newsbeat on third street

October 30, 2024October 29, 20241 Comment

When I’m downtown I always pop into Newsbeat, which is my favourite shop downtown. I usually get a magazine and a cold drink from here, but I tend to buy a lot of cards too, cards I don’t always need right then, but always seem to find a use for later. When nice cards come out, it’s worth getting them because they may not be available later. Newsbeat gets in a lot of lovely cards from Britain (we make the best cards don’t we), and also those Jellycat stuffed toys, which I have also got a soft spot for getting as presents. I did draw Newsbeat once before, and it was included in that Sactown feature on my work that appeared earlier this year. I thought I should draw it from thins angle though. The weather was still unseasonably hot; I’m happy to say Fall has finally arrived and cooler days are here, I’m even wearing a thick jumper today, though I may regret that when it warms up later. The owner of Newsbeat mentioned to me that they’d seen one of my drawings being used in a Zillow listing, and I couldn’t remember if I’d said yes to that, I need to look into it. They also said that the building Newsbeat was recently got a new owner and the rents are going up, which is a familiar story downtown. I hope they don’t have to move. Stores like this are absolutely vital for a downtown like Davis, we really don’t need another boba tea shop. They make my life here more interesting, Newsbeat, the Avid Reader, Soccer and Lifestyle, the Paint Chip, Armadillo, Logos books, all those little shops. I don’t read paper newspapers much any more, same as most people I think. When I was a kid I wanted to be a journalist and thought that working in a daily newspaper was probably the most glamourous career anyone could have. I still bloody love a magazine though, usually the BBC History magazine and the odd football one, I got one about ukuleles last week (since the latest Hawaii trip I’m well into the ukulele again). I don’t like a lot of American magazines, as they are mostly pages and pages of advertising before you get to anything like an article, it really put me off when I first came over here and picked up Rolling Stone. I still like the metal newspaper stands like the blue one there, that make me think of American cities (and Clark Kent getting his tie stuck in one in one of the old Superman films), you’d be lucky to see those now with any newspapers in them. I stared down 3rd Street as I drew this and realized this was the third sketch I’d done of 3rd Street looking in this direction in the past couple of months.

like a video game

October 29, 20241 Comment

Here is the view from my window at work, the ongoing seismic retrofit project over at Jungerman Hall, UC Davis. That’s where the Crocker Nuclear Lab is based, with its large cyclotron, whatever that is. I enjoy a bit of construction on campus (I heard someone say that ‘UCD’ stands for ‘Under Construction Daily’) but it gives me something interesting to draw and document. The zig-zagged scaffolding reminded me of Donkey Kong, which I used to play with my brother and uncle when I was a kid, making Mario run up the girders jumping over barrels to reach the Princess held captive by Donkey Kong. A simple game, but my older brother would play it for hours and hours, long after I had gotten bored, trying to ‘clock’ it, that is get so high a score that the counter went back to zero. He would sit at the end of my bed playing it until about 3am, sometimes with his mate and my uncle. We had Donkey Kong Jr too, which was similar but involved a little gorilla dude climbing up vines and getting cherries and bananas and avoiding scorpions or something. These were very basic days, computer games have come a long way. We played it on my ColecoVision, which was an unusual game system but for the few games I had it was quite brilliant. Not many people round our way had computer game systems at the time, though the main one was the Atari. I had previously had an Atari-like system called the Philips, which had some good games and extremely simplistic graphics that nonetheless excited my imagination, especially the one where you had to pilot a little spaceship through a field of colourful pixels that represented asteroids (I think it was called Asteroids). It was no Atari though, and everyone wanted an Atari. My neighbours had an Atari, and we loved the game Pitfall. Then I got the ColecoVision, which nobody else had at all. I got it for Christmas, I don’t know who my dad got it from, but no kid I knew ever heard of it, and they used to laugh at me when I would tell them about it. The thing is, the games on it were a clear upgrade from the Atari, especially Turbo, a racing game which had a special steering wheel and brake pedal that you would plug in. It was brilliant. There was no big joystick or modern games controller, rather there was this keypad that looked like a huge phone with a toggle on the top, plugged neatly into the system. Games came in these robust plastic cartridges filled with technology (if the game would not load properly, you just blew inside them and they magically worked), a bit like the later Nintendo and SNES games. Coleco games were not easy to come by though, you would not see them in the shops. Maybe in a second hand shop you might find one, but it was hit or miss if it worked. But we had Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr, and basic as they were, no Atari game came close to those. Those games were played to death in our house. I don’t know what happened to our ColecoVision in the end. There was only so much fun you could extract from the four games we had that worked (the other was I think was a Smurfs game that was truly terrible and impossible to play). It might be still in the loft, or maybe we sold it at a car-boot sale. When my little sister got the Nintendo Entertainment System one Christmas, and Super Mario Bros came along, well that was that. My brother and I would have to wait until she was asleep and sneak in to play it silently on her little TV late at night so not to wake her up. The NES killed the ColecoVision, Mario killed Donkey Kong, and when the SNES came along with Mario Kart, that was it for poor old Turbo. The old days eh.

tunnel records and trad’r sam

October 26, 2024October 25, 2024Leave a comment

Part Two of my day in the Clement Street /Geary Street area of San Francisco, about seventeen or so blocks further towards the ocean and the rolling fog. I was looking for the 4 Star theater, on the corner of 23rd, which shows older films and which unfortunately I had not given myself time to watch anything, but on this day they were showing My Neighbour Totoro (always a favourite), Toy Story 3 (good but I prefer 2), and North by Northwest (which I have never seen but I think involves a small plane and a man running away). I was here to look around the attached record store, Tunnel Records, which is in a little nook of the cinema. It is not the main shop of Tunnel Records, that one is somewhere else in San Francisco, another area I have not yet been to. It was not open when I got there, which gave me some time to draw the building. I stood opposite and looked up Clement, listening to another Jarvis Cocker interview, I can’t get enough of his soft Sheffield accent. I left the details of the other side of the street a bit sparse, sometimes that is all you need to get the message across, and all I had time for, this was not a ‘finish later’ sketch as so many seem to end up as these days, I just wanted to draw what stood out to me in those moments. The record store opened, and I went in to have a long browse. It’s something I don’t do any more, and I can’t remember how or why I do it, but once you start you can’t really stop and have to look at all the racks, alphabetically, in case something pops out that makes you think oh wait, now that I might like. There was one other person in there browsing too. I realized he was a few racks ahead of me, but browsing each rack one by one, same as I was, though more slowly. Was I not paying enough attention to what I was browsing? Either way, I knew at some point I would catch up, and would either have to go around to the next rack and quite obviously miss out the one he was looking at, or what, start looking at the same rack? You can’t do that. I would try to slow down by stopping and pulling out something interesting, to look at as if I could hear the music coming from the sleeve. I would nod and pull that expression people pull with their mouths when they want to show silent respect for something, you know the one, but I was just faking it really. In the end, I caught up. Instead of skipping to the next rack over, I decided to pretend that I needed to look at my phone suddenly, and then went to look at some t-shirts. I am not sure why I was acting like I was in some kind of play. I went and looked at the soundtracks section (like, why would I be looking there), and then after the other man, who was probably in some play of his own, moved to a different genre, I went back and looked through the alphabetical racks again but this time, in an unexpected move, in reverse order, starting at Z. I ended up not buying anything, despite being tempted by an Al Green album, because I didn’t fancy carrying a record around with me while sketching, and I didn’t really need it. I gave a little smile and raise of the eyebrows to the shop clerk as I left vie the movie theatre’s main entrance, and went off to draw a massive Russian church.

