Le Havre, Easter, 1968: Café des Amis stood just a few yards from my school penfriend Philippe’s house in Le Havre.
Philippe’s school
I was in my first year at art school but Philippe was still attending school.
Arriving at Southampton bus station on my homeward journey.
The Lemaires lived on Rue Roger Salengro, not far from a small park overlooking the town and port of Le Havre, so these long flights of steps were a feature of any walk into town.
I haven’t added any sepia toning to these photographs, that’s down to my poor skills at developing and printing the 35 mm film. They still have a whiff of fixative about them.
In sepia my room at the Lemaire’s has a nineteenth century look to it.
On the homeward journey, after a sleepless night on the ferry, I explored Southampton.
I was met at the station by Mother and Father and the Deacon’s in their new car. We had a Soirée in the evening with Dave on the Guitar, Party games, a Sing-Song and Mrs Odo Ardi singing and Uncle Jack hid father’s Pyjamas* and left his glasses and I went to bed under the kitchen table it being 41½ hours since I got up.”
*My dad once appeared in pyjamas and dressing gown winding up an alarm clock as a gentle hint that it was time to wind up the party.
In February, Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating the 120th anniversary of Horbury’s Carnegie Free Library. This 1902 reprint of The Origin of Species might have been part of the original stock, although as it has been trimmed and rebound there are no original labels or stamps to confirm that.
With its photogravure sepia-toned portrait of Darwin as the frontispiece, it’s identical to the book that I borrowed from Horbury Library when I was a student at Batley School of Art in 1968.
Tree of Life diagram from ‘Origin of Species’
At that time I was trying to read through some of the ‘great books’ – Greek myths (in a two volume compilation by Robert Graves), the Bible, Plato’s Republic, etc – and I took it as my holiday reading when I visited, for the first time, my French penfriend, Philippe, in le Havre.
It wasn’t the best choice for what turned out to be a 40-hour stint without sleep on my return journey by ferry to Southampton and train:
I attempted to Read Origin of the Species but heard voices and saw faces in the corridor out of the corners of my eye and the spaces between the type on the page formed figures suggested by the narrative”
On our circuit of the lagoons at RSPB St Aidan’s this morning we saw a sparrowhawk at Astley Lake and, over the ridge, kestrel, buzzard and red kite – the latter two being mobbed by a crow, which couldn’t decide which one to go for.
As we returned to the car park we got a chance to see a little owl in a bush behind the dragline excavator: a grey streaky shape against the brownish gnarled trunk of the bush. We wouldn’t have spotted it without the help of an observant bird-watcher.
The days are getting longer but by the time I get around to painting this in the late afternoon, getting on for half past four, the light is fading fast.
In the aftermath of Storm Goretti, which thankfully passed by without incident here, female pheasants sit hunched up in the morning rain.
A sparrowhawk zooms up over the hedge, turns 180 degrees without catching any of the birds on the feeders and continues on its rounds.
A wren hops about on the frozen surface of the pond and pecks at the overhanging vegetation, disappearing for a while as it explores under a clump of sedge.
The great tit’s head markings are a cross between a superhero mask and a muffler.
Four blackbirds are steadily stripping berries from a hawthorn alongside the Horticentre car park at Overton.
Facing upstream, I get the impression that the Hepworth is gently moving, the feeling you get when you’re on a train in a station and the train on the adjacent line starts gradually edging away in the opposite direction.
This is pencil and watercolour crayon, a change from my usual pen and watercolour because its dry media only if you’re working in the galleries. The Hepworth encourage people to draw and have folding stools available.
The gooseberry crumble cake with a latte in the downstairs cafe is another attraction on a barely-above-freezing morning.
With the prospect of days getting longer, I feel the urge to start making a few natural history notes again.
Recent highlights have included sparrowhawks on their rounds again. So far we haven’t spotted one making a kill on one of its swooping surprise visit to our bird feeders.
It’s usually a smaller, greyish brown male visiting, which pauses for a few minutes break in the hedge or crab apple, then continues towards the woodland edge where its progress is marked by groups of wood pigeons flying up and away from the treetops.
One afternoon as I unloaded the car at the front of the house, a sparrowhawk sped past just one foot above the pavement, climbing swiftly to clear a tall larch fence and heading between the houses to the back gardens beyond.
