R2-D2 and C-3PO: how they are related.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to a Star Wars fan who shares her name with NASA’s plucky little (weighing in at just 200 kg at the launch) solar Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.
R2-D2 and C-3PO
The Hogweed Jungle
Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.
Around Old Horbury
When I first published Around Old Horbury in 1998 to launch at part of an exhibition at Horbury Library I borrowed a laser printer to print the pages in black and white but went for a colour cover using my own ink jet printer. I got the cover laminated and included a flip out town trail map.
That first edition would have been designed in Microsoft Publisher. That’s given me some problems as I was never able to get Publisher working on my iMac, even if I ran a virtual version of Windows 10 on the Mac using the Parallels program.
So I’m now revamping the booklet as an Adobe InDesign publication on the iMac. It’s an opportunity to simplify the typography, so I’m using just one typeface, Dolly Pro, for all the text and headings. The colour cover will stay the same, as I’ve had that printed and laminated professionally.
Baggage Simulator
The launch of their first Virtual Reality baggage carousel wasn’t the success that Microsoft Flight Simulator had hoped for.
Happy birthday to Dave.
Coffee Break
Happy birthday to Andrew (in the former Charles Roberts wagon works, where he started his career the Coffee Stop has opened in the room adjacent to the old drawing office).
June Sketches
Recent sketches from my pocket-sized A6 landscape sketchbook.
Robin Hood’s Grave
Photographs from our weekend tour of Kirklees Park where all that remains of the Priory are lintels and stone recycled for use in the buildings of Home Farm and the Gatehouse where, according to tradition, Robin Hood died (see my earlier post). The barn would have been in use at the time Cistercian nuns occupied the Priory.
There’s only a fragment of the original tombstone left as over the century so many visitors have chipped off fragments – Robin Hood’s stone was reputed to cure toothache. As Dr Borlik pointed out, the plant debris (larch needles?) scattered on the surface of the stone seem to have picked out a faint impression of the shaft of the cross that early drawings show carved on the stone.
Family Album
My favourite photograph of great grandad George Swift, sneakily taken, I’m guessing, by a teenage photography enthusiast: my grandad Maurice (I bet that’s his thumb print from when he developed the plate negative). George was a third generation spring knife maker in Sheffield but times were hard in the 1880s so he and Sarah Ann opened a corner shop as a sideline (note the Peek Freans ad, board). Must have been an exhausting business.
What do you do in a family crisis? Yes, bake scones. Here’s my mum-in-law Betty Ellis in a sketch of mine from the 1980s in her kitchen baking at her fold-out Formica-topped table. She once told me about cycling 25 miles through the black out to deliver a Christmas cake to husband-to-be Bill at his temporary camp in Sheffield when he enlisted in the army in 1939. So glad that I persuaded her to write it down.
The Nation’s Family Album
I’m submitting these images to The Nation’s Family Album: the National Portrait Gallery and Ancestry.co.uk are creating a special display at the gallery in 2023, so hope that Betty and George will be featured.
The Mousy Scent of Hemlock
Newmillerdam car park, 19℃ 68℉, humid and overcast: Luxuriant should-high hogweed, nettle, creeping thistle, curled dock and growing to 8ft, hemlock with cleavers scrambling amongst the stems. Several species of hoverfly are attracted to the umbels of hogweed or resting on leaves.
Working under an umbrella, the patter of rain on the fabric reminds me of when I occasionally camped out in my one-man tent but any fresh smell of summer rain is cancelled out from the strong smell of mice from the hemlock.
The Yorkshire Robin Hood
Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.
Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.
In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.
In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.
