Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The leaves of this purple sage proved a bit tough when Barbara was making the stuffing this Christmas but a clump of the regular sage-green variety, growing at the end of our herb bed had smaller, more tender, leaves. It gave an aromatic lift to the stuffing, made to recipe Barbara’s mum, Betty, used every year. And it lasted until Boxing Day to go in our chicken sandwiches.
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.
Perhaps spring was the reason for the strange behaviour of a group of five grey squirrels, which we saw capering about under the beeches and oaks at Newmillerdam last February. We watched as they bounded playfully and rolled about on their backs. They weren’t bickering or chasing each as you might have expected at that time of year and they weren’t foraging or going through a grooming routine. They reminded me of children let loose in a soft play ball pool.
We couldn’t guess what they’re doing and nor could a dog, which stood motionless a few yards away, transfixed by their antics. Could that be a reason for their forest-floor frolics: to confuse predators?
If it had been the dog rolling around, I could have understood that, as they like to gather scents as a kind of badge of honour, but would squirrels do that?
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).
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).
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.
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.
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton: a painting belonging to my grandad, which survived the raid.
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.
A foggy Monday morning, so I’ve gone for black and white, using the Shapes option in Adobe Capture.
I’m looking for definite shapes, like the bunch of ash keys on this fallen branch, which probably came down during the strong winds on Saturday night when Storm Bella battered the western side of Britain.
I can’t quite get out of my habit of looking for characters amongst the rocks, trees and street furniture of the park. This pattern of scars in the bark of a poplar reminds me of an Easter Island head.
When I was concocting my litter bin robot in Photoshop a few weeks ago, I considered doing something with the colourful play equipment in the park’s children’s play area. I wouldn’t have to do much to get this slide to look like a robot, he seems to be striding towards us already.
These roots (of a flowering cherry, I think) reminded me of dinosaur fossils and in black and white they look very like the cover design of the Paladin paperback of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People.
Finally, another pattern in the bark of a Lombardy poplar caught my eye. I think that there’s a Celtic influence here. Or did the swirling patterns of poplar bark influence Celtic metalworkers?
The days should be getting longer now, but you wouldn’t guess that, looking out on the uniformly grey sky and continual rain and drizzle. The goldfinches visiting the feeders add a spot of festive colour as they gather on the sunflower hearts.
A suitable day for me to press on with the exercises in Sassoon and Briem’s Improve Your Handwriting. After a week or so completing twenty-six A5 pages or exercises from their course, I’ve still got some way to go, but I have got to the stage where doing any writing will be good practise, so I’ve gone back to my notebook and I’ll try to write something every day, even on a dreary day like today when there hasn’t been very much going on.
Monday morning on the shortest day of the year but it’s so overcast today that we don’t stand a chance of seeing the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter this evening. Even so, on our regular walk around Illingworth Park, Ossett, this morning it didn’t look quite this grim: I’ve reduced the saturation of the colours when editing the iPhone footage in Adobe Premier Pro.
Another Tier 3 homemade card, this time for my sister Linda who has been crafting away through Tiers and Lockdowns alike, although I have noticed a gradual change in the bespoke dolls she makes.
Doll making must run in the family: yesterday I posted a photograph of our great-grandma Sarah Ann lining up homemade dolls to raise funds for the wartime ‘Save-a-Penny-a-Week’ fund which raised money for hospitals.
So apart from my sister knitting woolly witches and me concocting treemen, stonemen and wheelie-bin robots on my Monday morning walks around Illingworth Park, we haven’t been too badly affected.