I started this sketchbook 50 years ago today, on Thursday 21st December 1972, title inspired by hearing Gawain and the Green Knight on the radio on the Monday. I’d stocked up on Daler 10×7 inch sketchbooks the day before in Leeds, buying a year’s supply as I suspected that size was about to be discontinued and I thought that A4 was just bit too large, A5 a bit too small. But 10×8 was just right!
But coming back to 50 years ago today . . .
I recorded in my regular diary that after a morning Christmas post round which I didn’t get back from until 1.20 pm (‘longer than expected; almost missed Pogles Wood; but watched the programme on Verulamium), I ‘did a couple of sketches down Addingford’.
Helpfully a passing dog walker, a school boy with a red setter, advised me that ‘You should come here in the spring, there are bluebells all over.’
The red setter was barking. ‘I don’t think he likes you said the boy’. Probably he realised that I was a postman. Temporarily.
Here’s Hartley Bank, an outcrop of sandstone, with its scarp edge wood of sessile oaks, as it is today, photographed this afternoon (disclaimer: barbed wire and electric fence in foreground removed in Adobe Lightroom!)
But 50 years ago a railway embankment follow the line of the hedge coming down the slope at the left edge of the wood. I must have paused to draw the willow on my walk home, before crossing part of the Hartley Bank Colliery spoil heap, which a few years later was opencast and landscaped and restored as farmland.
The cat curled up in the Windsor chair is Burke.
My students living next door to me in the college hostel must have cursed Ray Piggott and his wife for suggesting that I learn the recorder but they should be grateful that the musical couple dissuaded me from taking up the violin!