This is Norwich Walk, the street where I grew up. On this very block in fact; my old bedroom window is on the third house from the right.  I’ve never seen so much snow in London, as fell on my recent trip. It was on the Saturday morning a week before Christmas, and despite a little fall of snow the day before, we decided to take the short trip to Colindale to visit the RAF Museum. I wanted to draw old planes. In Burnt Oak, carol singers stood outside the station singing Christmas songs as snow fluttered down like a picturesque postcard (without the picturesque of course; it was Burnt Oak tube station, not one of London’s nicer spots). Then our bus stopped due to ice on the road, and we got out and walked across the estate. As we did, an absolutely massive amount of snow pounded down upon us. We were walking snowmen by the time we finally reached the musuem, which had just decided (wisely) to close. The buses then stopped, as did the tube, and cars were quickly becoming buried beneath feet of snow. Thankfully my dad managed to dig his car out and came to rescue us, though the roads were treacherous, and we had to crawl along. Snow was coming down in ice cubes. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see those little paper umbrellas too. We got home, and warmed up, and then I went straight back outside with my little sketching stool to fill the last page of moleskine sketchbook #6 and freeze my fingers off. The snow had just stopped falling, and I had to capture this before it all vanished (little did I know it wouldn’t vanish for another week and a half).

Passing locals must have thought I was a nutter (those that have known me all my life knew it for a fact…). I quickly sketched the pillar box I’d drawn two days before, and then drew the street panorama. I gave up halfway through, my fingers freezing off, but then decided to soldier on, finish the block, and I’m glad I did. My micron pen didn’t give up so neither would I. Thankfully snow isn’t hard to draw. I added the paint when I got home.

So this is the last page of this sketchbook, which was started on a very hot day in southern Oregon on the fourth of July, and finished in freezing cold London in December. I did a good bit of travelling in this book, and you can see the whole journey on my flickr site: Moleskine #6