Let’s Draw Davis – August 2023

August 9, 2023August 8, 2023Leave a comment

Before we continue with our Scottish adventure, I just wanted to let you know (those who live in or near Davis anyway) that I will be organizing a sketchcrawl this Saturday, August 12, in downtown Davis. I’ve been organizing sketchcrawl / sketching events called “Let’s Draw Davis” since October 2010, on and off; I’ve had a fair amount of time off, for one reason or other, in the past few years, and I actually can’t completely remember when the last one I organized actually was. A couple of years I think. I didn’t organize any while I was coaching that first season of AYSO United club soccer, and then after I stepped down as coach I still spent a lot of my weekends watching my son’s games, and just didn’t get around to setting any sketching events up. I got a bit shy. Fortunately, other urban sketchers in Davis (Marlene Lee mostly) have been running Let’s Draw Davis as monthly meetings, often on Sundays in Central Park, and the Facebook group seems to have been pretty active. (‘Facebook’, something else I hadn’t looked at for years). Well, I had a free Saturday coming up and decided that now would be a good time for me to start getting out there again. I met up one evening in London while I was back with the London Urban Sketchers, and that was really nice, looking at everyone’s sketchbooks at the end. I’m hoping to take more of an active part in these again, and will try to organize one in October for the new UC Davis school year too. This weekend though, in this hot summertime, we’ll have a morning sketchcrawl in the shady courtyards downtown. It’s summer so we may not et a lot of people, but if you fancy joining us for a bit of sketching, do come along.

DATE: Saturday August 12
TIME: 10:30am (start) – 1:00pm (finish)
LOCATION: Orange Court, E Street (start and finish at the same location)
FB EVENT PAGE: www.facebook.com/events/157365444045831

We will meet at 10:30am at Orange Court (129 E St), and then you can sketch about this part of downtown (by yourself or in a group as you prefer), before meeting up again at 1:00pm back in Orange Court to take a look at our sketchbooks.

All ages/levels are welcome, this is a fun informal way to meet other sketchers and take a look at our town through our sketchbooks. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on. (And maybe something cold to drink in this hot summer weather…)

Maybe we’ll see you there?

“Bloody MacKenzie, Turn the Key!”

August 8, 2023August 8, 20236 Comments

A must-see spot in Edinburgh for ghost hunters (or ghost hunted?) is Greyfriars Kirkyard. I went there twice. The second time was early on our final morning in the city, when I got up and walked across the old town until I reached the statue of Greyfriars Bobby, outside the Greyfriars Bobby pub. If I had heard of Greyfriars Bobby before, I don’t remember it, but I probably assumed he was some sort of policeman, maybe one that wandered the spooky graveyard in the foggy night looking out for graverobbers and ghouls. No, it turns out Greyfriars Bobby is a dog, a wee little pooch, and Disney even made a film about him. The story goes that the wee Bobby was the dog of a local policeman, a little Skye Terrier who was so loyal to his master that when the man died and was buried in the kirkyard around Greyfriars Kirk, Bobby would guard his grave every night for about fourteen years. Greyfriars Bobby, as he became known locally, eventually died in January of 1872 (thereby missing the first ever Scotland v England international football match by eleven months). Such was Bobby’s celebrity, a small fountain was commissioned by Lady Burdett-Coutts, president of the Ladies Committee of the RSPCA, topped with a little statue of Bobby sculpted by William Brodie. It was unveiled in November 1873 (almost exactly a year since that first Scotland v England international football match, which ended 0-0 by the way). I had to add Bobby to my sketchbook, and I added the eponymous pub in the background so that you know his name (the pub I think came later, and in those days they did not show international football on TVs in pubs, due to the lack of international football, plus the lack of TVs what with them not being invented, though a Scotsman would later fix that too). You will notice that Bobby has a very shiny nose. If you ever saw him you might even say it glows. This is because of a very silly tradition that tourists have, perhaps told by silly guides in years gone by, that if you touch Bobby’s nose you will have good luck, because (and you have to say this in a Scottish accent) obviously that makes loads of fuckin’ sense, doesn’t it. The problem has got so bad that the statue is in danger of being permanently damaged, so locals have taken to making up stories of bad luck that will befall people that rub Bobby’s nose, and those stories I might actually believe. One thing we do not want is for Bobby’s nose to come off, because the absolute last thing Edinburgh needs are endless jokes from its tour guides about how Edinburgh’s dog has no nose, “how does it smell?”, “reeky!”, etc and so on. So people please, leave wee Bobby’s nose alone.

Speaking of tours, the first visit we had to spooky Greyfriars was the very night before, when we took the ‘City of the Dead’ walking tour. This started outside St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, I sketched the little scene above while we awaited our tour group to assemble. We were met by our guide, a man dressed all in theatrical black with a spooky hat adorned with black flowers and crow’s wings,, round glasses, charcoal coloured paint around the eyes, and unnerving milky-white lenses in his eyes. He reminded me at first of the Crow Man from Worzel Gummidge, but with his white beard he also looked a bit like Terry Pratchett. He gave us an illustrative tour of the old town, full of ghosts yes but mostly full of bodies. Some of the stories were long, detailed and very gruesome, especially those concerning the infamous Old Tolbooth. We then moved through the city towards Greyfriars Kirkyard. It was not yet dark – it’s late June in Scotland, no chance – so we didn’t feel completely spooked out yet. Still the light was getting gloomy and the Kirkyard, packed with weatherworn graves, gnarly trees and mossy old monuments, was the perfect stage for this storytelling. It was also full of other guided tour groups, many from the Harry Potter realm. Greyfriars was a favourite thinking spot for JK Rowling as she came up with ideas for the Potter books, and she would write in a cafe just up the road from here. Many of the graves have names familiar to Potter fans, such as McGonagall (who was actually a poet, apparently a very bad one), James Potter, and the one everyone comes to see, Tom Riddle. It’s actually ‘Thomas Riddell’ but that’s close enough. On our tour, however, we were in for a very ‘real’ bit of spookiness. We were here for the infamous poltergeist, Bloody MacKenzie.