It’s pretty hard to miss as you go up Geary, yet it’s not one of the famous San Francisco sights. The Holy Virgin Cathedral “Joy Of All Who Sorrow” has tall, shiny golden onion domes that probably look even shiner in the sun, let alone on this foggy day. It’s a Russian Orthodox church; there have been Russian communities in the San Francisco area for over 200 years. This is the largest Russian Orthodox Cathedral outside Russia, and was completed in 1965. I sketched it from across the street, adding in the metallic gold paint when I got home (you can’t tell here but the page is actually quite shiny). I popped inside, but only to peek through the door, I wasn’t sure if I could walk around and have a look. It was very ornate looking, and even though there wasn’t a service going on I felt a little bit like I was out of place, and I didn’t want to unwittingly break any rules. The Church Etiquette and FAQs pages of their website are quite interesting, full of extremely clear and specific instructions as to how you must behave. If your phone goes off: “You should answer the call (accept it), but do not start speaking until you have stepped away (outside or in the narthex). Walk out of the church quietly and calmly. Do not sprint/dash out of the church when this happens. Make the caller wait.” They are thoroughly disgusted at people leaving lipstick marks on icons, which is fair enough frankly and not something I was in danger of doing; as for clothes, shirts must have collars and be buttoned up, though you’re ok to loosen the top button if you have to, and don’t ever wear a t-shirt saying “This Bud’s For You!” I imagined there must have been a very specific incident involving a t-shirt with that phrase on it. I was wearing a Red Star Paris football shirt, which was probably a big nyet-nyet, and the big red Star on the badge may have been confusing, so I didn’t take any chances, and just peeked through the door. I tried to teach myself Russian when I was a kid, I didn’t get further than a few phrases, but I learned the Cyrillic alphabet and so I was enthusiastically reading the signs outside and trying to figure them out. I think it was in Old Church Slavonic, which would have blown my teenage self’s mind to see in person.

I stood outside the cathedral though to sketch my last destination on this day in the city, Trad’r Sam, an old tiki-themed bar that’s been around since 1937. It is not fancy, but is a real San Francisco legend I had read about on a list of historic San Francisco bars, since I have it as my mission to go and draw them all. I was already quite tired by this point, so when I drew the exterior and that big green sign, I went in through the saloon doors (am I misremembering that now?) and ordered a Lava Flow cocktail. I sent my wife (who loves a historic tiki bar) a picture of my drink; she was in Disneyland and had just ordered a Lava Flow ice cream at the same time, coincidentally. It was a pretty popular place on a Saturday afternoon and started filling with locals. The bar itself is a big horseshoe, my favourite type of bar set-up, and the barman was friendly. I chatted with some of the others sat at the bar, got comfy and finished off one of my sketches. I decided I didn’t have the energy to draw the bar itself, this time, but enjoyed the mood. I tried a Mango Mai Tai, and wow it was really good. I think it was really strong as well because I started feeling a bit drunk already; maybe that was the lack of a proper lunch mixed with looking at all that orthodox religious architecture and old pop records. I had to explain to the barman who Red Star Paris were; not the team I support, I just like their kits and the fact they aren’t PSG. He’d heard of Red Star Belgrade, and hearing I was from London he asked who my team was, giving me a fist bump and an acknowledgement of how good Sonny is when I told him. I talked to a couple who lived about a block away and gave me some good tips for other old local bars in this area, they are now on my visit and sketch list. It was a good place to wind down the day, and I had a beer to finish off, alas not an Anchor Steam which was always my SF drink, but eventually I had to get myself back to Davis, a long long journey from this part of town. I took the 38 bus back, got the Amtrak bus to Emeryville, took the Capitol Corridor train to Davis, and then had to walk back from the station up to north Davis, four hours later. I slept hard that night, but got up next day to watch Spurs batter Man United 3-0 away. A good weekend.

green apple and schubert

October 24, 2024January 23, 2025Leave a comment

I needed a day in the city, and wanted to explore another part of town. Davis was getting too hot, and it’s about 30 to 40 degrees cooler down there. I’ve been spending too much time under trees lately. I took the early Capitol Corridor, the familiar journey across the Valley and past the Delta and along the Bay, and I can’t help myself sketching those colours, it will never be enough. I have sketches of this trip going back a long time now. It’s all a learning process. I listened to, what did I listen to this time? Pulp I think, still in the excitement of having finally seen them play live after thirty years of waiting. I listened to another podcast interview with Jarvis Cocker where he talked about some of his favourite records, and how he never lost the love of vinyl as a format for listening to music, the side of a record being just long enough to experience it, before doing something else like reading a book. I see that. It’s how I felt growing up, when CDs finally came along I missed that ‘two-sided’ construction, but could see that bands in the mid-90s still tried to think of their albums in that way. I was thinking about records and books as part of my destination, though I didn’t think I’d buy any, because I only brought a small bag, and anyway I have too many and not a lot of space at home. It’s good to buy tickets to places where you can look at them and then draw things. I always worry that by spending so much time looking at and drawing things I forget to experience them as well, so I decided that I’d draw what I can, but not be too worried about it. So I arrived at the Transbay Terminal, the fancy bus station in downtown San Francisco, and found the bus that would take me straight out to the Richmond area, and up to Clement Street.

