Where no spaniel has gone before . . .
Happy birthday Henry.
Spaniels in Space
Goose and Mallard
More bird anatomy studies from photographs in the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guides Bird and Skeleton.
The Canada geese are from a photograph in The Encyclopedia of Birds by Perrins and Middleton.
This is from an illustration in the 1969 AA Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, artist unknown: eight artists worked on the project but illustrations aren’t credited individually.
Wildfowl Anatomy
A goose wing and duck skeleton drawn from the DK Eyewitness Guides, Bird and Skeleton.
Pizza Dough
Our friends Jill and John presented us with a pizza stone for Christmas. Admittedly our first attempt at using it was a bit of a disaster, so we’re still working on our technique for using the stone but at least it was crispy and it tasted good.
Most recipes suggest making enough dough for several pizzas, so I scaled it down here to make a pizza that comfortably fits on our new pizza stone.
I’m dipping into the Adobe Color online program to cook up and save colour schemes in a variety of ways. Here I’ve used the ‘Extract Theme’ option on one of my photographs from this morning and opted for a ‘Muted’ set of swatches.
The Bells of Blaco Hill
My grandad Robert Bell’s family: the Bells of Blaco Hill, Mattersey. That’s grandad, back row on the right.
According to my diary (above) Grandma gave me the photograph 50 years ago today when we called at Sutton-cum-Lound on Christmas Day 1972. My dad’s elder brother, Uncle Fred, was also there.
Grandad and Grandma had such large families that my father claimed that he could never sort out who all his aunties and uncles were. Somewhere I’ve got a key to the photograph but until I put my hands on it I’m as clueless as my dad was.
At least I know that this is my great grandfather, John Bell, born 1842, an agricultural labourer, later working as a groom at Blaco Hill.
And this is great grandma Helena Bell, born in 1845.
Look forward to finding out more about the Bells and my grandma’s family the Bagshaws as I’ve been so involved with the other side of the family, the Swifts and the Trueloves of Sheffield.
Link
Blaco Hill Cottages – looks like the perfect location for a Bell Family reunion!
Seven Crayfish Swimming . . .
As I write this it’s just one blue tit, one great tit and one nuthatch visiting the feeders. No sign of Bruce (who isn’t really a Persian but some equally fluffy variety).
Happy Christmas!
And talking of melting snowmen, it’s at this time of year that we remember Lucky. Actually he wasn’t so lucky as shortly after this photograph was taken he melted overnight leaving only a scarf, a hat, a carrot and a pile of loose change.
Photocredit: Meghan. Lucky’s stylists: Meghan, Millie and Evie. It has been estimated that Lucky’s perfect smile cost 12 pence in orthodontic work.
‘Rather an Unsettled State’
28th December 1972: ‘Why doesn’t he clear those books away instead of wasting his time drawing them?’ Well I’m in a rather an unsettled state at the moment and my other shelf unit is down in London.
If you read this picture carefully you might find hidden in it; clock from Horbury station, an unfinished model of a village built on a rock which I started before O-levels and a Victorian writing box which Grandma Bell gave us when they moved house.
Today I date every drawing in my sketchbook, because it’s such a help when I’m trying to track down a drawing later. Apart from references to Christmas and the new year I wasn’t so consistent at that time.
But I did mention in my diary that I ‘did a sketch in the bedroom’ on Thursday, 28 December 1972. Probably more details than you need here! Even so, you may be wondering what I dreamt about that night?
What do you mean ‘No!’?!
Well, I recorded it, so here it is anyway . . .
Yarrow and Tansy
Seed heads of tansy, from a rough verge in Ossett and yarrow from a grassy area at Newmillerdam.
On Monday morning wisps of thin vapour blew over the surface of the ice. There was a hollow clacking as a child three chunks of ice and rock onto the frozen surface of the lake.
One of a family of four swans touching down at the far side of the overshot the landing site and went skimming along the watery surface of the ice. A drake mallard landing on ice near the open area by the war memorial did something similar but managed to do an about turn and slid back towards the other ducks he’d landed with.
Vivobarefoot Recycled Primus Lite III
I like that these trainers are made from recycled materials and, as the name suggests they’re light and flexible. Amazingly they’re available in my size: 13, a size that other manufacturers seem to have more or less given up on.
Toebox
The only problem is that as they’ve got such a minimal toebox they seem to be crushing one particular toenail – the second largest – on my right foot. Possibly there’s a bit of a crease in the uppers when I lace them up. I can’t say for definite but I first noticed that I had a bruised and broken nail after walking a few miles in them.
After that I wore them just for around town or going out for a meal, but so often after I’ve worn them I notice it’s happened again. Perhaps just running up the stairs can be enough to break the nail.
100 day trial
Vivobarefoot do a 100-day trial, so you can return them for a full refund if you have any problems, however I liked these so much that I’ve hung on to them for far longer than that, so these will be going to their Take Back Programme. Last year they ‘received 2,600 pairs of old Vivos, which were refurbished for resale or saved from landfill’.
Solstice Sketchbook, 1972
I started this sketchbook 50 years ago today, on Thursday 21st December 1972, title inspired by hearing Gawain and the Green Knight on the radio on the Monday. I’d stocked up on Daler 10×7 inch sketchbooks the day before in Leeds, buying a year’s supply as I suspected that size was about to be discontinued and I thought that A4 was just bit too large, A5 a bit too small. But 10×8 was just right!
But coming back to 50 years ago today . . .
I recorded in my regular diary that after a morning Christmas post round which I didn’t get back from until 1.20 pm (‘longer than expected; almost missed Pogles Wood; but watched the programme on Verulamium), I ‘did a couple of sketches down Addingford’.
Helpfully a passing dog walker, a school boy with a red setter, advised me that ‘You should come here in the spring, there are bluebells all over.’
The red setter was barking. ‘I don’t think he likes you said the boy’. Probably he realised that I was a postman. Temporarily.
Here’s Hartley Bank, an outcrop of sandstone, with its scarp edge wood of sessile oaks, as it is today, photographed this afternoon (disclaimer: barbed wire and electric fence in foreground removed in Adobe Lightroom!)
But 50 years ago a railway embankment follow the line of the hedge coming down the slope at the left edge of the wood. I must have paused to draw the willow on my walk home, before crossing part of the Hartley Bank Colliery spoil heap, which a few years later was opencast and landscaped and restored as farmland.
The cat curled up in the Windsor chair is Burke.
My students living next door to me in the college hostel must have cursed Ray Piggott and his wife for suggesting that I learn the recorder but they should be grateful that the musical couple dissuaded me from taking up the violin!