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George MacKenzie, aka ‘Bloody’ MacKenzie, was the enforcer of King Charles II’s punishment and persecution of the Covenanters in the late 1600s. He imprisoned about 1200 Covenanters – Presbyterians who supported the National Covenant in Scotland resisting Charles I’s changes to the Scottish Kirk – in a little field next to Greyfriars Kirkyard, in terrible cramped conditions, with so many either starving to death or being executed that George MacKenzie gained that ‘Bloody’ (or ‘Bluidy’ in Scots) nickname. MacKenzie died in 1691 in Westminster, but he was ultimately buried at a mausoleum right here in Greyfriars, mere feet away from where so many of his victims were imprisoned. Now here’s the thing. His ghost is not only said to haunt this place, but it’s been well documented in recent times. I won’t tell all the stories here, but a lot of people have encountered the dreaded MacKenzie Poltergeist. As our guide told us (after locking us into the ‘Covenanters Prison’ area; only official guides can access this part), many people have encountered this spirit, often feeling a strange presence or the sense of being attacked, or getting home the next day and discovering strange scratches on their body. It was getting gloomy when we entered one of the more sinister feeling tombs, where at the end of the 1990s a homeless man apparently encountered the restless spirit and started a new wave of hauntings. Our guide told us his tales. As he did, an American lady stood at the back of the tomb was becoming increasingly freaked out, interrupting him every minute or so to say that she felt something pressing down on her forehead, as if being pushed back. I thought she was going to faint. While I like the stories, I don’t really believe in ghosts being actually ‘real’ (though I will get shivers down my spine and feel very creeped out), but she certainly did and it was real enough for her. Our guide did a good job though not to freak her out more, but he performed a parlor trick to show us that Bloody MacKenzie can at least turn a huge iron key that was placed in the palm of his hand, making us all recite “Bloody MacKenzie! Turn the Key!” in the dim light while watching this key magically turn of its own accord. It was entertaining; as the guide said at the end, that’s just a wee bit of fun. Still, the American lady was sticking with this ghost tale. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Does anyone have any AirPods on right now?” Um, no I don’t think so, people mumbled. “Some AirPods have just tried to connect to my iPhone! This has never happened before. That’s so weird. What’s causing that? Is anyone else having this happen?” We were in a literal tomb at night. “Well the poltergeist can sometimes have an effect on electronics,” our guide said reassuringly. The lady was utterly convinced, Bloody MacKenzie was trying to connect his Bloody AirPods to her iPhone. As I wondered what music he might make her listen to, the theme from Rentaghost just popped into my head, mysteriously. (There was a Scottish ghost in Rentaghost too wasn’t there, Hazel McWitch?) It was a fun evening of spooky stories, and it was dark when we walked back to our apartment, our last night in Edinburgh.

So I woke up next morning and came back to Greyfriars, drawing Bobby, and then coming in to explore in the damp morning light. Of course I had to draw MacKenzie’s mausoleum. I wasn’t too worried about being attacked by a poltergeist, or getting mysterious scratches on my arms, or even of having random bagpipe music commandeer my AirPods, though I was a bit nervous of getting eaten by midges, the biggest terror in Scotland as everyone knows. I drew the tomb safe from any supernatural danger, and went home for our final Edinburgh breakfast. We were off to Glasgow that day.

Edinburgh Old Town – a wee bit more

August 7, 2023August 7, 20233 Comments

I am glad we stayed in the Old Town of Edinburgh, among all those tall sandstone tenement buildings, just steps away from the Royal Mile. So this Royal Mile, what exactly is it? Well it is a long stretch of connected streets that slope downwards from Edinburgh Castle, sitting at the top of a 300 million year old volcano, all the way down towards Holyrood Palace (the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland), as well as the area where now the Scottish Parliament can be found. It was likely part of what was left over by a retreating ice sheet thousands of years ago. Along the way, if you can see past all the cashmere shops and whisky tasting shops and stores selling little Nessies with tartan hats on, are storybooks full of history both bloody and noble, pubs spilling out music and English stag parties, upon cobblestones haunted by the ghosts of so many dead Fringe plays that got bad reviews in The Scotsman. I walked one morning round to a building we really loved the look of, the Tolbooth Tavern. I never went into this tavern, but I knew I wanted to draw it. I got a can of Irn Bru (Tropical Irn Bru to be precise, it had a flamingo on the can), stood outside a shop selling tartan scarves or little wooden cows or something, and had to turn my landscape sketchbook very much into portrait mode to fit it all in. Edinburgh is tall and it’s worth getting the tops of these buildings. I didn’t feel like painting the whole thing, but added just enough that you can imagine the rest of the brickwork. This building was once the Canongate Tolbooth, originally dating from from 1591. It’s probably haunted, because why not, everywhere else is.