Although I’ve heard about this place for years, I had never been to Green Apple Books, not this one anyway. I drew the smaller one over in the Inner Sunset about three years ago, another September day exploring the city. Clement Street and that whole area on the north side of Golden Gate Park was somewhere that in all these years I had never explored, it felt just a bit far away. The 38R bus got there pretty quickly. I passed by buildings I thought would make good drawings, and old pubs I thought I should take note of and check out some day. I got out somewhere up on Geary near 6th, and walked over to Clement to find Green Apple Books. Fellow sketcher Suhita Shirodkar had sketched the bookshop recently, which gave me the idea to finally come over this way, and it was a good place to explore. A day like this is a big effort, getting up early and catching a not-inexpensive train at 7am, not making it to my destination until about 10am, just to wander about until it was time to make the long journey back. It was foggy, and there were people around having breakfast or brunch depending on how organized they were. I ate a pastry and stood opposite Green Apple to sketch it. I was on a sort of elevated wooden platform where people can sit and drink their coffee, and could see over the parked car. It’s funny, when you stand near a parking spot, there is always the chance that a large car might park in the way to block your view, but I find that sometimes people think about parking there, but do not when they see me sketching. Those people are usually in cars that would not block my view anyway. Then there are those, usually in larger SUV-type cars, that don’t mind blocking my view if they park, even if they notice me. I don’t worry at all, these are occupational hazards of the urban sketcher and I just move down slightly (I am not standing there with an easel), it’s what I expect when I pick a spot to draw. It’s just an observation, I’m not making any judgements about the type of people who drive bigger cars being less thoughtful, and actually I would like to tell those who choose not to park where I am sketching that it really doesn’t block me at all if they park, I’d rather they got the good spot (and save it from a minivan or something). But really I think they just assume I am a traffic warden. Anyway, here I had a good view of the shop. I decided to do all my sketching before going in to browse.

This impish fellow stands in front of the shop, holding a red book and a green apple. The bookshop is much bigger inside than I realized, and going up and down its stairs was like an adventure book in itself. My son would love this place, I thought. My teenage self would too, and after all when I was a teenager what would I do on a Saturday other than get on a train or bus and go exploring for interesting bookshops, usually finding myself in the foreign languages section. There were things I wanted, but I exercised restraint, and just bought a postcard with a painting of the shop on it, and a canvas tote bag for my son. Despite having worked in bookshops, I sometimes get overwhelmed by it all.

Before I went into Green Apple, I decided to sketch the bakery outside of which I was standing. Schubert’s Bakery has been making cakes since 1911 and having eaten one myself I can confirm they are delicious. I got one in a little box, covered in all sorts of fancy chocolate, and had to go back in for a fork because it was bigger than expected, and filled me up so much I never ended up eating lunch. I could not get a certain song out of my head as I sketched, “Blue Suede Schubert” by the Rutles. A good bakery is an essential part of a good neighbourhood, I have always thought that. Somewhere for amazing cakes. Places that do not have this are very much worse off for it. If people end up getting the generic bland cakes from your Targets or Safeways or whatever, the world becomes a much more boring place. Show your local bakeries love! And eat lovely cakes. When I was done sketching and looking around this part of Clement, I walked down a bit further, where there was a local Chinese festival happening, with little stalls lining the street and music, and people canvassing for local elections. I found the bus that would take me further down Geary again and explored a different part of the area.

(not) a cottage in the woods

October 23, 2024October 23, 2024Leave a comment

It’s a funny building, this. I have drawn it before of course, but I like this one a lot. The G Street sign being the only bit of colour reminds you that this is downtown and not in some enchanted glade in the Black Forest. I have never been in there (Bubble Belly, I think they do baby clothes) but it’s such an unusually shaped building. I stood outside Jack in the Box to draw it. It was that time of the month that was still really hot. Now things are finally cooling off (it’s 81 degrees today, which for us is positively autumnal), and it’s nearly Halloween for which I will not be dressing up. I never do. I like the spooky decorations everywhere though. I’ve often thought that in the spirit of the spooky season it would be funny to write in the letters “HO” in between “G” and “ST”. We could go further along the spooky sign changes: add “EA” on the B Street signs, “ORE” on the F Street signs, or “POOKIE” on the S Street signs. Or to be completely non-scary and a bit pointless, “RMRE” on the A Street signs. Or maybe add “HRI” on the C Street signs, maybe followed by “MAS” to keep it holiday themed, as they say. You get the idea. I always liked the end credits of the Simpsons when they would do the Treehouse of Horror specials and change the names of the cast and crew to silly scary versions. It’s something a lot of people do now. I’m Pete Scary at this time of year. Or Pete Skully. I was trying to Halloween-ize the F1 drivers names in the US Grand Prix last weekend, with your Pierre Ghastly, Lance Troll, O-scare Piastri, Jaws Russell, that sort of thing. I don;t know, I find it hard to get into Halloween as much any more. There was that one year where I went a bit crazy drawing loads of Halloween stuff, decorating our whole whole with hand-drawn Halloween decorations, and we had a fun party for the kids from my son’s pre-school with these really detailed invitations, I was so into drawing bats and spiders and vampires. I suppose it’s just in the past now. Some of our neighbours go all out with the Halloween stuff, with so much stuff. We will probably carve pumpkins, though I prefer to paint on them now, they don’t go mouldy so quickly, and it’s a lot easier. Anyway, this building looks like it could be a witch’s cottage in the forest, but it’s not, it’s just a clothes shop on G Street. Or maybe that’s what the witches want us to think…

