It was August the 20th, the traditional height of summer. The Premier League season had begun days before; Spurs played Leicester the very day before this, and after dominating the game we ended up drawing, of course. And so the next day, I too ended up drawing. Ooh, that was a weak link. Why does August 20th stand out to me though, it has no significance in my life does it? No major birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries. Anyway, I chose this date to come down to D Street, to that little alleyway with the cute little shops that leads through to E Street and to the rear of the Pence. I like the red parts against the green, the brickwork in the chimney of the (very expensive) Mustard Seed restaurant, the lights hanging across on garlands. The woman who walked past did actually have a red bag too so I had to quickly draw her in as she passed to get the unifying look. I had to add a lot of the paint after I got back home, because of time/my legs. I thought back, it was on this date back in the summer of 2006 that I cycled down to D Street and did a sketch of the red phone box outside the Mustard Seed, a little piece of home. This has always felt like a significant point in my Davis existence. It was that first summer here, hotter than I could possibly have imagined; would we have moved to the Bay Area instead of Davis if we’d really known how hot it would be? I doubt it, I’ve always appreciated the air-conditioning, and Davis has been a great place to live and work all these years. That summer I was working at the Avid Reader bookstore on weekends and a couple of evenings per week, while also working full-time at the UC Davis Statistics Department, having been assigned there as a temp before they decided to take me on full-time as the graduate coordinator (I’m still there all these years later, but now the manager). There were a lot of incidents of the air-conditioning going down amid  power outages across town, I remember one night a lot of people crowding into the Avid Reader just to stay cool until our closing time of 10pm. On this one day, it was a Sunday and my wife was away in Hawaii with her Mom and nephew, I couldn’t go because of work; the bookstore, but also I had no more vacation days at the university, having spent my small accrual on a solo trip to London earlier that summer, a trip I still look back on with great fondness). So I was all by myself on this Sunday, and I had recently bought a small watercolor set. I had with me a WH Smith spiral bound sketchbook that I had bought and started drawing in during that trip to London.  It was not long since I started to look at other people’s blogs online, people who sketched daily, as I had been trying to do for a while, and it inspired me to really get a move on with that and do a lot more of it, especially around Davis, to really start looking at my new town. I didn’t know how I was going to sketch yet. I drew with pen a lot before moving out here. I bought sets of pencils, and they seemed to smudge a lot. I still have a bunch of watercolour pencils I bought to start adding colour. But I was really interested in the whole watercolour thing. It was a cheap set of pan paints that I bought from the university bookshop that got me started. At this point I did not use pen and watercolour together, I had not found a pen that didn’t run by this point (when I did, it was the Pigma Micron, because that’s what some other sketchers online used and so I copied that, a few months later). That green bike in the foreground, I rode that everywhere. My wife got it for me the first Christmas we lived here, it did me well, until eventually it gave up and the wheels just stopped turning. I rode that thing everywhere. That summer I think about riding across Davis with the sound of Belle and Sebastian’s new album The Life Pursuit in my head, wondering how many summers we would have here until we moved on elsewhere. So far it’s nineteen. That’s a lot of hot summers.

The phone box is still there; I don’t think it ever had a phone in it. Years ago when my son was very small we would get the bus downtown, and come down to this phone box and pretend it was a space ship that would take us to the moons of Saturn. I think it’s locked now, presumably to stop people going in and exploring other planets. I’ve drawn it a few times over the years, and when I went back on August 20th, eighteen years after I drew this, I thought about drawing again from the same spot, but since my bike has a flat tyre that I am too stubborn/lazy/unskilled to fix (see previous post) I wouldn’t have got the same view. I would not have wanted a comparison anyway, this old sketch is its own thing and a particular step in the story. So I turned and drew the other direction. There’s a lot of green and splashes of red, so it’s on theme.