One of my absolutely favourite memories form our trip to Edinburgh was getting jacket potatoes from Tempting Tattie. This was about a block away from us on Jeffrey Street, and even thinking about it makes me feel hungry from some delicious buttery jacket spuds. Tempting Tatties had some fantastic toppings – I got a huge one with loads of cheese and baked beans on it, pure comfort food for not very much money. My wife got the one topped with Coronation Chicken, that was delicious. I got another next day topped with Chicken Tikka Masala, also very tasty. If I lived in Edinburgh I would need to be climbing up Arthurs Seat every day to burn of all the calories from the jacket potatoes I’d be eating (all washed down with Irn Bru naturally – though it was the Irn Bru Xtra, the zero-sugar one, that I drank mostly – the tropical version was nice, though I did try an Ice Cream flavour Irn Bru which went very much into the bin, yeuch). I must have visited this Tempting Tatties when we came here in 1999, what with it being close to the place where we put on those shows, but I don’t remember, I mostly ate greasy bags of chips.

One evening following a lot of touristing, my wife and son rested at the hotel while I went out to put some more sketches into my book while the light was good. The John Knox House, just a couple of minutes from our flat, was another of our favourite buildings from along the Royal Mile, and dating from the 1480s is one of the oldest surviving medieval buildings on John Knox was the founder of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, leading the Scottish Protestant Reformation back in the 16th century. The ground floor of this building is home to the Scottish Storytelling Centre, which we had a little look around – there were some interesting performances they were hosting that we unfortunately would miss. I’d definitely take a look there before any future trip to Auld Reekie. The little cafe in there also served haggis both meaty and vegetarian. I drew on this light evening (it was after 9pm, still so much daylight) but it started to rain a little, so I sheltered in the covered close directly opposite.

When I was all done, I popped into a pub on the corner – called “No. 1 High Street”, right opposite the busier World’s End where I couldn’t find a table to sit at (they were setting up for some live music in the corner, which I presumed would be one of those traditional Scottish folk nights that Rick Steves and all the guidebooks said I had to experience), and rested my very weary feet. I hadn’t filled in the details on many of those windows yet (repetitive actions like that are often a “do-later” job) so I got to work on that over a nice pint of something cold and Scottish, but of course I can’t stop and always need to draw something new, so I sketched the bar instead. It wasn’t very busy; there was an American couple in, sat next to a couple of young lads from Northern Ireland (with strong and amazing accents), who were there for some farmworkers conference. The young lady at the bar was from the north of England and very conversational with them, and even had a look through my sketchbook, being an artist herself. The Americans I think were from Texas, apparently they met on a TV show, and one of the young lads asked if they have cowboys in Texas. Nearby an older Scottish man chatted with the owner, it was a friendly little place. It didn’t get dark until about 11pm. I walked back to the flat as they were closing, pretty tired, but at least I finally got a Scottish bar sketch from the inside. Walking past the World’s End, the music being played wasn’t quite folk music, more of the generic singer-songwriter variety, so I’m glad I didn’t stand to wait for it, though it sounded nice enough. At least it wasn’t bagpipes. I know it’s an odd thing to admit when I’m touristing around Scotland, but I don’t really like the sound of bagpipes much…

Edinburgh New Town

August 6, 2023August 4, 2023Leave a comment

We took a walk through Princes Street Gardens, which are absolutely lovely. Possibly one of my favourite things about Edinburgh. It’s great being up high and seeing over everything, but it was really relaxing being down low, and looking up at it all from among trees and flowers. I did a couple of quick sketches in my small Fabriano Venezia book, to capture the mood. Edinburgh is a lovely city. These gardens are the sort of place to sit and read a novel. They love their writers in Edinburgh – Sir Walter Scott has that absolutely massive monument by this park, the biggest I’ve ever seen for a novelist anywhere, 200 ft high. Apparently it’s the second biggest in the world, because there’s one in Havana dedicated to Cuban nationalist hero José Martí that is bigger, and since he was also a writer, well it means the Scott Monument isn’t the biggest one for a writer. Just the second biggest, which is fine.

We walked through the parks and there was an old time band playing old time music, I think it was for a gathering of veterans as there were lots of elderly people in uniforms with kilts, it was a nice event underneath the shadow of the castle. We had a cold drink and went off for lunch, before exploring some more of New Town, following a walk from my guide book.

New Town is (obviously) a lot newer than Old Town (wow, this is epic level travel writing here Pete, you’ll be competing with Rick Steves at this rate) but still historic and actually a UNESCO heritage area. Many of the buildings are Georgian (I suppose) and laid out very mathematically (I guess). It was a different vibe to Old Town and seemed to have fewer cashmere shops per square metre. We found ourselves on Heriot Row, which is where Robert Louis Stevenson lived as a child. Edinburgh loves its writers, and he’s one of the most famous, writing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses (personal favourite of mine as a kid and as a parent), and loads of other stuff, I mean the guy was a literary legend. Does he have a monument as big as Walter Scott? He has little monuments all over the place. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson’s true monument is his body of work. That said, he does have a massive state park named after him in California not too far from us. It is (checks Wikipedia) in fact the largest state park in California named after a writer, at 5,990 acres, so well done Robert. Jack London’s state park is only 1,611 acres and he’s a native Californian. We found Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood home at 17 Heriot Row, and so I added that house into my sketchbook. I’ve loved his poems since I was a kid so this was really fun to see.