let’s draw more trees

October 22, 2024October 21, 2024Leave a comment

My obsession with tree drawing led me to organize the first Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl of the 24-25 season, a gathering down in the UC Davis Arboretum on an unnecessarily hot morning in early October. I had been for a four mile run that morning, an unnecessarily long distance in preparation for the very unnecessary 10k I will run in the Turkey Trot this year. Speaking of which I need to get back into training for that, I had a vacation to Kauai in between and swapped running for fighting waves and sipping cocktails. The temperatures we had in Davis at the start of this month though were a bit stupid, well over a hundred degrees for several days on end, what sort of autumn do you call this. It has cooled off a little now and the weather is lovely, though the world at large fills me with dread, the election is coming. I really hope the thing I’m dreading doesn’t happen. I will bury myself in my sketchbook in the meantime. Anyway, we were there in the Arboretum, and I drew the bridge, the same bridge I drew on my first ever sketchcrawl in Davis back in December 2005. A very long time ago now, but it was the future at the time. I had to get out of the house, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t know this town, I needed to start drawing again, and my wife spotted a posting for the worldwide sketchcrawl on DavisWiki or something, long before the world revolved around Facebook, and so out I went, shy as a coconut, started sketching at Mishka’s with some other shy people, the old Mishka’s a block away from where it is now, made it into the Arboretum, and kept going, I didn’t meet up at the end, I just kept drawing on campus, ended up at the library. You might say I kept going and never stopped. Anyway I always think of that day when I draw this bridge, a cold day, before I had even found a job, two months away from the end of my 20s, not even two months into my new life across the Atlantic. I still can’t draw the bloody bridge. Anyway, as you can see the creek has a little sluice in it (is that what they are called? I don’t know. Weirs, that’s it, not sluices.) which is part of the whole Arboretum waterway project I mentioned last time. Bit inconvenient for the ducks, they have to walk round. Good exercise I suppose. Don’t feed them bread. I stood beneath a huge overhanging tree limb while sketching, and leaned against it when I got tired, which after my four mile run was a lot.

I had rushed out of the house and not brought anything to drink with me, no water or anything. I thought about going back downtown to get something, but thought, I’ll be fine. I walked through the shady Redwood Grove looking for something to draw and came across the old tree stump lying on its side. The way the light was hitting it made it look multicoloured, though it was white as a bone. It reminded me of an old skull, maybe of a styracosaurus, and I had drawn a real styracosaurus skull in Los Angeles earlier this year, on my day-long dinosaur drawing adventure. I might need another one of those. I was getting thirsty by this point. I did have another sketch in me but needed to find a drink. None of the nearby buildings on campus were open on the weekends for me to see if they had vending machines, the shops were too far, and my own building with its well-stocked vending machine was a bit too far a walk. So by the time we were all done sketching and met up at the end to look at each others’ work (and there were some very nice sketches done) I was parched. I wasn’t even hungry, I just went straight to Newsbeat and bought two cold drinks, and drank them on the way home.

It was busy downtown, really busy. Newsbeat had a lot of customers, and there were a lot of folk walking about. It’s a good sign for downtown Davis that. The building owners just need to stop putting business rents up to unsustainable levels as that is bad for small local shops, shops the community needs. We really don’t need another boba tea or fro yo shop. Anyway, there were a lot of people about, and it was hot, and I wasn’t hungry so skipped eating lunch and went home. On the way back I noticed this tree on E Street, in the Old North area, and just had to draw it. I only drew a bit of a it though, and finished it off at home because I was feeling hot. It’s lovely isn’t it, it looks like some wise old monster that might control your mind if you aren’t careful. Well not mine. I went home and took a nap, and dreamed about styracosauruses, probably.

the empty lake

October 21, 20241 Comment

The UC Davis Arboretum is currently undergoing some major work to the waterway, an ambitious project called the “Arboretum Waterway Flood Protection and Habitat Enhancement“. I don’t know what it will look like in the end, but right now, it’s jarring to see the big serene Lake Spafford completely drained of water. Like seeing the man behind the curtain. Now I know how deep it is. The ducks probably aren’t too happy, but we’ve all got to have work done on our homes. Round our way the painters have been painting all the condos, coming in the yard and scaring off the spiders. I’ve drawn this lake many times over the years and now it’s empty, for the time being. I’ll be interested to see how this all turns out! So of course I drew it, at the end of September. I’ll be back down to sketch it again. “Waterway to have a good time.” We did hold a sketchcrawl in the Arboretum at the start of October, I’ll post those later. For now, more September trees.

September Trees – Part 2

October 9, 2024Leave a comment

Time for side two of the album of trees from September. It is October now, the weather is still very hot (over a hundred for several days now) and I haven’t stopped drawing trees, though I am tired of this heat and need some cooler weather now please. It was cool standing in the shade of the big tree above, on Mrak Lawn. You can see one of Arneson’s Eggheads there, “Eye on Mrak/Fatal Laff”, one of the most photographed of the Eggheads. This was on the Friday before the new academic year began, just before the rush, the last moment of calm. I like the new year starting, usually, but this year I was feeling a bit of apprehension. I have quite enjoyed the quiet, even though the Davis summer is long and hot. I know that once all the people are back and things are moving that I always feel differently – I’m a city person after all – but maybe I am just always seeking the quiet spaces now, away from the noise. The world feels so noisy these days, with the news and the adverts and the endless sewage of voices that are shoved in your faces every time you look at your electronic devices that supposedly connect us all. This leaves our heads feeling noisy, as thoughts bounce around in there like birds trapped in a glass room not really sure where to land. The trees absorb some of that noise, I think. They just stand silently, no plans to go anywhere. They are alive, I wonder sometimes if they are happy with where they have ended up or if they don’t like some of the other trees nearby because they are always dropping leaves or attracting squirrels, or if they don’t really think about it because they are, you know, trees.

It’s at this time of year the trees start changing and getting ready for winter. Not all of them do, some stay the same. I start thinking about when I might start wearing my warm sweaters again – not any time soon, if this heatwave continues. It’s getting busy at work as we get on with the general running of this big university, helping the branches of academia grow and develop, insert tree-based analogy here. On the other side of the world this week, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 2024 Urban Sketching Symposium is about to start. Sketchers from around the world are descending upon that colourful capital and starting to post their experiences already, their sketches, their photos, their connections with each other. October is not a good time for me to go to a Symposium. Last year it was held in New Zealand, another far-flung place I have always wanted to visit, but at another time that was not really possible for me due to timing (April). The last one I went to was the huge one in Amsterdam, 2019, when about 800 or more sketchers descended on the Dutch capital in the middle of an unbearably hot summer, back in the pre-Covid world that feels like a different planet in so many ways (though it’s still unbearably hot). Sure, we are ‘back to normal’ now, but so many of us are still not really. I think I’ve reverted back to the solitary reclusive sketcher that shies from the big events, and the small ones too. This has been happening since before the pandemic, but the past few years have made me even more so. It’s hard for me to really explain it. I sketch, I post on my website, I also post on Instagram, and while I keep up with a load of sketchers online who still inspire me daily, I don’t interact so much with all the wider groups these days, your Facebooks and so on. The algorithms are a mess. Instagram’s ok but a bit limited, I’ve stopped posting on the old Twitter, and Threads is useless. I post to Flickr, but not in the old groups which all feel so 2006. This place right here is my main outlet, old fashioned though the blog is. At the launch of Urban Sketchers I was a correspondent for the main USk blog, but I have not posted there for years since it’s not really for that any more, and is more about the network of local chapters. I never did set up an official local chapter round here. Keeping up with all the global sketching community is overwhelming now, it’s massive. I’m in my little corner doing my thing. I am feeling more reclusive than ever with sketching (and in general, if I’m honest), going back to the default setting of hiding away. Maybe I just need a proper Symposium experience, like in the old days, to kick me out of this, and give me some new ideas and energy.

