There’s just enough room in my new one litre bag for an A6 pocket-sized sketchbook, bijou watercolour box, pack of crayons, Safari pen, water-brush, Olympus Muji Tough camera and microfibre buff (‘a bandana with attitude’) plus an attached key fob compass/thermometer. As it says on the label:
‘So pack up . . . and get out there on your next big adventure.’
Or in this case mini adventure as this is the bag that I’ll grab when we’re setting out on our errands and appointments, for instance this morning when we had a few things to do in Ossett and I spotted the brown sporangia of a hartstongue fern growing in a crevice in an old stone wall on New Street.
Usually those furry caterpillar sporangia would be arranged in a feather pattern on the back of the frond but here the frond has shrivelled and curled inwards along the midrib, exposing the spores to any passing breeze, so no doubt thousands of them will find their way into suitable crevices.
May Sketches
It’s only a month ago that there was snow on the hills but since then the spring has burst into action. We’ve made efforts to get the garden up to speed and to plant all the veg beds so I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to draw but here are the few pages of sketches from my A6 pocket book.