We wandered further on our guidebook walk, finding ourselves on George Street, popping our heads into the very fancy restaurant The Dome which has a spectacular marble-columned interior underneath a huge (surprise!) dome. We rested on the steps and I did a quick sketch of the 18th century church spire across the street, called “St. Andrew’s and St. George’s West”, the two patron saints of Scotland and England. We moved along to St. Andrew’s Square, which surrounds a very tall column with a statue on top called the Melville Monument. Named after Herman Melville, the writer of Moby Dick, Edinburgh really loves big monuments to its writers doesn’t it. It’s 150 ft high so not as big as the Scott Monument but bigger than Stevenson’s, though neither of them have massive state parks in California’s wine country. Further inspection of Wikipedia and my guidebook informed me that Herman Melville is from New York, has nothing to do with Edinburgh, and that the Melville on this big column is some old Viscount called Dundas from the problematic days of the British Empire who famously opposed efforts to end the transatlantic slave trade. So, not a novelist who wrote about whales. I think I prefer the monuments to the great writers. With none of this really on our minds, our tired legs needed a rest and wouldn’t you know it, there was a big screen set up and they were playing The Wizard of Oz. So we sat on the grass (well, I stood and sketched for a bit) and watched the second half of that great ancient film. I know all the words, my sister used to watch it about eight times a day when she was little. When we were done, we all went our separate ways for the afternoon, my wife looked about the shops, my son went home to read the new novel he’d bought at Blackwells (he loves a good book, so fits in well with Edinburgh) but I needed to do a bit more climbing so I walked up Calton Hill and drew this.

Edinburgh Old Town

August 5, 2023August 4, 2023Leave a comment

“Auld Reekie”, that is Edinburgh’s nickname. Back about four or five hundred years ago, the old walled city had little room to grow, so the buildings got very very tall – many still are. All these homes and all these chimneys gave out a lot of smoke, blanketing Edinburgh in thick smog, so locals would call it Auld Reekie – that’s ‘Old Smokey’ in the Scots tongue. A bit like the way London was referred to as The Smoke (I don’t know if people still call it that; perhaps it’s The Vape these days). I always thought Auld Reekie referred to the smell, like when something reeks, and it seems it was a smelly place, but no more than many cities. People would throw their toilet water out of those tall windows into the narrow streets shouting the phrase “Gardyloo!” which came from the French “garde à l’eau”, ‘watch out for the water’. By water we mean of course wee. I mean, listen I’d love to time travel, but I’d die of some vile disease within half an hour of time travelling back then, it sounds disgusting. I had all this history in mind (and in my ears thanks to the podcast I was listening to) when I got up early and went out to sketch this part of Old Town. I hadn’t slept that well, the apartment was nice but very warm, and the fan that was on had given me a dry mouth, and irritated my allergies so my nose was starting to run again. It was raining lightly. I walked up to the cathedral of St. Giles, which is the High Kirk of Edinburgh, to get my cathedral drawing in. I love to draw a cathedral, and this one has a very crown-like spire. Technically it is not a cathedral, not any more, not since 1689, when the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, gave up having bishops, and therefore cathedrals. It’s still allowed to be called one though, because, what you gonnae do about it pal. It does date back to about 1184, long before they started calling it cathedral, and much later this was the church of John Knox, the big figure in the Scottish Reformation – I also drew his house, which will be in a later post (plus I think his brother Hard ran a school?) It started to rain while I was drawing this, so I stood a bit closer to the wall in an attempt to stay dry. That worked for a while, until it didn’t. I did most of it, then scarpered into one of the many alleys that branch off of the Royal Mile.

If you’ve been to Edinburgh you’ll know the sort of alley I mean. Through archways in many of the terraced buildings, you suddenly find yourself in a long passage that doesn’t just go through to another street, but down (or up) steps into a whole new level. Edinburgh’s old town is very hilly, many of the streets have to curve around to get over the steepness (“stepth?” That should be a word, I’m inventing it). These narrow portals cut through the town providing short cuts to those fit enough to brave the steep staircases, and they can also provide sudden photogenic vistas across the city. One such alley with a magnificent view is Advocates Close. We went through there on our first evening in Edinburgh and waited in line (I mean, not a long line) to take a photo looking down at the Sir Walter Scott Monument. On this morning when it started raining, I ducked into this now empty alley – save for the odd passer by with an umbrella – to draw the view myself. It was still before breakfast, and this sketch illustrated an aspect of Edinburgh any visitor would get to know. I listened to more Stories of Scotland, telling me about Greyfriars Kirkyard, which we would visit on a ghost hunting tour the next evening. When I was done here, I picked up some delicious cannoli from a little bakery on Jeffrey Street and headed back to wake everyone up, for a day of touristing.

This above is another thing found on the Royal Mile, which I only outlined while passing in the rain, but drew later on at the flat. The Heart of Midlothian is a mosaic made of cobblestones that marks where the Old Tolbooth once stood, outside St. Giles Cathedral. The Old Tolbooth was a big medieval building whose jail was a dreadful place by all accounts, and many executions took place there. Heart of Midlothian football club – Hearts – is named after this landmark. Sir Walter Scott (he of the aforementioned big monument) wrote a book called The Heart of Midlothian, referring to the Old Tolbooth. Apparently there is a tradition of spitting on the heart, either for good luck or to show disgust at all the executions that this place hosted. I decided against gobbing on the street, though I’m sure worse happens during the Fringe Festival.

