So good to be back at Langsett, walking around the reservoir, across the more and back up through the woods where larch and beech are now in their autumn colours.
Langsett in October
Month: October 2018
Sparrow Nestbox
First visitor to our new sparrow nest box: a blue tit. It checks out hole number three first; no, that’s not quite right; then hole number two and it’s just about to investigate hole number one when a second blue tit appears, there’s a skirmish and off they fly.
It’s likely that, as this RSPB box was made specifically for sparrows, the blue tits will find the entrance hole a little too wide for their liking but the old box, single-holed variety, attracted blue tits one year, sparrows the next (and finally bumblebees), so we’ll have to wait until springtime to find out who finally takes possession.
Link
Egg Market, Western Desert, 1941
When he sent this photograph back home to Sheffield, my father, Robert Douglas Bell, then a sergeant in a light anti-aircraft unit, stationed in the Western Desert, North Africa, wrote on the back:
‘The Egg Market (remember) taken in Feb. 1941’
Years later he told me about setting up this pop-up trading post. He’d been an accountant before his call-up and a keen sprinter and footballer, so he, and his unit, realised that the best way to barter with the locals was to be organised and scrupulously fair. Other units preferred to haggle and to try to get the better of the locals, so they soon found themselves sidelined and a queue formed at the packing-case desk that my father’s team operated.
My father is manning the desk and it looks as if he’s hung his shirt on the end of the bargeboard before getting down to business.
It’s amazing to have this photograph of ‘The Egg Market’, which my late mother thoughtfully added to a family history album.
On a Balcony in Cairo
The following year, in Cairo, my dad was transferred to the Military Police.
‘The moustache is not really as untidy as it may appear,’ he wrote, ‘It’s slightly bigger now.’
Thank you, father, that’s just the sort of nugget of information which will be so useful to future historians. He rose to be colour sergeant major in the Special Investigations Branch of the Corps of Military Police, Cairo. His beat included the Pyramids and the Sweet Water Canal (which was anything but, he told me) and he had some input into security for the November 1943 Cairo Conference, attended by Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Roosevelt and Churchill went on to meet up with Josef Stalin in Tehran two days later.
The Spoils of War
In my childhood years, we had a battered light-tan leather case which had been confiscated from hashish smugglers and I still have father’s sergeant’s baton. My mother used to keep it handy by the back door on top of the three coat-hooks in the porch, in case she ever had to beat off a doorstep attacker. Fortunately she never had cause to use it in anger. She could easily control us with a well-aimed tap with the back of the Hush Puppies brush.
My father was born one hundred years ago today on 29 October, 1918, just a couple of weeks before the end of World War I.
Link
Corps of Military Police, Cairo, 1939 Sept.- 1940 Dec., The National Archives, Kew. Do records for 1942 – 1945 still exist? Please let me know if you’ve been researching the subject and you can point me in the right direction. I’d love to read some of my father’s case-notes, if they still exist.
Autumn Trim
A cold front came in from the north during the night and today it’s noticeably cooler but mostly sunny.
Armed with secateurs, long-handled loppers, a step-ladder and a pruning saw, I trim back the golden hornet crab apple to a more manageable shape. It’s mainly a case of cutting back the whip-like vertical shoots that have grown since I last cut it back a year ago but I put in a bit of extra effort and use a pruning saw on one branch that’s managed to get its twiggy offshoots beyond my reach during the past few years.
Yes, it was a favourite look-out post for the resident blackbird, but it will soon find another perch. As I work at in the crown of a the tree, a long-tailed tit flits past my head and perches on a branch three feet in front of me. I don’t think it quite knows what to make of me.
Common Earthball
Common Earthball, Scleroderma citrinum, has ‘a characteristic smell of old rubber’ according to Wildlife of Britain, the Definitive Visual Guide or strong odour ‘of gas or acetylene’ (Encyclopedia of Fungi, Michael Jordan). As I’ve mentioned before, this didn’t stop me from slicing the young ones, with firm white flesh, and frying them in a bit of butter when I was trying to survive on a very slender travelling scholarship on a student field trip to Iceland. To me, they tasted of mushroom, but I don’t recommend that you try them, as they’re variously described as inedible or even poisonous.
These were growing by the path in deciduous woodland at the top end of the Pleasure Grounds at Nostell Priory Park.
