I’m working, if it can be called working when no money changes hands for my efforts, on a reprint of a book that I did with my late good friend Gordon Thorburn. At the time the book was called ” Some Missing Persons’ and was about rare breeds of British people. Well, given recent sorry stories of real missing persons I’ve ditched. that title and it’s now a little more positively titled: “Spotted!” I am doing an Amazon paperback version which has been a journey of discovery through technical upload bollocks, but I am almost there. I’ve had the proof … Continue reading Sometimes I surprise myself…

Done some 40 plus years ago and was one for an exhibition on British Institutions, this one being “Fair Play” as I recall. Given that in the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of landscapes this one stands up ok. I never used reference much so it just came from my head. For my recent landscapes I use my photographs as reference. The original ended up on the wall of my mother in laws beautiful cottage on a hillside in Shropshire. It lived there for years and I was always very pleased that she put it in a … Continue reading One of my oldest drawings.

Four weeks without salad, how on earth will we manage? Well we have a supply of Peruvian Blueberries so we’ll just have to be creative. So it’s been in the news that we are without here in the UK, well, we are in a sense, we are without brains for a start. Local supermarkets around here are to my knowledge not short of loads of stuff, so if we have to be without a Spanish cucumber then I think we might just get by. Local news stories ,especially those put out by the so called “Gloucestershire Live”, are uniquely designed … Continue reading Peruvian Blueberries?

From another blog this old phone looks much like the one my business partner and I started with in 1972, and yes, we only had one phone. Simple. Ancient Phone Continue reading Ancient Phone

It’s a Gloucestershire adjective for being careful with ones hard earned. The opposite word for it might be generous. When I was at college all those years ago the only money we had was what the Government kindly gave us as a grant, or what we could earn on the side by taking a job of some sort. My good friend at college was notoriously generous, but this meant he was frequently without funds. I recall that he came to me one day, looking at me clear eyed in the day and asked me if I could possibly forward some … Continue reading “Toit”

Posted two identical packages yesterday afternoon second class, one managed to get to Gloucester 8 miles down the road by today, which is good. The other managed to get 350 miles north to Scotland also today, which is better than good. No grumbles here about the Post Office and Royal Mail. Good goals chaps! #postoffice #royalmail Continue reading Good Goals

Well actually just an afternoon, but what an afternoon! Collected by my good friend Mike we headed down to the River Severn at Purton. By way of a change no walk was planned but I’d determined that we should go and take some photos of the boats down there. These ships, to be more exact were rammed into the banks of the Severn there to help counteract the erosion of the banks by the river back in the 1930s. Now these hulks are a venue for people like Mike and I who consider them to be major works of natural … Continue reading A grand day out.

I’ve moved house a few times since doing this drawing, and the kids are grown up, or so they claim to be. I did this for a lady in the States who convinced me that it was a good idea. The company, her company, wanted to make some of my drawings into usable signs, which meant they would make the files ‘traceable’ by sign making equipment of the time. This is probably the reason the guy is driving on the left. I used to post off the drawings to her in California, and then wait and see if I got … Continue reading From years ago…

This does not involve music or sound, it’s a band of people who have a liking for what is termed CI. That’s corrugated iron. The Corrugated Iron Appreciation Society on Facebook to be exact. I’m not alone, there are thousands of us out there. We post pictures of ‘finds’ and over the years I’ve found loads. What qualities does the CI have to make it so attractive? It rusts beautifully for a start. In fact that may be the end as well. It’s usually but not exclusively in the country side. I love it so much I make drawings of … Continue reading I’ve joined a band…

It’s not something that one necessarily tells people, what you might like to have been if you started again. My early ambition was to work in advertising and I did, in a way. People were generally just great and I worked among people who had lot of talent and a sense of humour. It was the ‘right time’ in many ways : the 1970s. After a brief time working in an ad agency, I then went ‘freelance’ and started diverting towards just drawing for a living, for the people, unlike me, who had hung on to their jobs within agencies. … Continue reading A big thank you to people I don’t know, and some I do.

The last of the series about why one should always back up one’s files on your computer. A small mouse in the office might make inadvertent mayhem. This done for my good friend Robina Burton when he was Marketing Director of Christie Electronics in Stroud. They built back up systems for companies so that no company need lose their data, come what may. The computer and the fountain pen sort of date it. Linework on acetate and then painted on the back for those bright punchy colours by Linda, office background done in magic marker by me. Fun to do, … Continue reading Eeeek!

It’s all the fault of Christmas. The bin men are in a right old tizzy, and the neighbours are, like us, looking out of the front window to see who has got it wrong. We have the bonus of Sharon across the road who has never to our knowledge got it wrong. So it’s in ‘Sharon we trust’. The council put the new collection dates out on the web, but some of our number prefer to go against the grain and complicate the issue by putting out the wrong bin on the wrong day. These are the natural anarchists in … Continue reading The tyranny of disrupted bin day.