Later that day, we were able to get tickets to go into Edinburgh Castle. Tip for tourists – if you ever go to Edinburgh and want to go to the castle, get those pre-booked tickets in advance because they will sell out fast. The castle was a hike uphill, past all the cashmere shops and whisky shops and shops where you can buy little cuddly Highland Coo or Nessie toys, but the view was great. We got the self-guided audio-tour, which in respect wasn’t as interesting as I’d have hoped (they rarely are, I never like standing there listening to those little plastic radios, when I could read a small sign much more quickly – in fact the small signs they did have often included QR codes to hear someone talking in Gaelic for example, on your phone). We explored the castle in depth, it was enjoyable, and interesting to see the room where James the Sixth / First was born. He was the Stuart King that was on the Scottish throne when Elizabeth I died and he was invited to also be the King of England, uniting the monarchies but not the countries, we were still a century away from the United Kingdom. So he was James VI in Scotland, and James I in England. There was a big queue to get inside this building to see the Crown Jewels, so my wife and son decided to do that while I decided to stay outside and sketch, having seen enough Crown Jewels at King Charlie’s Coronation. I did notice on the shiny plate above the door dating from 1993, two swords and the official royal cypher of Queen Elizabeth II, that is “ER”. Er… where’s the “II”? It should be “EIIR”. You all know this if you spent any time in Britain during the Queen’s funeral, or any time at all in the past seventy years. Except this is Scotland, and they didn’t have an Elizabeth I, so she can’t be Elizabeth II here, right? That’s apparently the case, I hadn’t even considered it. I noticed that a lot of postboxes don’t have the royal cypher on them either, just the crown of Scotland – except older pillar boxes did have a royal cypher, such as those of George V for example. From what I can tell it was down to what has been called the “Pillar Box War”, which was a dispute in Scotland as to whether Elizabeth II could style herself II in Scotland or not. There was a legal challenge, and in the end they decided it was Royal Prerogative for the Queen to bally-well call herself she bally-well liked. Still after a bunch of pillar boxes were vandalized, tarred, hammered, even blown up, Royal Mail decided in Scotland that new post boxes would just have the crown of Scotland on them and not any EIIR. I don’t know what will happen for King Charles III, but as all Kings Charles came after the union of the crowns (it was James VI/I who named his son something completely new, that being Charles I, ingeniously getting around the confusing numbering system). I don’t know what happened during the reigns of William III and William IV, since Scotland didn’t have a William I or II, but perhaps in those days they were too worried about people throwing piss out of their windows to care much. I bet King William V won’t get his initials on the postboxes though.

Pete does a Brucie in front of the statue of Robert The Bruce

My tribute to The Bruce. A Brucie next to Robert The Bruce.

The Athens of the North

August 4, 2023August 3, 20233 Comments

I often (by which I mean never) wonder, do Greeks call their capital the ‘Edinburgh of the South’? Climbing up Calton Hill though, you can see why ~~Edinburghers~~ ~~Edinburgians~~ ~~Edinbr~~ people from Edinburgh call their city the ‘Athens of the North’. There aren’t Greek restaurants everywhere. It does feel like Edinburgh’s forefathers did try to build a city on those hills that represented lofty ideals and thoughts, and if you go up this big hill you can see the city from a grander perspective. The castle hill is in the background there, built atop a practically impenetrable ancient volcano, you can see the grand sweep of Princes Street with the tall clocktower of the Balmoral Hotel and the gothic spire of the Walter Scott Monument, and in the foreground is that structure with the columns, the Dugald Stewart Monument, named for a philosopher who was one of the leading figures of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. Behind me there is an Observatory, as well as the very Parthenon-like National Monument of Scotland (sir-not-appearing-in-this-sketchbook). This is the Acropolis of Edinburgh (unless you consider that to be Castle Hill, I don’t know). It also overlooks the city as it spans down towards the Firth of Forth, and you can see among other things the Forth Rail Bridge, and Hibernian FC’s stadium Easter Road. I would come up here most days while I was in Edinburgh in 1999 to look out over the city, often at sunset. I was excited to come up here to attempt a drawing or two. The first time we came up, I sketched very quickly in paint, but the next day after we had explored New Town and then gone to do our own things for the afternoon, I climbed back up, and drew the scene above. I had time on my hands, so I just looked out and drew as many details as I could. It took over an hour and a half, and while I did consider painting the whole thing too, in the end I just caught the sky and those distant hills, and left the rest be. It took a while (I was either standing or leaning on a big rock the whole time) and many people came by to take photos as the view got more ‘golden’ – I didn’t want to stay until sunset (June in Scotland? Sunset is very late there) but as the afternoon moved into early evening the light was glowing. When I was done with this, I got a sketch of Arthurs’ Seat, below.

Arthur’s Seat is a huge rocky volcanic outcrop that dominates the Edinburgh landscape. People climb up it, though it wasn’t on my agenda for the trip, my feet were tired enough. I wanted to draw it in this amazing light though. In the foreground, the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill, put up to commemorate Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, and yes it does look like a naval telescope. Arthurs Seat conjurs up stories of King Arthur and the ancient Britons, and Merlin going mad in the Caledonian Forest. Also of Tim the Conjuror and deadly rabbit that could only be defeated by the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

By the way, I have learned that people from Edinburgh are called ‘Dunediners’, though it’s not a patronym that you hear very often in Britain (unlike ‘Glaswegian’, ‘Liverpudlian’ or ‘Mancunian’ for example). It derives from Dun-Edin, the Gaelic name for the city, and also where the city in New Zealand, Dunedin, gets its name from. It does sound a bit like the ‘Dúnedain’ which were Aragorn’s people in the Lord of the Rings. Still you live and you learn. I didn’t really get to meet that many Dunediners, so I didn’t get a chance to embarrass myself with figuring out the pronunciation, since most people I met in Edinburgh were either English or from somewhere else like Spain or Italy. I would like to go back some day and explore a bit more of the city (maybe what Stewart Lee calls “the 90% of Edinburgh that they hide behind that big rock”) and speak to more Dunediners, because growing up most of the Scots I knew were Glaswegians, and they didn’t generally say nice things about Edinburgh. I very much enjoyed our few days here though, and got quite a few sketches in while I was there, and that top one in this post is definitely my favourite.