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National Trust, Nostell
Perspective Ruler
Perspective can be a bit of a struggle but, according to Italian comic artist Pietro B. Zemelo in a recent Clip Studio Paint webinar, ‘you can’t go wrong’ with the perspective ruler. I have gone wrong actually as I didn’t plot my vanishing points in quite the right place when trying it out on my iPad, but it’s a lot of fun to use.
I wonder if I could draw a set of steps . . .
Links
Tips for Constructing Comic Pages with Clip Studio Paint webinar on YouTube. He also explains the mysteries of the ‘Lock transparent pixels’ button – something that I’ve never dared mess with – and explains the difference between the ‘Divide frame border’ and ‘Divide frame folder’ tools.
Pietro B. Zemelo on Facebook
Trees at Wath
After so much practice drawing on the iPad, it’s a change to get back to pen and watercolour and to sit and draw this autumnal-looking Victorian hybrid lime tree in a garden in West Melton, Wath-upon-Dearne near Rotherham.
Hopefully the small degree of planning involved in the process of drawing on an iPad is prompting me to be more methodical in my approach to drawing in general while the experience of going back to a more tactile medium – back to pen on paper – might encourage me to be a bit more spontaneous in my iPad drawings.
The original drawings are 2½ inches, 6 cm, across.
Word Art
I’ve been indulging in a bit of hand lettering, going through the opening Word Art chapter of a new free e-book from Apple Education, Everyone Can Create: Drawing, On iPad. They suggest using Tayasui Sketches School, a free version of the drawing program, which is what I’ve used here.
There’s nothing too daunting but if you were to take your time to follow each of the suggested projects you’d have covered a lot of ground and you’d have thought a lot about different approaches to drawing.
The Everyone Can Create series of e-books is aimed at 5 to 18 year olds but it’s equally useful as a refresher course if, like me, you’ve been drawing for decades and you’ve settled into what could be a rather too comfortably familiar way of working. It’s good to get back to basics.
If you can draw a smiley face, they suggest, you can make a start with drawing. I added a grey beard to my worried-looking emoticon.
Letterforms are a familiar way to get into drawing too, so they take you step by step through decorated characters, to 3D and inflated bubble lettering.
Patterns and Lines
As I’m so keen on observational drawing that I tend to forget that a simple line on its own can carry meaning, for instance horizontal lines can evoke calm and jagged lines action. There are a few simple exercises to get you thinking about line, pattern and shape.
Links
Bracket Fungus
I’m not sure whether this is the hoof fungus, Fomes fomentarius, or a Ganoderma bracket fungus. It was growing on a softwood deciduous tree, probably birch, at Dubbs Moss Cumbria Wildlife Trust nature reserve, southwest of Cockermouth.
Hoof fungus, also known as tinder fungus, was once considered to be mainly confined to the Scottish Highlands but it is spreading south.
iPad drawing using Clip Studio Paint.
The Old Scouring Mill
I’ve drawn the old scouring mill at Horbury Bridge several times this year, not because I’m particularly interested in the old buildings but because of the attraction of overlooking the mill, scribbling in my sketchbook as we wait for coffee and croissants at Di Bosco, just across the road.
Overlooking and scribbling . . . (with apologies for that terrible link) . . .
‘Scribbling Overlooker’
Arthur Pearson, a scribbling overlooker, worked in one of the woollen mills at Horbury Bridge until shortly before the start of World War I, when he started working for a large woollen cloth manufacturer in Freiburg, Bohemia. After getting into an argument about the Emperor and the Kaiser in the local barber’s, he was interned from March 1915 until December 1918, when he made his way back to Yorkshire.
Speaking to a reporter from the Leeds Mercury, he said that in Vienna ‘food and clothing were only purchasable by the very rich people; in fact, money at times could not buy food, and he had seen gold watches given in exchange for a loaf of black bread.’
Tea was selling at £2 per lb, salmon 30 shillings a tin, jam 25 shillings per jar and rice £2 per lb. A suit of clothes sold for anything from £80 to £120, but, Mr Pearson noticed, ‘the cloth was of very poor quality’.
Scribbling was the initial process of combing the wool prior to spinning it into yarn.
Casualty Lists
War Office Casualty lists for 8 October 1918, a little over a month before the end of hostilities, listed Private B Clark, 46532, of Horbury, who was serving in the Durham Light Infantry. In the previous month Private J Heald, 40981, of Horbury Bridge was listed as a casualty on the 10th.
In June two soldiers from Horbury Bridge had been listed as casualties, Private W H Osterfield, 48495, of the West Yorkshire Regiment and Private D Hall, 242319, of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.