It was the very first Urban Sketching Symposium that effectively brought me out of my shell in the first place, so to speak. We’d only been a thing for barely a couple of years, but the idea of getting sketchers together for a few days of workshops, talks, sketching and mostly interacting in-person was always on the cards, so Gabi and co organized the first event in Portland, Oregon. Not too far from Davis, really. I nearly considered not going. I was part of Urban Sketchers from the start but that old feeling that my place is to hide away. I’d been going through a bit of a personal crisis at the end of 2009, feeling at my lowest ebb, and I think I took a decision in 2010 to figure out how to somehow grow more, take charge of myself a bit. I was encouraged by other urban sketchers to come to Portland, so I took the leap. It really was a lightbulb moment for me when I got there. The Correspondents had a dinner the night before the Symposium, and for so many of us, gathered from not just America but literally all over the world – Kumi from Tokyo, Gerard from Belgium, Tia from Singapore, Isabel from Mauritania, Simo from Italy, Liz from Australia, Lapin from Barcelona – who had not met in person before, but all knew each other and recognized all our different styles immediately. It was exciting to finally meet Gabi Campanario from Seattle, Matthew Brehm from Idaho, and Jason Das from New York, with whom I’d spoken a lot online already, plus several others whose work I loved and still do, Veronica Lawlor, Shiho Nakaza, Laura Frankstone. The Symposium itself started next day, and there were about 75-80 of us total, and it was far less rigorously structured than the Symposia now – we only realized on day two that name tags might be helpful – but as we all wandered about Portland in our groups, it felt like everyone there got to know each other, and I met a lot of people I’ve stayed sketching friends with (and huge fans of) since, such as Kalina Wilson, Rita Sabler, Don Colley, Mike Daikabura, Orling Dominguez, Elizabeth Alley, Vicky Porter, to name a few I discovered there for the first time. I had dinner with a group of the local Portland sketchers and have been back a few times since to sketch (and eat and drink!) with them on their monthly sketchcrawls. The talks were especially fun, the bit where I asked Frank Ching about curvilinear perspective and Gerard Michel got up and gave an animated explanation to the room in French was brilliant. One of my favourite moments was in Matthew Brehm’s talk, when he described it as the ‘Woodstock of Urban Sketching’, and he was absolutely spot on.

It really was where I lost my shyness as a sketcher too. I remember being in Frank Ching’s architecture workshop down in Portland’s Saturday market, and I didn’t know where to sit and sketch, normally looking for the out of sight place where I would not be bothered. I was sketching with Shiho (who introduced me to the pen that day that I still use daily) and we decided, why hide? Why not just sit in the middle of the market, and let people go around us? I think we were back to back. And it was fine, and people came up and watched, and I didn’t mind, for the first time ever I didn’t mind being watched. It was as if suddenly I realized, it’s ok to go out sketching, it’s normal, and not only are other people doing it, but by doing it ourselves we are giving other people permission to do it. And I drew pirates. I remember sitting outside a little bar one afternoon with a group of us and just seeing each of our minds racing with ideas, none of us able to sleep much, and I realized we need more of this to get sketchers together. On the plane ride home, I couldn’t sit still for ideas, and filled several pages of a notebook with thoughts and phrases and plans, and wrote down “Let’s Draw Davis!”, deciding to start a monthly sketchcrawl in Davis, making fliers that I would post about town and start an email list and make it open to anyone, and promise myself that I would get out of my shell and actually start trying to meet other artists and sketchers in this little city, and encourage others to become urban sketchers. I even brought extra pencils and little sketchbooks with me in case people wondered what we might be doing, and would like to get sketching themselves. And it worked! I’ve met a lot of the local art community over the years, and continued meeting sketchers from over the world, and organizing big events in London, all the fun art stuff. Yet now I find myself shying away again. Maybe I need to, if you will not excuse the pun, branch out a bit.

Let’s get back to the trees. The previous trees were from the Northstar Park, not too far from my house. The big old oak above though is outside the Chemistry building, right opposite the Bike Barn, and has seen a lot of construction right next door while that new Chemistry wing has been built. A number of smaller, younger trees had to be sacrificed for that building to happen, but thankfully this big old mighty tree remains. Its trunk is such an interesting shape, and I pass under its shade most days on my way to work, I am very grateful for its shelter from the sun. I try to find the path with the most shade, the sun does not fit well with my skin. I drew this in pencil as you can see, it made the drawing go a bit faster. It looks like a traditional map of languages, starting out with the big trunk of Indo-European, branching off early into Indo-Iranian and European, then getting all Indo-Aryan, Italo-Romance, Germanic and so on. Like Minna Sundberg’s illustration of it from about ten years ago. I love a language family tree. Languages were my obsession for many years; I’ve kind of let that go a bit, but I still get very excited when I read about it. It’s nearly twenty years since I wrote my Masters thesis, which was based around medieval English and its relationship with French. As far as family tree models go, they are very useful but of course don’t tell the whole story – certain languages having strong influences/cross-pollination on others not in the same branch (or even tree), mixed-language societies where code-switching leads to blurring of the boundaries and pidginization, enforced standardization, but on the whole they can be very helpful in showing how languages at their core developed from each other. Besides, as we have established, I just really love a drawing of a tree.

