It must be over a year since I’ve had a coffee and scone at Blacker Hall. Good to be able to linger a little with a sketchbook without feeling that I’m breaking some rule. The Courtyard Café is now literally in the courtyard.
A Taste of Normality
Author: Richard
Apple Blossom
As I draw, bees, including two different species of bumble bees, and a small hoverfly are continually busy on the blossoms of our single cordon Golden Spire cooking apple. The single-stemmed seven-foot tall tree can’t possibly as many apples as there are blossoms but we can thin the little apples out to two or three per cluster and, if we don’t, it will shed a few anyway.
West Yorkshire Mayoral Election
You couldn’t ask for a better bunch of candidates for the final line-up for next month’s West Yorkshire mayoral election, my only regret is that we can’t be in an alternative universe where Tracy Brabin’s predecessor in the Batley and Spen constituency, the ebullient Jo Cox, could also have a crack at it.
Therese Hirst
Therese Hirst is our candidate for the English Democrats.
Green Park
Green Park, South Ossett, 10.45 am, 10℃, 50℉, sunny
A jingling orrent of song from a dunnock in an adjacent garden. Three blow flies gather around a tiny naked chick that has been taken from its nest. A male blackbird perches on a tangle of honeysuckle stems cascading from a larch lap fence.
A robin perches on a branch, watching intently, then spots something and swoops down to the ground to pick it up.
Apart from a few quick sketches in the co-op car park, I’m out of practice for drawing on location, so I decided that I had to be kind to myself this morning and not to worry if, for instance, I get the flowers of the honesty out of proportion with the rest of the plant.
Andrew Cooper
Though a critic of the concept of an elected mayor for West Yorkshire, describing it as ‘an elected dictatorship, and not a proper democratic body’, Andrew Cooper, from Huddersfield, is representing the Green Party in next month’s election.
When Moths turn Bad
My friend John Gardner, celebrating his birthday today, has built up an impressive list by running an ultra-violet light moth trap in his garden. Hopefully these reprobates haven’t turned up.
Moths have a bad name in my brother Bill’s childhood writing. He wrote this damming indictment aged six and it’s survived in a school exercise book from his infant school days.
Greta Thunberg
It is scarcely necessary to remind people of what a few feet rise in sea level (let alone the ultimate 200 feet which would follow the complete liquidation of the land-held icecaps) would do to to our geography. Suffice to say that it would be unwise to take a ninety-nine year lease on coastal flats!
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968
That urgent advice was given over half a century ago by award-winning science journalist Peter Ritchie Calder in a succinct account of ‘The greenhouse effect’ in his 1968 book Man and the Cosmos, The Nature of Science Today.
As a student, publications like this convinced me that, if I was going to try to make a career as a natural history illustrator, I should also do all I could to campaign on environmental issues. I didn’t do very well on that one, so it’s good to see Greta Thunberg’s generation treating global warming (along with the alarming rate of extinctions) as an overridingly urgent global issue.
One of the functions of weather satellites is to make measurements of the energy which reaches the Earth and to note the circumstances in which it is lost. If records show over the years that this debit or credit is being affected, then counter measures will have to be taken. The energy budget is more important than the ledger-balancing operations of ministers of finance. The lives of people and the fates of nations will depend on patterns of rainfall.
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968
Waj Ali, Bob Buxton
Two more mayoral election candidates: Waj Ali, standing for Reform UK, looks rather formal in his studio portrait, so I’ve drawn him on location too, in a selfie taken at the Hepworth.
No studio portrait for the Yorkshire Party: they decided the best place to launch their candidate, Bob Buxton a parish councillor in Rawdon, would be a windswept moor.
Teenage Tuna Tearaways
I found it slightly alarming how easily I slipped into the sleazy slang of these Teenage Tuna Tearaways. Ivy’s is the first ever child’s birthday card to have been given a PG – ‘may include unsuitable dialogue’ – rating.
West Yorkshire Mayor
We’re spoilt for choice in next month’s elections for our first ever mayor for West Yorkshire so here, in alphabetical order to avoid political bias, are our candidates from the three main parties (the other four contenders to follow). Tracy Brabin, MP for Batley and Spen, is standing for the Labour Party.
Stewart Golton, a councillor for Rothwell on Leeds City Council is standing for the Liberal Democrats.
Matt Robinson, the Conservative Party candidate, is drawn from a photograph taken before his post-lockdown haircut, so you won’t recognise him now.