Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.
A card for a beachcombing marine biology enthusiast (he lives not far from The Deep, which I’ve yet to visit).
There isn’t room to walk into our shed without moving the stack of plastic trugs that stand in the doorway. On the left, hanging on the wall or leaning against it, are spades, forks and rakes, some of which belonged to my father and some to my father-in-law, Bill Ellis. I’m particularly glad to have a long-handled cultivator – a four-pronged cross between a fork and a rake – because I think that might have come from my grandad, Robert Bell, who had an allotment just across the road from his cottage in Sutton-cum-Lound near Retford.
The large black pond net, which I use to scoop up duckweed, would probably be safer stored in the garage as it’s had several holes nibbled in it by the mice that occasionally adopt the shed as their winter quarters.