Christmas Day
An immaculate-looking cock pheasant is pecking around near the bird feeders alongside three females. They’re not alone. There are another three females down by the pond, four checking out the hedge by the shed and more of them foraging over the veg beds, some of them pecking at all that’s left of our cavolo nero. It’s probably the calm before the storm for these pheasants as Boxing Day is a traditional day for a shoot.
Christmas Day sketches: holly, bay, Viola tricolor and a poorly chaffinch.
My father used to meet up with his shooting friends at Terrington, in the Howardian Hills, North Yorkshire, not far from Castle Howard. He’d bring back a few pheasants – two would be a brace of pheasants – which would hang from the shelves in our storeroom, smelling increasingly gamey until my mum plucked them.
Boxing Day Shoot, c.1962, Fred Green’s cottage. Fred Green, who I think is the figure in the centre, was the gamekeeper. The man in the beret, front row, right, is Eric Chalkley, who lived on Stanley Road, Wakefield and who, I believe, worked for the National Coal Board.
Boxing Day Walk
We join a motley procession. Two pied ponies with young riders are walking on, guided by an older couple, the man kitted out in yellow high viz jacket. Following ten paces behind them are four hikers in animated conversation then, another ten paces behind, a man with a dog.
We emerge from a footpath to tag along at the end. There’s no way that we can stride out to overtake them on this narrow country lane, so we adopt the measured clip, clop pace of the party, a relaxed pace that I could imagine a party of medieval pilgrims adopting.
Shepherd, Wakefield Mystery Plays
Chaucer’s pilgrims upped their pace when they saw the towers of Canterbury Cathedral up ahead We still call this pace between walking on and a gallop a canter.
Periwinkle growing in the hawthorn hedge.
It was spring-like enough on Boxing Day for a song thrush to be singing its varied thrice-repeated snatches of song. A robin sang its wistful trickle of a song in the hedgerow.
No spring flowers as such yet but a few periwinkle flowers are already showing on straggling stems in the hedge near some old cottages on Coxley Lane.
Struggling to draw garden birds flitting around the feeders, I realise why I like to get out drawing ducks, geese and swans resting and preening at the water’s edge.
As these smaller birds move so quickly, my aim is to just watch one of them until it flits away then attempt to draw the whole pose in one quick drawing.
A goldfinch at the feeder can be there for a minute but a blue tit can be in and out in less than a second. Sparrows usually settle for longer, which is helpful as each one has slightly different plumage, the males particularly: the face and ‘bib’ markings vary a lot.
Drawing whatever bird comes along for an hour or so is quite a session but if I could keep doing that I think it would improve my ability to observe.
Drawing from a photograph or a stuffed bird would be a good way to take in the smaller details but to get an impression of the life and individual character of a bird I need to stick with these flitting about garden birds.
It must be decades since I last opened this old Quality Street tin, stowed away in the attic.
No box lid and I don’t remember the subject – a joust perhaps – so we’re going to have to reconstruct this piece by piece . . . starting with the edges.
Why the punched hole in the centre of the tin lid? Did we keep string in the tin?
Writing Christmas cards is now often the only time of year when I settle into an extended session of writing with a fountain pen. Normally I alternate between pen and keyboard for blog posts or articles.
It takes a while until I settle into a rhythm. My shaky hands and the rather worn joints in my right thumb don’t help me feel at ease but, if I happen to get into the flow, for a while it can feel natural and comfortable.
The trouble is that I’m never sure how I managed to get myself into this flowing and relaxed mode of writing. That’s partly because, once I’ve got going, I’ve moved on from attempting to consciously control it. I’ve switched to a kind of muscle memory.
I stop worrying about wobbles and shakes and badly formed letters. I can even get to the stage where a capital ‘S’ doesn’t feel like too much of a challenge!
Font versus Flow
My training in graphic design has left me fascinated by fonts. I’m keen to observe every nuance of an individual letterform but that’s not going to help me get in the flow if I’m constantly changing gear to draw each letter as a separate entity.
For the past four or five months, Barbara and I have been regulars at a weekly Tai Chi session and we’ve both found that the relaxed attention that’s needed to follow the flowing moves has been helpful.
I see parallels between the practice of Tai Chi and the process of handwriting. Our teacher Pat is keen that we should get the moves right from the start, rather than fudging through and getting in the flow but potentially developing bad habits which might be difficult to correct later.