This is the second tree in this set which has a lot of yellow blooming on the sunny side. This one is next to the Bike Barn, drawn on the first day of Fall quarter. I did another type of tree drawing this summer – I finally updated our Faculty Family Tree. It’s something I have wanted to do for many years. Back in 2008, for the UC Davis Centenary, one of our Emeriti in Statistics, Professor Mack, created a massive genealogy, with lines carefully hand-drawn in pencil, small black and white photos, and names of all sorts of historical mathematicians and statisticians (that bit was typed by me), all collected into one huge board that we displayed for the Chancellor, and have had on our wall ever since. A lot of new faculty have joined us in the intervening years, some have left, and I thought that it would be nice to update it somehow (especially as we can now add Newton and Galileo to the map). And yes, you’ll notice I said ‘map’ there and not ‘tree’ because it was while I was in London this summer, on the Underground, that I had the idea of finally doing this project, and drawing it in the style of the tube map. I had kept a spreadsheet of the lineage of all new faculty who had joined us in the past sixteen years, and got to work in Illustrator, taking about a month to draw the whole thing up. I had it printed as a poster, and it made its debut at a special event in (funnily enough) Portland, at an event for our alumni held at the Joint Statistical Meeting and hosted by our Dean. It’s now on display in our main office on campus, and the great thing is I can update it every year as I find out more information, or as people come or go. It was even featured in the L&S Magazine back in August. Perhaps the biggest tree I have drawn this year.

And finally, two big old oak trees on the north-west corner of the Quad – above, the first day of the quarter, below, the last day of September. Everyone is back now, behind me groups of sororities and fraternities and clubs and other campus groups, as well as the Jehovahs who have been there patiently every day this summer, were gathered outside the MU grabbing the attentions of all the newcomers on campus. Bikes are whizzing by, and e-scooters which go faster and more silently, and e-bikes which go faster still, and now those e-bikes that look more like mopeds, but people ride them on sidewalks and bike lanes much faster than any regular bike; one nearly knocked me over behind Hart Hall the other day. I’ve not been out during the busiest parts of the day yet when classes interchange, but late September/early October is when most of the crashes happen. Yeah it’s great having the people back. I’m still drawing trees, and probably won’t stop any time soon. The Symposium is starting now. Maybe I should think about finally submitting a workshop, trying to teach something. I never feel confident enough to feel like I have anything to pass on; maybe I could teach about drawing trees. Yes, maybe I could. I will try to come out of the shell a bit more, be less of a recluse, I will, but for now, you’ll probably find me under a tree.

September Trees, Part 1

October 6, 2024Leave a comment

I drew a lot of trees last month. It started out when I decided to draw the big tree outside Rock Hall, followed by a big tree outside Physics on that same lunchtime, and just went from there, filling my sketchbook pages with trees over the following couple of weeks. We lost a lot of trees in Davis the past few years, mostly during the big storms at the start of 2023. I miss their shade, especially on the very hot days, and this hot summer is lasting right into Fall as we are currently in a first week of October with multiple days over 100 degrees. A tree is a good place to stop and think for a while. Trees are alive, very much alive, and to sit in its shade makes you feel like you are protected by a large giant. I’ve not been much of a tree climber; when I was a kid I would climb trees because I was light as a feather, but never too far up, because I wouldn’t float down like a feather.

I don’t really have a lot to say about the trees themselves. I could be all naturalist and tell you all what type of tree they are after drawing, but I didn’t bother checking; many of them are types of Californian Oak, but don’t quote me on that. I should know better. When I was 11, I won a competition which was held in schools across the London Borough of Barnet, when I designed a ceramic butterfly. I was really interested in pottery when I was at junior school, and thought it might be something I carried on doing as an art form into later life, but in my first ceramics class at secondary school I got the impression that the teacher, Mr Herring, hated me for some reason. I got the impression he hated a lot of people, but he gave me a discredit on day one when, after he had thrown a huge lump of clay at a pupil, I told him my old pottery teacher told us never to throw clay. He also told me my drawings were really bad. I got a second discredit for not doing my homework once – the homework was literally drawing, but he’d made me feel like I couldn’t draw – and that resulted in me getting my one and only detention at school. In all the time taking those classes I don’t remember making one actual thing. But before Mr. Herring’s class put me off doing ceramics for life, I had won a prize at primary school for my ceramic butterfly. In fact, they told me the main reason I had won is because of all the preparation drawings I had done, they liked them so much. My prize was a book called ‘The Young Naturalist’, and it was all about looking out for insects and identifying plants, it was stuff I was always quite interested in when I would go camping with the cubs and scouts. However, I could not really read it much at home, because my older brother and sister took all levels of piss out of me telling me that a ‘Naturalist’ was one of them people that goes around the woods in the nude with other nudey people, and that I must be one of them if I had that book. Now even though I knew full well that they meant ‘Naturist’, and I knew the difference between the words, I could not be completely certain, they might have been telling the truth. Either way, I thought it best to hide that book, in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought that I, a freckly red-headed 11 year old kid, might be secretly spending my weekends dancing about woodlands in the nip. To this day, I try to avoid using the word ‘Naturalist’, and have even so far resisted getting my US citizenship because I’m a bit worried about the ‘naturalization process’, nobody is making me take my trousers off and go dilly-dallying about an orchard. So that’s the reason I can’t really tell one tree from another.

Being around the trees does make me think though. A little thinking can get you into a lot of trouble, a wise man once said (it might have been Brick Top in Snatch), but this is a place for my thoughts. One piece of music was going through my head when I drew these trees, the song ‘Trees’ by Pulp. It was on their final album in 2001, ‘We Love Life’, an album I very much adored, and brings me back to those first few months in Aix-en-Provence, listening to that CD in my shared apartment above the bakery. Pulp have been very much in my head recently, because after 30 years of being a fan, last month I finally got to see them live in concert. It was an amazing experience, my mind going right back to the 90s. They played at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, a pretty decent sized venue. My wife and I travelled down from Davis, I bought the t-shirt, we sat pretty high up. The opening band were not great, a duo playing very odd experimental (self-indulgent) music, the classic avant-garde-a-clue. Pulp on the other hand were amazing. The bass player Steve Mackey died last year so this your is a tribute to him. They reformed in 2023 for a series of gigs, and these ones over here in the US were their first gigs over this way in many years. Jarvis was great. I was a massive fan of Pulp in the mid-90s, ever since I saw one of their video for ‘Lipgloss’ on the ITV Chart Show in late 1993 (I used to watch that show on Friday nights when I was 17, that and The Word; I didn’t have a social life then, just like now). I loved His’n’Hers, Different Class blew me away. They played loads of favourites, ‘Babies’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time’, ‘Disco 2000’ (which reminded me so much of those sweaty nights at indie clubs in Soho in 1995-96) and of course ‘Common People’ which is still one of the great pop songs of all time. Their 1998 album This Is Hardcore is another album I adore; the title track is an absolute classic and I was so pleased they played that one live, but they didn’t play ‘Help The Aged’ (which we rewrote as a football song in 1998 called ‘Help The English’ and those are the lyrics still in my head). They played some songs from We Love Life too, but unfortunately not ‘Trees’. And yet, that is the song that has been in my head the most this month, as you can see.

