In my grammar school days, Ancient History, with it’s epic battles and larger than life characters, always had more appeal for me than the serious, grown-up Social and Economic History from 1750-1865 that we were obliged to study for our O-level with its sober politicians and reformers and its Corn Laws, Factory Acts and Reform Bills.
I couldn’t remember the litany of dates, I still couldn’t tell you when the Metropolitan Commissioner for Sewers was appointed and despite my enthusiasm for history in general, it turned out to be the one subject that I failed.
In Ossett we were surrounded by the tail end of the Industrial Revolution with plenty of textile mills, steam railways and coal mines with five miles of the school but there was no hands-on element to the course it was all classroom based and all taking place elsewhere than on our local patch, which actually had its own local luddites, reformers and innovators.
Unfortunately, to judge from the length of my school exercise book, we got just one term of Ancient History with our class teacher Miss Eaves. I’m still enthusiastic enough about the subject to have taken the University of Reading’s FutureLearn course on Ancient Rome twice, once before our visit there three years ago and, again, to recap after.
A wood pigeon perches on the shed roof then swoops down to the lawn to chase off another pigeon that has just landed, chasing it around beneath the bird feeders with a menacing waddle punctuated with short jumps. The second pigeon soon realises that it isn’t going to get any peace and flies off.
I like drawing pigeons and that’s just as well because when they fly up from the wood the flock fills our field of vision as they wheel around, well over a hundred of them, probably 200. But we are going to have to net any seedling we plant in the veg beds.
It was good to see water flowing on the Cascade between the Middle and Lower Lakes at Nostell this morning. We haven’t seen it in action for years. The sluice was restored but because of leakage issues the water has been diverted through a sluice and through a pipe for the last five or six years.
Stable block at Nostell, drawn as we waited in the queue for coffee.
I started a new A6 Hahnemühle watercolour sketchbook last month and now spring’s here, I’m making a point of carrying it with me in this Trespass A6-sized bag, along with a small box of Winsor & Newton professional watercolours.
At the Coffee Stop again, which is newly extended with some stylish hand-painted graphics and decorations.
Our lunch stop was the Ego Mediterranean, our first visit since before the pandemic and our first during the subsequent event, a pointless war in Europe.
As the library specially ordered in a copy of Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes for me, I thought that to try out his suggestions I should draw some library superheroes.
Carnegie
Troubled millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie himself came to Wakefield to open the Carnegie Free Library that he funded in the city, so each episode opens with him materialising at a secret rendezvous to deliver cryptic instructions for a mission impossible that will be a real challenge even for his astonishingly talented team (so his job description is very similar to that of the current head of libraries).
At the end of each episode he appears again to round off the adventure to with a suitably wise epigram, such as ‘Knowledge is Power’, a phrase incorporated in gilded Arts and Craft lettering on the iron gates of the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
So how does he manage to drop in to the present day? Carnegie also funded a Institute of Technology. Unfortunately course our understanding of the space time continuum was rather limited in 1900, so in his enthusiasm to try out the steampunk prototype, built for him in Wakefield by the illustrious Victorian engineering firm, Brown’s Comptometers (it was going to be the real life Green’s Economisers, but they’re very much still in existence, and I don’t want to hear from their legal team) he’s got locked into a chronosynclastic infundibulum so his corkscrew path through space time means he’s in sync with his superhero team only at odd, but predictable, occasions.
Stax
Arcane cult knowledge? Long lost special editions? Martial-arts trained hooded mystery woman Stax is a legend down in the archives deep below the secret library headquarters in a boarded up retail store in the city centre.
Every superhero has an Achilles heel and problems in their everyday lives and for Stax it’s that she classifies her friends and family in Dewey Order.
Bookman Bold Italic
The muscle-bound action hero is Bookman Bold Italic, in real life the van driver who’s developed his strength through lugging around those heavy boxes of requests and returns.
Thanks to doing the rounds, his local knowledge is extraordinary and no-one suspects that the local cheery van driver had a double life as Bookman driving the alarmingly powerful Bookmobile on daring missions. And causing a lot of mayhem along the way.
Stampa
When you return books to headquarters library, do you ever think that checking in scanner has a life and a character all its own?
Of course it does, because when the superheroes spring into action it transforms into Stampa, the Dating Agency Droid, providing comic relief in the story but also often saving the day through its plucky and practical ingenuity.
