Memor esto, memor esto, Quintum Novembris. Today is the Fifth of November, which is Guy Fawkes Night / Bonfire Night to us British, but to Americans it is just plain old November the Fifth. It is also twenty years to the day that my wife and I arrived here in the city of Davis, having moved to California from London a month and a half before. Twenty years! 2005 was a different world. Today was a very rainy Wednesday, out of character in this otherwise quite sunny week. I was not sure how I would commemorate 20 years in Davis. I thought about making a short e-book with 20 years of sketches. I started making a video showing 20 years of sketches over some easy-listening music, to be a bit like The Gallery from Tony Hart’s old shows (why did he have to keep the kids’ drawings, why? That’s why I never sent mine in.). I thought about making a poster like I did for 10 Years in Davis. I even started a very long post featuring 21 drawings from the past 20 years (2005-2025 inclusive, that’s 21, do the Math. s.), one drawing from each year, with a little story about that year. That was getting very autobiographical, more than usual, and so I stopped. I might still do that some time, though I don’t know if it does you good to be too retrospective. I might still do all of these things. Instead what I am going to do is time travel back to 2005, not November but December, to the first sketches I did in Davis. Yes, it’s amazing I went over a month without drawing but things were different in those days. I didn’t yet have a job, or any money, and spent my time going to the library to use their computer to get online and write my blog, or emails back home. My wife heard about this thing called ‘worldwide sketchcrawl’, and that there would be a meeting of sketchers one Saturday in December, and that I should go to it, get me out of the apartment. Good idea. I went to Mishka’s Cafe on 2nd Street (which was about a block away from the current Mishka’s), and was very shy but I did a bunch of sketches, in my 2005 style. The sketch above outside Mishka’s is the very first sketch I did in Davis; there have been hundreds and hundreds since. I don’t know who that sketching guy was, but a couple of the people on that sketchcrawl (Alison and Allan) are people I sketched with for years afterwards. I went down to Covell Commons and drew Borders (remember Borders?), then moved through the Arboretum for the first time, finding my way to campus which I had not yet really explored except for Shields Library. As the day went on I sketched by myself, I was very shy, and in the end I didn’t meet up with the others to see what we had all done, I felt oddly self-conscious. But I like this little group of sketches now. It was a little while before I did more sketching of Davis, it was a slow start, not really getting going again until mid-2006 (but then absolutely I never stopped). So to celebrate 20 years living in Davis here are those sketches from 2005. Borders is long gone, I’m better at drawing those bridges (but still get them a bit wrong), I don’t know if those mysterious sculptures at the back of TB9 are still there, and I’ve drawn the Eggheads many times since.

Anyway, I have officially been a Davisite for twenty years now. If you want to see the sketches that all came after these ones, most of them are in this Flickr folder: Davis CA. Happy Fifth of November!