Each of these interludes between trees is going to be a little story or thought all of itself. That’s ok. This will be a long post. There will be eight trees. And there will be more in the next post, about nine. The great thing is, you don’t have to read the words, you can just look at the pictures. The words are here to break up all the pictures really. I drew these trees around UC Davis and downtown Davis, some with the fountain pen like the one above, the rest with the uni-ball signo pen like the one below. I listen to podcasts a lot when I sketch, and since the Pulp show I have been gorging myself on podcasts featuring interviews with Jarvis Cocker. There’s something about his dry, gentle Sheffield voice that is so reassuring. I listened to the audiobook of his 2022 book ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’, which he read himself. It’s a book about the stuff in his attic, and how talking about the stuff (and deciding whether to keep it or chuck it) becomes in a way the story of his life. I feel that way about my drawings, and this blog, I guess. I could go through the random things in my own house, or those things from my childhood still somewhere in my mum’s loft, and draw them, picking apart the story of my own existence. Self-reflection, or escaping the present into the fog of nostalgia? It’s best to be careful about these things. In that interview I did recently on KDRT it was remarked that my posts are a kind of life story (this one is, that’s for sure), and I think that’s part of the excuse to draw, is the excuse to look back while looking at the world in front of me. The tree above is right outside a funeral home, and I kept thinking that I should do all my thinking while I am alive, because (to paraphrase Paul Weller) there’s no thinking after you’re dead. Wow, that got dark! Best get back to listening to some Pulp, that will cheer us up.

Speaking of 90s music, one of my other favourite bands Oasis have finally announced a truce and will play a number of big shows next year, you may have heard. Of course I was very excited to hear the news, but had mixed emotions about it. The shows of course have had insane levels of interest, and the whole fiasco about dynamic pricing – you wait online in a queue for seven hours for expensive tickets to a show in a massive packed stadium where they will probably sound a bit shit, and if you are lucky enough to actually get through, you find the cost of the tickets has doubled or tripled? And you are on the spot. I didn’t even try. It was overall a very bad look, left a sour taste. Like Pulp, I was obsessed with Oasis in the mid-90s but never saw them play live, it was too hard to get tickets. I considered Knebworth in 96, but that would have meant hanging on the phone all day, and besides I had to work on the Saturday at ASDA. One of my co-workers did go, I think I even covered for her on the Sunday, and she had an amazing time (while I made tea and toasted teacakes for shoppers). I didn’t mind. I had already seen the Sex Pistols that summer at Finsbury Park, and nothing in the world was topping that. I never had the patience for competing for tickets to the big gigs, though looking back Knebworth would have been fun. I did eventually get tickets to see Oasis in France in 2000, when I was living in Belgium. It was I think in Metz, and I didn’t really know how I was going to get there and back from Charleroi, so when the band had a big fight in Spain and Noel Gallagher quit, they cancelled those shows and I was partly relieved. When they split in 2009 I thought it was a long time overdue; there are a few songs on the last few albums I really enjoy but nothing like the energy of the 90s. For the past fifteen years, I have loved Noel’s ‘solo’ albums, and even those Beady Eye albums made by Liam and the remainder of the band. Most of all I’ve enjoyed the interviews, and the silly drama of it. The music is part of my own personal history, it’s not for everyone but there were big reasons that it hooked onto me when I was 18-19. When the announcement came they were finally getting back, well it wasn’t like when Pulp re-formed and people were like, oh ok. With Oasis the whole world all seemed to have an opinion. People delighted in telling the world they hated them. Well, I loved them. Part of me wanted them to never get back, because it was over and done with, but well, playing some live shows with all the old stuff is all part of the fun. The Sex Pistols did it, after all, and they still hate each other thirty years after that. I’m mostly looking forward to the interviews, to see what the pair of them will be like together again after all this time (and when they will split up again).

Music has been on my mind lately. I got that record player, and belted out the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘Substitute’, the first song I ever learned on the guitar. My uncle Billy played that song to me on the same vinyl record back in about 1988 or 89 and I was transfixed with the sound. You could play like that, simple angry chords, and it was great. You didn’t even have to get it right. I learned the chords from ear, got the words all wrong, played it fast like the Pistols and slower like the Who (marginally slower), and to this day I still get it wrong but it doesn’t matter, my version is right because it’s my version. I have loved playing the guitar since then. I got an acoustic guitar at a car boot sale for about a fiver, a fairly crappy old thing but it played and stayed in tune, and I learned all my chords on that. At school I would play the basic nylon string guitar in the music room, I always got a tune out of it but it was quiet, it was hardly right for playing Anarchy in the UK. I started writing songs almost right away. One of the first I wrote was called ‘Strike’, written as a homework assignment in Music where we had to write a song about something in the news. Me and my friend Kevin performed it in class, me on the guitar and him on either the keyboard or tambourine, I forget now. The chords were some thing like G-E-D-C-G, with no melody, and the opening words went something like “down to the station I usually hike, today I’ve got to take my bike, because there’s a strike.” That’s all I remember. I didn’t even have a bike. Still it was a start, and I started writing any old nonsense after that, looking for chords and tunes, some very catchy, some very crappy, latching onto whatever was floating about. At this point I loved the Pogues, the Pistols, the Beatles, the Jam, the Who, and loads of Irish folk and rebel music, I had this song book with guitar chords that we picked up at one of the Irish music festivals. I got my first electric guitar on my 14th birthday (thanks to my big brother), a trusty Westone Concord, though I didn’t have an amplifier so never plugged it in until I was in front of an audience at school. I wrote and performed a lot of songs at school, I had that band called ‘Gonads’ with my mate Hooker singing (a much better singer than I ever was) and we would get booed off annually at the Christmas Variety Show, which we loved. Funny enough I remember first hearing Oasis after leaving school and thinking, wait this is the sound I was after, I could never get it but this is what I was going for. I had given up the idea of being in a band by then. I did keep writing songs for years, in waves, and I think a part of me would write them with my old mate’s voice in mind, and they were never for playing or showing anybody, and eventually I stopped, seemed a bit self-indulgent. I do still find myself coming up with tunes though, playing them into my phone as 20-30 second unfinished sketches, and there they stay. I like to think that informs my sketching somehow, inspires me to draw more quick and less ‘finished’ sketches, but come on now.