the train to scotland

August 3, 2023Leave a comment

I love a train journey, especially a long one in a comfy seat with a table and a nice view over the countryside. It’s exciting, more exciting than a car trip, less annoying than flying, and don’t get me started on coach travel (which isn’t so bad actually, I’ve not done it in a while, but historically I’ve had mixed bags there). Anyway, one journey I was really looking forward to was Kings Cross to Edinburgh. The last time I took this journey was in 1999 with my friend Simon on our way up to Scotland, where we’d join our university’s theatre company at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival after spending a couple of days with his uncle outside Glasgow. This time it was me, my wife and my son on an eight-day adventure around Scotland, this being the first time back since that trip at the end of the 20th century. That was a really long time ago now. Well the countryside hasn’t changed that much, it’s still a lovely view over rolling English countryside, gradually getting lovelier the further north you go, passing by Durham which looks wonderful from the train (though my son and I were playing MarioKart at the time), going right through Newcastle and its bridges over the Tyne, past Lindisfarne off the coast, imagining the Viking raids all those centuries ago, circling around the lovely Berwick upon Tweed, which could be thought of as a little bit of Scotland in England (the football team does play in the Scottish league), and up that dramatic coastline towards Edinburgh itself. I think it’s one of the great train journeys of Britain. The train we were on was terminating at Inverness; that was our final destination as well, but after a week of seeing as much of Scotland as we could fit in. First though, three nights in Edinburgh. Our train journey was pretty pleasant, there was an older guy sat in one of the seats next to me who saw my Spurs top and he was a Tottenham fan, and told me a lot of stories about watching Spurs in the 70s and 80s and watching Ossie Ardiles, of course Ossie was my hero and I loved watching him as a kid myself, down at the Lane. A little later there was an American family with several kids and they were debating over whether the little light above the seat was red or orange, spending quite a long time on the topic, getting other passengers opinions (yeah we really don’t do that in the UK; I was going to say it looked yellow), but I did notice the dad really looking at my Spurs shirt, though he didn’t say anything. A few days later, we actually saw the same family up on Calton Hill, they recognized us, and he did say to me “I remember you were in the Tatt’num jersey!” I considered asking if they settled their argument on whether the small light was orange or red yet. And so, we arrived in Edinburgh, and walked to our apartment where we would spend the next three nights. We were right off the Royal Mile, and it was a walk uphill from the station. On the way, we passed the Old St.Paul’s church on Jeffrey Street, which was (I had almost forgotten) the location of our plays with the QMW theatre company in 1999. A number of barely-remembered memories came dribbling back. Many people whose names I’ve largely forgotten. It was 24 years ago after all, literally more than half my lifetime ago. I did the lighting and sound for three shows, I think it was three, along with Simon. Midsummer Nights Dream was the main one, plus a shorter piece I think was called Fat, by our friend Cuan (good bloke), and then another one which I have completely forgotten, except they used part of this song by Air over and over, and my job there was to turn on the music, and turn it off again, I think about four times in total. It was the only time I did Edinburgh with my uni, it was fun albeit quite drunken at times, there was another theatre company at the same venue who were performing a bizarre version of Ubu Roi, already a bizarre play, which I really loved and consequently got really into the original French version. I remember going out with the cast from that play on a fairly crazy evening. I do have some good memories from that trip, even if so many of them are distant and foggy now. 1999…

It is nice not being in Edinburgh during the Fringe though. The Royal Mile then was a cacophony of people, jugglers, students dressed in silly costumes handing out flyers to their low-budget plays (I was one of them, though I wasn’t acting or performing), and tourists. It was still busy this time, but a lot more mellow than that. The Royal Mile is mostly tartan souvenir shops, whisky shops, and cashmere shops. But there’s a lot of history here, and we really enjoyed being around those tall old stone Edinburgh buildings. Now that I am for all sense and purposes an American, I did wonder if I had to start calling it “Edin-borrow”, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I did however insist that we had to eat haggis. Now I don’t eat it myself because it’s meaty, but they have a vegetarian version now. At the restaurant where we ate dinner, down on the curving Victoria Street, we tried it, my wife getting the original style. I think she liked it, though it was very rich and she couldn’t finish it. I liked mine, though I preferred the Neeps and Tatties that went with it. Oh I do love my Neeps and Tatties. Neeps I supposed were Turnips, though actually what they call turnips in Scotland are more like what they call Rutubaga in America, and Swede in England; English turnips are actually something as bit different. I actually learned this from a podcast I started listening to called “Stories of Scotland”, hosted by Annie and Jenny, and I probably listened to about forty of their episodes while on this trip, and many more since. It’s all Scottish folklore, history, geography, geology and traditions. So, we had our haggis, that’s done now. I brought out my little sketchbook on that first evening’s walkabout, just doing a couple of quick sketches as we stopped. The one below is at Parliament Square, which is on the Royal Mile very close to St. Giles Cathedral, and I recognized this area as the part where The Vision and Wanda Maximoff battled against Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight in Avengers Infinity War (I love that film), before crashing down into Waverley St Station, and getting rescued by Captain America, Falcon and Black Widow. So, a bit like the Royal Mile during the Fringe, then.

piccadilly to tower hill

July 31, 2023July 31, 2023Leave a comment

I didn’t do a lot of London sketching on the first few days of our trip, just what I could get in quick moments. The one above was drawn while waiting for my wife, I was outside Waterstones in Piccadilly (in the building which used to be Simpson, Piccadilly, the old department store which was the inspiration for the TV show Are You Being Served). Looking towards Piccadilly Circus. It was the sky that interested me.

