These two could have auditioned for the latest series of All Creatures Great and Small but they’re appearing in one of the folksy fables in Yes it is. I like the pig – just need him to tilt his head on one side as he listens to the tale – but for the farmer I need his expression to be flummoxed rather than irate.
Although Yes it is has a retro children’s story setting, it deals with themes that are all too contemporary, like the loneliness and isolation – in this case the loneliness of this green ball. The fact that the author has specified the colour makes me tempted to go for a spot colour, perhaps backed up with blocks of neutral grey, to hint at the style of children’s book illustration in the 1950s and early 60s; I’m thinking of Dr Suess and Gene Zion’sHarry the Dirty Dog, illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham.
Margaret Bloy Graham uses a textured line which reminds me of conte crayon with a soft watercolour or gouache wash. With this in mind, I tried bamboo pen, to try and deliberately simplify the line (left) and dip pen (above) but inevitably, as I use it every day, I’m more relaxed drawing with a fountain pen, as in the farmer and his pig drawing, which was drawn in De Atramentis Document Ink with my Lamy Vista with an EF nib. That gives me more of the energy that I’m after, but without getting the particular vintage graphic look that I had in mind.
We’re set to have snow tomorrow, so I thought that I’d make the most of a sunny morning walk around Illingworth Park, Ossett, by taking Instagram-friendly square format colour photographs on my iPhone.
1.45 pm, Monday 25 January: So far no takers. I’ve somewhat hopefully set up my DSLR, Olympus Tough and even my iPhone all focussed on the birdbath. Just a few feet away there are long-tailed tits, wood pigeons and starlings feeding but nothing is touching down for a quick drink.
What do you know?! – just as I wrote that, a blue tit came down and perched exactly on the spot that I’d focussed on. Let’s hope that the memory card lasted out!
Later
Unfortunately it’s just as I expected: the blue tit turned up a few minutes after the two cameras ran out of memory. It should be there on the iPhone but that’s just taking a general view.
Back at the Waterhole
I give it another try and 3.30 pm, which in winter is late afternoon, proves to be a better time. Within the first five minutes this blue tit comes down to drink, then flies up to the sunflower hearts feeder.
I could have guaranteed some bird action if I’d focussed on the feeders but it’s going to take a bit more arranging to get my cameras up on that level. Besides, a bird’s bathing routine is going to be more interesting than just watching them feeding.
Just to be sure that I’d get something, I set up the iPhone at the foot of feeding pole, so at least I’ll have some close-up shots of blackbirds, chaffinch and robin on the ground.
“I’ll bring my lumping hammer!” was a typical response from Barbara’s dad, Bill, when I was explaining some garden DIY job that I had in mind.
Lump in Middle English is a ‘shapeless piece’. In Swedish it could mean a ‘block’ or ‘log’. Lumping stuff about in Yorkshire dialect refers to carrying heavy loads from place to place.
The other hammer was my dad’s and I think this is the one referred to as the ‘coal hammer’. As he worked for the National Coal Board he was entitled to concessionary coal deliveries. Our Victorian house had two coal houses and, if I remember correctly, the far coal house was the one with the larger lumps of coal which occasionally needed breaking up with the hammer.
I’ve been working in brown ink for a month, so I was ready for some black inkiness again. My gardening gloves made a suitable subject. Drawn with my Lamy Al-Star with the F nib and a Pentel Brush Pen.
It’s been a tough kind of year but looking back through my photographs makes me realise that we’ve done a lot despite restrictions and made the most of our home patch.
I’ve just been searching back through my photographs for a short video that I took of drake mallards fighting as some reference for an illustration and I’m impressed with how the Photos app on the Mac presents them. I remember what sorting through slides and colour prints was like. This is from the Photos app monthly view.
I never get around to doing all that I’d like to do with my thousands of photographs but even if I’ve just been snapping away on our regular walk, they’re all there in date order and the ones that I take on my iPhone have GPS with the exact location marked on a map.
Photograph taken from Andy and Neil’s video tour of the shelter, 12/12/20
Eighty years ago this month, at about 7.30 pm on 12 December 1940, my mum, Gladys Swift as she was then, my Grandad Maurice and Grandma Ann, rushed for this air raid shelter in the back garden of their house at 77 Nether Edge Road, as the alarm sounded at the start of the Sheffield Blitz. They hadn’t finished their tea (the term for early evening meal at the time) and my mum grabbed the pan of stew from the stove, so that grandad wouldn’t miss out.
An incendiary landed within yards of the shelter, causing irreparable damage to my grandad’s house and to the joined-on semi-detached house of his mother, Sarah Ann Swift, next door. Another bomb that landed nearby wiped out a whole family with direct hit on their house, so I feel lucky to be here really (I would be born 10 years later).
Photograph taken from Andy and Neil’s video tour of the shelter, 12/12/20
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to listen to my mum’s stories about her experience and try to picture the interior of the shelter but I never dreamed that I’d get to see it, so my thanks to Andy and Neil who on the day of the 80th anniversary invited my brother, sister and I to a Zoom meeting live from the shelter (or rather from the coach house next to it as the wi-fi couldn’t penetrate those built-to-withstand-a-bomb concrete walls).
Photograph taken from Andy and Neil’s video tour of the shelter, 12/12/20
On the the guided-tour phone footage that they showed us, I was impressed by the original concrete door, still in place on rusty hinges on one of the entrances.
Photographs taken from Andy and Neil’s video tour of the shelter, 12/12/20
This door led to a flight of stairs (now blocked with rubble) which was intended as an entrance for my great grandma Sarah Ann, who, as I’ve said, lived next door. On that evening though, she took shelter in her cellar along with her pet bird and her Pomeranian, Queenie. The rescuers brought her out of the wrecked house through the coal chute, along with the bird and the dog.
I imagined there were rudimentary bunks in the shelter but there isn’t as much room in there as I expected. Probably they sat it out, as I remember my mum saying that she once fell asleep down there in a deckchair and had the most extreme form of pins and needles imaginable when she woke because the cross-bar had been digging in behind her knees.
Links
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com
It’s all systems go for Henry’s Robot Wars card as it dawned on me that, for a symmetrical pop-up shape, all I needed to do is fold down the middle of the card and cut both halves at once. Yes, it really did take me two birthday cards to work that one out. But how about asymmetrical pop-ups? There must be a simple way for working those out . . .
One detail that doesn’t show up in this photograph is that Henry’s command module features transparent windows (cut from the packaging of Sainsbury’s Deep Filled Mince Pies. Of course, I had to eat the mince pies first). And, yes, Henry is wearing his pyjamas rather than the traditional space suit, so I guess that he’s planning on going into suspended animation on his interplanetary journey.
My birthday-card technology continues to evolve: with this card for our great-nephew Ralph, I’ve done some out-of-the-box thinking and burst into 3D, which is appropriate as this card is based on a real-life incident.
No, his parents didn’t actually transport Ralph in a box when they moved house shortly before Christmas, but with so many packing cases around, he did enjoy trying one out for size.
