If like me you have a tendency to laziness, then when you put away your neatly ironed underpants ( ironed??? ) then they simply go on top of the pile. It’s possible that at the bottoms of the pile is a clean pair hardly used, or even new. So should one turn the pants? If you don’t care a fig then the pants you are wearing are the same pair that you wore just a few prewash days ago. If, however, you are of a mind to always turn, then you are naturally getting the benefit of a complete range … Continue reading Turn your underpants…

I used to work for a chap up in Hull, or to give its proper name Kingston upon Hull. It was once one of our nations premier fishing ports. If you have ever been there then you’ll know that when you get to Goole ( put that name in spellchecker and you’ll get google ) you are still quite a way off. So we can perhaps agree that Hull is a little bit way off. Way out even. The man I worked for designed posters for nearby Scarborough’s famous playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who wrote, and perhaps still does, some wonderfully … Continue reading Does a budgie impact creativity?

Taken some years ago on a walking holiday in Sardinia. Sunshine almost all the way and loads of wild flowers like this deserved something more than an enthusiastic amateur to take its picture and try and identify it, but there you go. Now is a good time to think of sunshine and flowers methinks. I’m a fan of walking holidays, we’ve been on a few and shared some great moments with complete strangers who happened to have booked the same week as us. One couple actually won their holiday and did not look like walkers might look, being of the … Continue reading Sardinian orchid and sooty occupants.

This is the view from one of my regular walks with my good friend Richard. We’ve done the walk about 4 times now and the plan is to set of from Priddy a small stretched out village on the top of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, then to walk down to Wookey Hole, where there is a place to partake of a regulation cuppa before the walk back up to the top, through the woods and up a gorge. This is quite narrow and steep and it’s from here that I took this image. Looking up to a perfect blue … Continue reading Mendip Gorge looking up…

It’s a sport that leaves me cold All that hectic frantic brushing on the ice Like something’s spilt that’s not nice It’s like crown green bowling On the snow Why Olympic? Don’t know. Continue reading So we won the Curling Gold

So it is. Such an old fashioned name for a storm that was announced hours ago and has now turned up. Continue reading Eunice? Is that you?

This image from a few years ago, like a few of these current postings. Asquith Road allotments is where I used to have my plot, it was a huge site with quite a number of plots of varying quality. My own was near the car park so tended to be quite sociable. This particular shed was in what I called shed alley. A line of these fine buildings with a long green path between. One particular plot on this row had massive cabbages and other brassicas and appeared to be capable of growing almost any vegetable at all. It was … Continue reading Shed curl: Asquith Road

That’s advice rather than a statement. It will lift your spirits to draw on a cold wet day which is very much what its been here today. Happy memories of this view from just outside Painswick looking towards the River Severn a silver line in the distance, probably a little exagerated in this coloured up print. Pastels make this very quick to colour up but as I recall it was a very bright summer day when the original view was photographed. Did I refer to the original photograph to do the final colouring? No. I did not want the truth … Continue reading Colour on a dull day.

Another of my recent coloured prints, that is to say the colour is added to a print rather than the original black and white ink drawing. I thought I was being clever getting prints done of the drawings and then adding the pastel colours after, but the black print areas seem to resist the pastels to a degree ( who can blame them ) and any whiting out of the image areas on the print give the pastels a hard time too. Photocopying might have worked better…perhaps. We’ll see. Fun to do but also colour is not my best area, … Continue reading Shed 10, Reddings Road.

This little shed is in the middle of the valley near Chalford. I’ve taken loads of pictures of this over the years and this drawing is from one of them on a bright Summer day. This is the first lot of colour to go onto a black and white print of a line drawing. I like to make things complicated for myself. It’s good to be adding colour on what must have been the dullest wettest days we’ve had for a while. Quick picture of the artwork so far from my phone and then pin it up on my wall … Continue reading Chalford Vale

I had a bike like this when I was around 11 years old. Complete with Sturmey Archer three speed gears, all three gears being just a tad ‘off’. I had to stand on the pedals for most of the time to get the bike to move.The fine metal levered brakes took some effort to work when this heavy machine headed downhill at speeds never achieved on the flat. Brilliant light on the front, hardly used as I was not allowed to ride it in the dark, and if I did the dynamo that ran it from the back wheel made … Continue reading Abandoned Bike.Scotland.