felt like, if I wasn't posing or setting a challenge, then I was being lazy and wasn't earning my fee. One of the girls spoke about how she wasn't entirely sure how comfortable she wold be with a naked man in the room, but then - when I was there and talking to them and completely relaxed with my own nudity - she was completely cool with it. It's not the first time I've had feedback like that, and I always appreciate it.
The bride also commented that she had specifically said "no strippers" and said that perhaps she should have expanded on that statement so that it referred to naked men in general. By this point, though, she was also completely cool with the concept and was just joking around, and this led to a conversation about the differences between my classes and strippers. I think the ultimate conclusion was that it was all down to the sexuality of the concept. There's no getting away from the suggestiveness and the innuendo, but strippers play up the erotic elements and the sexual aggression. I told them that the girls who hire me tend to be the kind of people who want to be a bit playful, but also want to keep a sense of decorum going on.
At one point, one of the girls did or said something (I can't remember what started it all off) that made me decide to knock a single point off her score. I couldn't remember her name, so she lied and claimed she was one of the other players - trying to get me to knock the point from the wrong person. So I told her that as a further penalty, I was taking away all her points and giving them to the person she had tried to sabotage. This put that girl firmly in the lead. A couple of times I tried to find ways to knock her back down again - just for the fun of it - but somehow, she kept winning other challenges. In the end, I think she had about eighteen points, while her nearest rival had seven. My memory is always hazy on the specifics and numbers, but it was definitely in that area.
A further cool touch - once I introduced the prizes (greetings cards I'd made up a few months ago, from pictures Alison had taken of me in the Fiddlers' Elbow) some of the girls asked me if they were for sale, because she wanted to buy a couple. I tried to give some away at that point, but she insisted on paying. I couldn't think of a realistic price to ask and actually felt bad about charging anything at all, considering how much I'd been paid for the class already. Since the class was effectively over at that point, I was also happy to take a drink, so I suggested that if they bought me a second pint (they'd bought me one already) then they could all take their pick of the cards, but she insisted on giving me £10. Then, at the end of the class, the bride herself dug out her purse and also insisted on tipping me.
About half an hour later, as I was booking myself a place to stay for the night, that extra bit of cash actually came in very handy. There were no nearby cashpoints and the card facility was down, so only cash payments could be accepted and I had exactly the right amount on me to pay for a room overnight. I ended up sitting in front of a log fire, chilling out with a glass of whisky that someone gave me and feeling really happy that the day had gone so well. I had been pretty stressed by the potential for it to go badly, for most of the week, but - in the end - it was a lot of fun.
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