We walked into Mayfair and up towards Savile Row. It’s incredible, I’ve never actually been up Savile Row. I explored London for years but for some reason Mayfair a lot less so, though I would give open-top bus tours round a lot of the fancy squares and high-end streets, twenty-odd years ago. I had it in my head that Savile Row was further up, on the other side of Oxford Street somewhere, but of course it’s just a block off Regent Street. I do love that even in London I can be surprised and find places I’d not really been to before. The only place on Savile Row I was interested in seeing of course was #3, now an Abercrombie and Fitch, but that was once the HQ of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, and where they played that concert on the roof in January 1969. Watch ‘Get Back’, it’s my favourite thing ever (right up there with Star Wars and The Dark Crystal). There’s a blue plaque to commemorate the historic event, and so I put that in my sketchbook.

We were on our way to take a London Walk, over by St.Paul’s. It was the walk called “Old London”, and was a two-hour-plus stroll through ancient streets in the City, ending up at Tower Hill. It was a hot day, but our guide was excellent and she took us along streets I hadn’t explored in years, or didn’t even know about (and I have given walking tours in this part of London myself years ago). See https://www.walks.com/ for details on all their walks, given by accredited blue-badge guides, they are great and know a lot more than me. I was remembering some of the old stuff I used to know, but was fascinated by the stories. I did one sketch of St. Vedast-Alias-Foster, one of the many Christopher Wren churches, while we waited.

When it was over my wife got the tube back home while I stayed out a bit longer to do some sketching before dinner. I decided to draw the Tower, with that big sundial thing in the foreground. I was pretty tired though, my heart wasn’t really in it, so I left it as it was and got on the District Line. We were off to Scotland next day.

watling centre

July 30, 2023July 30, 2023Leave a comment

As with most of my trips back to the UK, there’s usually a sketch from Burnt Oak at the start of it. I wake up early and get out for morning walk with my sketchbook, eager to draw something that isn’t the UC Davis Bike Barn or something. I didn’t walk very far on this one morning, just up to the corner of Orange Hill and Deansbrook, a couple of minutes form my mum’s house. I’m getting very conscious that I won’t be doing this forever. There will be a day when I don’t come back to Burnt Oak much, like everyone else who left, and maybe I won’t even come back to London as much; I’m always torn with the idea of letting London go, but I just can’t, can I. It’s still my favourite city, annoy me though it does. It is definitely feeling too crowded, and while that may be just because I’m coming from less-crowded Davis in a state designed for bigger cars and wider roads (I don’t even drive, I ride a bike), there seems to be so many more cars parked along all these narrow roads, crammed three or four fold onto small driveways built for one or two. I’m not a fan of this new ‘ULEZ’ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) expansion that is happening – although London evidently needs to improve its air quality – it forces a lot of people who do need their car to buy a newer car they can’t really afford. Mostly though I just think it’s a rubbish name, they really could have come up with something better, I mean if it didn’t sound like a 2nd-person-plural French verb ending it might catch on more with the crowd who don’t like the sound of that sort of thing. But as I see all the cars squeezing themselves around the streets in these old neighbourhoods, I think to myself something needs to be done to reduce or discourage the number of cars. This street in particular, Orange Hill Road, it seems there is usually traffic backed all the way up from Watling Avenue almost to Deansbrook, but when there isn’t, cars will sometimes bomb down here like it’s 200cc MarioKart. I was up early, but even at this hour there was a lot of traffic. This is the Watling Centre. I stood next to the bus stop across the street to draw; as this is Britain, people started queuing up behind me in a polite line, I had to gesture for them to go ahead of me. I’m still disappointed that TFL removed the very useful 305 bus route that came up here, joining our part of Burnt Oak with Edgware. So, the Watling Centre, this is where my mum and dad had their wedding party back in 1991. They obviously met a long time before that, otherwise I’d be a lot younger. I remember that party, we had a lot of family and friends there, friends we loved, family we liked, and also family we didn’t like, that’s how it goes, but it was a good party. There was a lot of dancing to Irish songs, small kids running around. My schoolfriend Terry came, I still have a photo of him in his blue cardigan. I remember eating an entire chocolate mousse cake, because when I was 15 I could eat everything in London and still be like a gangly skinny rake with unbrushable red hair. My uncle Eddie wheeled a shopping trolley with all the remaining booze in it back to our house, and then told me stories all night about my dad in the old days. Fun times. It’s funny, I know I have been to many other events here but I don’t remember them all now. I think this is where I briefly went to karate class, which despite being taught by a family friend, I only went to twice, with my neighbour across the street. There was another kid from my form class at school who showed up, and he was the sort of kid to take the piss the entire time and then continue at school next day, so I stopped going. In earlier years, I would go to the field next to this building with other local kids and look for conkers, because we all knew this was the best place in Burnt Oak to get good conkers. Anyway that’s enough “I ‘member when…” mawkish memories and city-planning moans. I have a few more London sketches to post, then it’s Scotland all the way. We had a great time up there, but I may have drunk too much Irn Bru.

