My good friend Steve has let me borrow a book that he thought might suit me. “Edgelands” by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. I’m not much into poetry but this book is prose. Not quite sure how one writes a book with someone else but they seem to have managed it seamlessly. I’ve really enjoyed it and what shows how good it was that it sent me off in other directions to look for things I knew little about. Including the authors. If, like me you like to see broken down old sheds, and find beauty in broken … Continue reading Meat and potato pie from Edgelands

Choosing the right place and time to go out for a walk seems to be more important these days than before we were locked in with the key seemingly chucked away somewhere. In this country you can be lucky with the weather and the further north you go the luckier you can be, or not. For instance, if it rains in the Lake District there are days when you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you and you might as well be walking around the old sewage farm close to where you live. At present we … Continue reading Spring loaded.

Same old, same old. TV is a massive hole that needs to be filled every day. Something the local council have really given up on around here, and probably everywhere. Before the ‘C’ word arrived was no better. Suspension testing holes in the roads were rife. When we lived in Gloucester the road men used to come by occasionally with a teaspoon of tarmac and add another patch to the already patchy road. It had the look of a grey quilt which had been sewn together over the years, when one big road refurb would have solved the lot. My … Continue reading “I don’t need a watch, I tell the time from the crap TV programmes I’m watching.”.

In the present scheme of things small things that go ‘wrong’ might be considered to be trifling, and they are. I have this odd theory that things going wrong come in 3s. Once those three things have passed you can move along and get on with the day and hope that something productive might emerge. Those that follow me here, and thanks if you do, will know that I’m a cartoonist and that makes me an artist. Over lockdown I have done a lot of landscapes, experimenting with media and different ways to make marks on paper. I’ve enjoyed doing … Continue reading Plottage: the answer to a bad day?

This is the canal from Gloucester, the UK’s biggest inland port, to Sharpness at the mouth of the River Severn. I found this on a trawl through old images and it reminded me that I used to take a walk out on Christmas Day camera in hand and I recall well that this particular day was bright, cold and crips and there were very few people around. It was Christmas Day 2009. This view overlooks the warehouses that would originally have been the timber yards that in their day would have been bustling with men unloading timber from Scandinavia. Some … Continue reading Home fires burning…