Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Back to my Rough Patch drawing a spear thistle but I realise that it is getting to the time of year when I’m going to need to cut back. The birds have finished nesting so I can tackle the hedge that the blackbirds were raising their young in a month ago.
Rough Patch, my ‘sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden’.
This little brown moth must have flown in one summer night and expired, or been the victim of a spider, in a corner of the studio.
Chimney of Victoria Hair Salon, High Street, Horbury. They still have the brick fireplace with a stone lintel on the ground floor. Drawn over a latte and a toasted panettonne with honey at the Caffe Capri.
If, like me, you lived in a downstairs flat as a child, especially if the flat was in a one hundred year old Victorian villa, then an attic is somewhere that you’re desperate to explore. In children’s stories there were always mysterious boxes and chests stashed away up there, with the occasional drum or antique rocking horse dotted about in dusty corners.
I never got to explore the attic but we did get an opportunity to explore ‘The Mysterious Cellar’, as I recalled in my Exercise Book Encyclopaedia, on page 456 . . .
Stephen Cassidy and the rest of the club were inspired to go down the cellar.
Stephen lowered himself down the depression into the unknown. He opened the door to the cellar. The floor was not on level with the ground. Stephen decided not to risk jumping in.
I decided to go and jump down. It was death or glory.
Luckily it was glory – the floor was a few feet below.
We explored.
And had, for a while, a club in the cellar.
Original page from my exercise book, from spring 1965 when I was 14 years old.
The little wooden chair was one that we’d had as children. We just managed to manoeuvre it into the cellar but it must have expanded in the damp atmosphere as we could never get it out. The ‘bench’ was a table made from large Yorkshire flagstones. The stairs on the right led up to what had been the servant’s back stairs but they’d been boarded over during the conversion of the house into flats and our electric and gas metres were in an under-stairs room we called the lobby.
The candle is in a ham tin. Tins of Old Oak Ham were a staple of Christmas hampers.
On the wall opposite the hatch that we came in by, in large capitals written with the sooty smoke of a candle, was the graffiti inscription:
J ROBB
1946
We got busy with candles too to add decorations to the walls: an electric guitar and, at the entrance to the little passageway at the back:
‘Tunnel of Love’
Although I thought that wasn’t the sort of ambience that we should be aiming for.
What pebbles do on their day off. Happy birthday to George (yesterday).
The view from Betty’s, Harlow Carr and Farrar’s Palm Court Cafe in Harrogate today.
It’s years since we bought any marigolds but they’re good at spreading their seeds around the garden. We’ll have plenty of seedlings next year at the top end of the border.
Also well able to seed itself around, the Welsh poppy. If it just spread by seed that would suit me but, unlike the marigold, it can establish itself as a perennial, building up deep dandelion-like tap roots and crowding out other flowers.
This heron, preening in a quiet corner at Adel Dam became watchful and alert when first a buzzard and then a sparrowhawk flew overhead.
A busy week for birthdays including, for Arden, some Secrets of the Underground beneath a Victorian villa. The map is 70% accurate: the Victorians did a lot of groundwork when they built their villas.
Less accurate: Paul Simon didn’t, unfortunately, include the exciting new ballad Dave in his surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival. My nephews James (happy birthday today), Richard and Tom gave its world premiere last month, at Dave and my sister Lin’s golden wedding celebrations.
It opens with Dave on his trusty NSU Quickly moped phut-phutting to the rescue with nothing to sustain him on his journey except a raw onion, hence the chorus, ‘Bite! Bite!’.
Performing alongside the Ingham brothers, my great-nephew Dylan, who also celebrated a birthday during this last week.
Happy birthday to Sue (a few days ago) who, as a member of our local wild flower group, follows in the footsteps of Thomas Gissing, pharmacist of Westgate, Wakefield, father of novelist George.
The fronds of the male fern by the pond are beginning to dry and curl at the ends, the back of the fronds covered with red-brown spore-producing sori.