This collection of trees is a bit like an LP isn’t it, with a Side One and a Side Two. A lot of these ones were drawn downtown while walking about on a Saturday afternoon, before heading to Armadillo Records to look through some vinyl. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989. I stood outside Froggy’s on 2nd Street to draw this one above, I was attracted to the reddish orange hue the tree took on at head height. Reminded me of myself, maybe? My hair is fading now though. The leaves haven’t fallen, but the bark is getting – wait, stop turning everything into some sort of tree tie-in. So, in this post I’ve covered even more mawkish autobiography than usual, from triumphs/failures in ceramics as a kid, finally going to see Pulp, failing to see Oasis, learning to write songs as a teenager, to now when my hair is fading and I’m obsessively drawing trees. In that radio interview recently Bill Buchanan described me as restless, and he was right, I’ve always been like that. Now I have started drawing trees, I can’t stop seeing trees to draw, especially those parts where all the big limbs start sprouting off from the main trunk. I wonder if the tree knows beforehand how many big branches will sprout out, which ones will be the main branches, which ones will get cut by some arborist or some force of nature, and just how far will some of those branches go? It’s all starting to feel like another autobiographical analogy again, and we’re not having that. Trees are just trees and I’m glad for them. They keep us cool and provide us with the air we breathe, and yes they can occasionally fall and ruin carports and rooftops, but that’s nature’s way isn’t it. Side One finishes with a tree and a bench in central Park, Davis, and that’s where we leave it. The bench is green in real life, if you’re interested. I could have left it out, but it seemed important to include.

sketching in the record shop

October 2, 2024October 2, 20242 Comments

This is Armadillo Music in downtown Davis, I have sketched the outside before but never sketched the interior. Well, I sketched the interior of the old store back in 2011, when I had my first art show in Davis for the Art About, but the store moved a couple of spaces up F Street to its larger location several years ago. I have been in a few times, but not really had much reason to look through records these days. When I first moved over here, my wife bought me one of those suitcase record players, and I brought over a bunch of my old records from when I was a teenager, not that many but as many as I could carry in hand luggage back in 2006 or 2007 or whenever it was. My old Beatles records I was given by my uncle Billy, largely, but also a bunch of old singles. I still think about the ones that I ended up leaving behind because I could only bring so many. But you know, I didn’t listen to them. That little record player wasn’t very good, as it was too small to play an LP without it flopping about, the speed was a bit off, and the sound from the speakers was, well it was fine but not with much depth. That record player sat in my closet for years, and the records have sat in my cupboard. My son recently started getting into music a lot, and one day came home with a vinyl album from one of his favourite singers (Laufey), so we got the little suitcase player out and he played it in the living room. Sounded alright, but right away I was online thinking, I should get a new record player.

So I bought a brand new up to date Audio Technica turntable, much smarter looking, with bluetooth capability so you can connect speakers or headphones. It connected well to my trusty little Bose speaker and sounded great. The difference is huge. However, when I was growing up I always had nice stereo speakers with my old record player, so I decided to get some new bigger and more powerful speakers too, stereo, that are both wired and bluetooth (I plug them into the record player, but I also connect my devices to them wirelessly). Not as mobile as my little Bose, but it’s for a different thing. Sure, this all takes up a bit of room that really I do not have. Space is a finite commodity in a small house, and I had to put them where I had all my sketchbooks piled up (I am in the process of finding a better storage solution for the sketchbooks, one where I can access them but they won’t get dusty). And now, I can get my old records out and play them the way I remember them sounding. It’s a bit middle-age retro of me, but it was inspired by the teenager in our family after all. I also bought it on the fifth anniversary of my uncle Billy dying, and he was the man with all the records when I was a kid, I would go over to his on a Saturday afternoon and he’d play me loads of records, then we’d go and get snacks and rent a movie and watch that until time to go home for dinner. So I was thinking of him when I finally got my record player. I realized it was the first one I’d ever got myself. My wife got me the suitcase one; my old record/tape/CD stereo system I had in England was given to me for Christmas when I was about 16, brand new at the time and the first CD player I ever had, and before that I had this massive (and practically indestructible) deck from the 60s or 70s with huge box speakers that used to make our little street rattle when I would play Never Mind The Bollocks. Sure I had the big old headphones on a coil as well but nothing like turning it all the way up, but that’s how it was in our street, we were never a quiet sleepy lane.

I won’t be turning it up to 11 nowadays. Anyway, I thought I should get a new record to christen the new player. Vinyl albums are expensive now; they were not cheap when I was a kid either, I used to go through second hand stores and car boot sales looking for my records, only buying cheaper singles from Loppylugs (my local store, where I’d spend hours), or going to the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill or Camden. I never bought albums on cassette (tapes were for taping things on to!) and when CDs started to enter my life I went for them in a big way. I wasn’t really a big record collector like my uncle, and I have no intention of becoming one. I missed the vinyl format though (I still get up instinctively half way through Beatles albums to switch the side over) and the little crackle, the warm feeling. But they are heavy and take up space. Still, I wanted a record, so I popped down to Armadillo on this Saturday afternoon after drawing some trees, and spent a while flipping through the racks, like the old days. Not looking for anything in particular, just browsing. One aspect about Armadillo now is that they actually have a little bar in there now, so you can have a beer while browsing, or after browsing in my case. So I sat with a pint and sketched the store. There were some other people sat at the bar, one guy who was Arizona or Texas or somewhere was talking about eating rattlesnake in the desert, and declared loudly to his younger companions “Oh I hate Oasis, they are just a Beatles covers band!” At which I bristled, and wanted to say, “Well it’s not for you, is it” but I don’t to talk to strangers. After all, get me on the subject of, say, Phil Collins or Ed Sheeran and you’d get a much more dismissive response. I remember when I was in the surgery that time and they started playing Phil Collins, and there was not enough anesthetic in the hospital to cover that agonizing pain. But enough about that. I ended up buying a remastered version of Joni Mitchell’s album ‘Blue’ which I do have on CD, but always felt like more of a vinyl album. And it sounds great. I’ve no intention of becoming a record collector, but I will get a few albums that I’ve always wanted on vinyl (perhaps including the newly re-released Definitely Maybe) and spend a bit of time browsing in record shops. If anything, they are good subjects to sketch.