Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We have mixed success with bulbs but a few of the iris made it into flower and the scilla seem to have settled in.
Snowdrops are the bulbs that have really made themselves at home, spreading behind the pond and along the hedge and tête-a-tête daffodils do well too. They’ve lasted for a month or more but are now fading away.
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
Despite what my pantomime version of Will Gompertz is saying, there really are people who are daft enough to take a Loony Dook in the Firth of Forth on New Year’s Day. Happy birthday to Leo.
You couldn’t accuse me of lacking in ambition. As a seven year old my first attempted book project was to write and illustrate Prehistoric Animals, my own take on the history of our planet.
I enthusiastically drew Tyrannosaurus striding past a tree fern. So far, so good, but now for the difficult bit. With my wobbly lettering the text was going to be a challenge.
‘Tyrannosaurus,’ I wrote and – phew – I got the spelling right, but then I continued: ‘had 200 theet.’
In my efforts to produce my neatest writing I’d misspelled ‘teeth’.
Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen Belsen and Peenemünde concentration camps, who died aged 96 during Russian shelling of his apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Friday.
In Holmfield Park, adjoining Thornes and Clarence Parks in Wakefield, this old beech has so far escaped damage in storms. So many beeches in the area are getting to that 150 to 200 year old stage when they start shedding boughs. Let’s hope that this one still has decades of life left in it.
On Saturday we met up with family at the Holmfield Arms, in Holmfield House, a Victorian mansion which was once gifted to the city and housed the local museum.
The cross-bedded sandstone is the wall of what is now an orangery style room in the Brewers’ Fair restaurant. It overlooks a terrace surrounded by shrubs and trees, including a lime (lower left on my sketch above). Varieties of lime that grew in a columnar shape were popular with the Victorians.
I drew more Victorian trees in Horbury. Some of these are getting to the end of their natural lives and have shed branches, or on the odd occasion been blown down in storms.
Some familiar faces on this card for Ali.
And, in a busy weekend for birthdays, following yesterday’s card celebrating Sarah’s Ancient Rome class project, here’s a card for classicist Tom.
English phrases from my school Latin exercise book, from 1963, but if you’re struggling with the Latin phrases they’re:
Sarah’s birthday today, and this card celebrates her enthusiasm for giving her class to a hands-on taster of Ancient Rome.
“Zach said straight away when I opened it ‘I know this one, it’s definitely Uncle Richard’s!’ ” she tells me, “and then was occupied for 5 minutes trying to work out the maths problem! Until Will explained it was deliberately very difficult :-)”
From my school Ancient History book my S.P.Q.R. News features a comics section based on my mum’s paper, The Daily Mail, so my Col. Pewtius was inspired by Arthur Horner’s Colonel Pewter which ran in the paper from 1960 to 1964. I thought enough about Colonel Pewter to collect the strips, originally four square panels in a 2×2 grid, and paste them into a newsprint booklet I’d made for them. This was a story called 12.2 to the Tropics about a Titfield Thunderbolt type steam excursion that ends up on a tropical Shangri-La deep in the North Wales hills. Unfortunately I no longer have it and it’s not one of the reprints that show up when I search Google.
At first the adventures of Adamus in the Corn Top strip didn’t mean anything to me but, knowing the way my mind works, I remembered the title Barley Bottom.
I must have read Barley Bottom in a friend’s dad’s newspaper as at that time it appeared only in the Daily Herald, a left-wing paper. My Adamus seems to be in the same mould, a hapless everyman frustrated by big business and establishment politics:
‘Frame 1: Adamus is trying to keep an old soari service going (possibly I meant to write ‘sella’, a Roman sedan chair)
Frame 2: At Bigus House: ‘Lay an ambush’.
Barley Bottom by ‘Lucian’ was written by Roger Woddis and drawn by Derek Chittock.
Colonel Pewter had originally appeared in a liberal newspaper, the News Chronicle, Barley Bottom was left-wing so presumably Flook the strip that I read for years in my mum’s Daily Mail was suited for right-wing readers. I liked the nostalgia of Colonel Pewter but out of the three of them my favourite was Flook because of the crisp, bold pen work of the strip’s cartoonist Trog.
For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.
The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.
These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.
We bought a pack of uni ball Signo gel pens, designed specifically for writing, so naturally I had to try one out for drawing these marigold seed heads.
