The start to 2024 has been long and stressful, and full of tiredness and wishing to be far away somewhere with a sketchbook and my headphones on, nowhere that I have to be. But you need the busy times to keep you busy, I could just do with a lot fewer headaches from the rest of the world. My way of handling it is and has always been to go into my sketchbook and draw things, I’ve said before I think it is a way of getting a little control of a small bit of the world by putting it onto some paper. Anyway on this one weekend day of rest, not a lot going on, I went downtown, had a milkshake, and chose a stretch of street I don’t think I’d drawn before, along D Street. It was sunny, and I’m drawn to those big leafless trees at this time of year, with the lovely bark textures. I listen to podcasts when sketching, probably something about the Beatles. I noticed a police car going up and down the street a few times, I don’t think he was looking at me sketching but you always get a bit paranoid. It was a nice day, a lot of people about downtown, pretty much as every other day. All these days blend into one don’t they. Another two-page panorama sketch, another for the book of landscape Davis sketches that I want to make some day. If I ever get there. I remember at a talk I gave years ago a lot of people saying they’d like to see a book just of my Davis sketches, but I still haven’t done it. I just never have the time to figure it out. So I keep drawing instead, and working. I spend a lot of energy trying to solve problems, come up with plans and schemes, try to unlock solutions, but I can never really figure out my own ones. So I keep drawing.