“cause I just wanna fly”

July 29, 2023July 28, 2023Leave a comment

Ok, I’ll start posting the sketches from my recent trip to England and Scotland (“Britain” as we call it, for the time being anyway). Let’s start with the bookend airplane sketches. You would think that I would be incredibly bored of drawing these views by now, and you’d be right, I am bored of drawing these views. Yet I still draw them, because when I fly I need something to relax me, and that is drawing my surroundings. I could watch some stupid film on the seat-back monitor, and get interrupted by the captain who wants to tell us very slowly that we can buy some useless duty-free rubbish from the flight attendants if we want, or maybe to not tell us about a pocket of upcoming turbulence that will make the plane suddenly plummet god-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-feet downwards towards Greenland (that happened on our flight back, and I’m still feeling it). I mostly just watch the map, to see where we are. I always download some things on my iPad to watch, mostly Get Back, but I don’t like to dive into watching something early on knowing that the flight crew will be serving us some marginally edible food an hour or so into the flight and I might miss out if I engrossed in watching my screen with headphones on. So I draw, it helps me calm my nerves a little. I do listen to a lot of podcasts while on the plane, and audiobooks. I don’t actually mind flying, I just hate the airport experience, and if we are all cramped into a plane with no space, I hate that too. The sketch above was done on the way over on my iPad, we flew via Seattle for some reason, late at night, and I think I only managed an hour of sleep at best, total, we were so cramped. On these flights, I only recline my seat a little, as to go back the whole way is not very considerate to those seated behind you, who then cannot move much. Still when we landed we were excited about getting to London, seeing family again.

This second sketch is on the flight back (we were flying through LAX this time), when we were similarly squeezed in, and I was feeling pretty sick. About ten minutes into the flight, the young fellow in the seat in front decided that he needed to recline his seat the entire way. Not only did this give me zero room to be able to lean forward and get things from under my seat – physically impossible, and I’m of average height – but also made it impossible to see the seat-back screen which does not adjust any more, and impossible to put anything on my tray taller than a small plastic cup (not my bottle, certainly not my iPad), and if I wanted to read my magazine I would have to hold it close to my face (which let’s face it I have to do anyway these days, my eyesight is so bad). His girlfriend in the seta next to him only reclined half the way and my son (who is now almost as tall as me) had no problem. So I politely asked the guy if he would mind not reclining the whole way, but may just 50%? Nope, he didn’t want to do that. This was ten minutes out of Heathrow, we hadn’t eaten yet and the lights were definitely not turned off for sleepy-time mode. “It’s just I have no room if you put your seat back the whole way.” “You can put your seat back too,” he said. “But I don’t need to; it disrupts the person sat behind me, and it still doesn’t give me any more room to lean forward to get things from under the seat.” “It’s the same for everyone,” he said, refusing to budge or acknowledge my point, adding “the person in front of me has their seat back,” which I could see was not in fact true. “Mate this ain’t a game of dominoes,” I said. “It’s not ‘the same for everyone’ because people generally respect the other people around them. I’m not saying don’t recline at all, but just halfway.” It was like the guy was on my lap. I’m not actually sure why they make the seats in these economy areas recline as much as they do, using seats from a time when there was much more legroom. Airlines have tried to squeeze passengers more and more in recent years, no wonder there is so much air-rage. On other economy flights they either don’t recline at all or just a little. Either way, be respectful innit. I feel like flight attendants should announce at the start of the flight that passengers should be considerate of their fellow cattle, their fellow battery hens. As I tried to move to get my bag, I’m sure my legs must have knocked the seat in front a few times, which I try not to do but dude, really. Eventually though, he relented, and moved his seat forward a bit more, with some quiet grumbling, and in a way that was very much like he was deciding that he was more comfortable further forward, nothing to do with me. So I had a bit more room to breathe, which was good because I was still sick, and very much losing my voice. I started a sketch early on this flight, and you can see that we were still only over Scotland by the time his seat went forward again, and I could put my lukewarm Pepsi Max on the seat (British airports – it might be nice if you occasionally refrigerated your cold drinks, thanks very much). I might have had eleven hours of that. I drew this in my little Fabriano Venezia sketchbook. We eventually got to LAX after what felt like a series of Andor (slow and painful and full of boring characters, and still not actually at our destination when the whole thing was over), and flew on to Sacramento after a long walk along not that busy road with the very narrow sidewalk that runs a ring through the middle of the airport. I will say though the immigration guy when I landed in LA was very friendly. We landed at Sacramento and got one of the worst Ubers ever, a smelly car driven by this stoner dude drinking a Big Gulp who played awful music and kept telling me about his trip to London in like 1999 and how he never saw any green space at all, “London has like no parks” (even after this journey I’m like, mate you clearly weren’t in London if you saw no parks or trees). I could still barely hear after the planes had messed up my ears, and I just wanted to see the cats, get to my bedroom, fall asleep. But even as we went up our pathway dragging our suitcases and sweating in the shock of the Davis heat, I could barely hear the Uber driver calling me from his car, and I was nearly in the house when I noticed him. What did he want, had we left something? No, apparently we hadn’t closed the door the whole way getting out of the car, in my exhaustion from that horribly long journey I hadn’t noticed. Rather than just get out and close it himself and drive on, he just sat there drinking his Big Gulp and waiting for me to come back, and open and close the door again more firmly, which I did. Honestly, I really just wanted to not be around people for a good while.

Well we got our wish because next day we all got progressively sick, and so we tested and sure enough, Covid had finally got us. So we stayed home all week, not seeing anyone, ordering food in, and tried to recover from our vacation. July 4th fireworks came and went, I nearly joined the cats hiding under the sofa. But even if the air travel itself was stressful (and that includes flying from Inverness into Luton, my least favourite airport, and the post-midnight Uber ride from there back to London), our trip overall was fun, and we saw some amazing places, many of which I sketched. So I’ll post all those next. Despite all of this travel fun, I actually can’t wait to go and visit somewhere else. But as I’ve said before, it’s always nice to finally get back home, even if it’s to 100+ degree weather.