This children’s book, first published in 1987 by Heinemann, was inspired by us moving down to Coxley Valley a few years earlier.
At this time of year, the wood and meadow have taken on the early autumnal look that sets the mood for the story, such as it is: it’s a walk through the wood looking at the way birds and animals use sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.
I included butterflies tasting through their feet and bees seeing ultra-violet but my spread of a pipistrelle bat using echo location turned out looking a bit too technical to sit comfortably with the other spreads.
John Carr’s Corinthian columns give Horbury’s parish church of St Peter & St Leonard’s an air of grandeur, in contrast to the old parish church, demolished in 1791, which, in his talk today, Keith Lister suggests may originally have been a timber building, like some surviving thousand-year old Scandinavian churches.
Father Christopher and Keith Lister
Keith’s talk as part of Horbury Heritage Weekend is ‘Horbury in the time of Baring-Gould, 1864-7’.
From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.
Page from my winter 1973 sketchbook.
These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.
Town Gardening
I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.
Town Gardening and my sketchbook
Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.
In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.
So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.
Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.
The book had evidently been on the shelf in the bookshop since pre-decimalisation days and it includes this dedication on the front endpaper.
Two pectoral sandpipers feeding in shallow water on the Eastern Reedbed at RSPB St Aidan’s are migrants, probably blown off course by an Atlantic low on their migration from their breeding grounds on the east coast of North America to their wintering quarters in South America. They’re slightly larger than the dunlins feeding by the small muddy islands nearby.
Some of the dunlins have slightly indistinct black bellies as they moult out of their summer breeding plumage into the ‘dunlin’ – the name means ‘dull brown’ – winter plumage.
We’re encouraged to make gardens accessible to hedgehogs by ensuring there’s access for them under fences. This animal run under the perimeter fence at St Aidan’s serves the same purpose. It looks about rabbit size but apparently foxes can make their way through a hole no larger than a fist, so this could be a multi-species animal highway. If it wasn’t so far from home, I’d be tempted to set up my trail cam here.
We walked beyond the boundaries of the reserve on our circuit today, taking the path alongside the River Aire as far as the weir below Lemonroyd Lock.
Chimney, Methley, drawn during our coffee break at the Rivers Meet cafe.
There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.
I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.
A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.
I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.
These guys weren’t actually feeding the ducks, just taking a break on a bench by the war memorial.
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
Home-grown
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
Florence celebrated her birthday and moved up from Woodland School to Primary a few weeks ago, so my card was a tribute to Leo Baxendale and David Sutherland of the Bash Street Kids comic strip in the Beano. One of the highlights for me of V&A at Dundee was the original artwork for a Bash Street spread.
Florence moved up schools but sadly that’s not the case for schoolgirls in Afghanistan as secondary schools are not strictly male pupils and staff only.
“I am so worried about my future,” said one Afghan schoolgirl who had hoped to be a lawyer.
“Everything looks very dark. Every day I wake up and ask myself why I am alive? Should I stay at home and wait for someone to knock on the door and ask me to marry him? Is this the purpose of being a woman?”
Speaking to the BBC, her father said: “My mother was illiterate, and my father constantly bullied her and called her an idiot. I didn’t want my daughter to become like my mum.”
