late July, downtown Davis

August 27, 2024Leave a comment

The Seawhite accordion sketchbook that I filled in the second half of July was very much a double A-side. The campus side, well that was We Can Work It Out, and the downtown side is Day Tripper. Or the other way round. The campus side is Strawberry Fields Forever, the downtown side is Penny Lane. Or maybe the downtown side is the B-side, the I Am The Walrus to the campus Hello Goodbye. No, it’s a double A-side, and this is side B of the double A-side. It starts off on 1st street with that big white Dutch gabled building I have drawn before. I realize now, this ain’t a double A-side, it’s an album, and clearly a greatest hits filled with old favourites (but surprisingly not the Bike Barn or the Silo). This is like the Red and Blue Albums condensed, all the greatest bits but for some reason no sign of I Saw Her Standing There.

Now I drew this out of order, not starting at the left and going right, but starting in the middle. In fact apart from that first one (which I drew last) I drew this all over the course of one weekend while my wife and son were out of town visiting family. The weather was suddenly a bit cooler after a really awful heatwave, so I took advantage. I went downtown on the Saturday afternoon and drew the Amtrak station below. I’ve never enjoyed drawing the train station, because those curves and arches always seem to get the better of me, but I had some shade and a big electrical box to lean on. You can see some haze in the sky, that was smoke from the Park Fire that was burning further up north. It didn’t end up drifting down this way thankfully, but it was a terrible fire. I drew this, and then went for dinner at Froggie’s.

You can’t have a series of downtown sketches without the Varsity Theatre slap bang in the middle of them. I spent the whole of the Sunday out there drawing, finishing off at home with the colour and hatching, and was quite tired by the end of it. You can see the poster for Deadpool and Wolverine in this picture in a couple of places, I had been to see that on the Saturday; fun, very silly, very violent. As you can see I’m using street signs and trees as dividers between the pictures. That’s something I did in the original 2010 accordion book. I think I’ve drawn the Varsity about 21 times now. I need to do an itemized list of which places in Davis I have drawn the most, and keep it like a league table.

Next up, the old City Hall, we’ve heard this song a few times too. It’s part of the restaurant / deli Mamma’s now, which I’ve still not been to.

And below, the old house on D Street in between the Pence and the Mustard seed, which I have drawn many times. It looks like it is called Mabel’s Market now, and I’ve not been in there yet. Ten years ago when it was an art studio and gallery space called Art-Is-Davis I took part in a small joint exhibition in there called Scene In Davis. That was a fun evening. I think the first time I sketched this place (in that 2010 accordion book) it was an Antiques shop.

And that’s your lot, I hope you liked this little tour through downtown. I did buy a second one of these sketchbooks which I will fill, not sure when.

late July, UC Davis

August 19, 20242 Comments

Here’s what I did in the second half of July. Or rather, half of what I did. When I was in London I bought a Seawhite of Brighton accordion sketchbook, one that is just under 7″ tall (that’s 17cm, I did buy it in England), and each page is about 3.5″ wide (about 9cm that is), and there were about 16 of those pages/folds, and well, you do the math. I mean, the maths. I have got one of these particular accordion books by Seawhite before, about 12 or 13 years ago, but it was bigger, and I never got past the first drawing. This time I was determined, a series of drawings of UC Davis, with another series of drawings of downtown Davis on the other side. To be honest it wasn’t hugely ambitious, it’s all stuff I have drawn a million times before, right, and the individual drawings aren’t exactly long panoramas themselves (unlike the four very long ones drawn on Hutchison in the 2016 panorama Moleskine). It does look pretty good all stretched out though, it does get a ‘wow’, but the idea was to show the two sides of the Davis we know, or I know. For the UC Davis side, we have six locations all drawn in ink and watercolour: Hart Hall, Shields Library, Heitman (formerly the Hog Barn), Mrak Hall, the Memorial Union, and Turner Wright Hall.

No stories with these, just the images as they are, UC Davis in the middle of summer. It’s quiet. In a month’s time all the people will start coming back and the quiet days will turn back into busy days, and before you know it the rest of 2024 will whizz past and we’ll all be six months older. I’ve enjoyed the quiet of summer, if not the heat (it’s relatively cooler now though, which is nice), and my daily sketching has slowed a bit since I did this book, and I have not been to many places, nor have I organized any sketchcrawls, that can wait. I drew some London pictures to go on the wall, and also to go into the Pence’s annual art auction. I have (as of last week) started getting into lino block printing, which I’ve not done since some time in the late 80s at school, and it’s fun so far. The biggest creative project I’ve done this summer (even bigger than this accordion book) is the faculty family tree I finally created for our department at UC Davis, which you can read about and look at in this article here. That was a project many years in the conception but which I finally decided to create when the idea hit me on the London Underground. And finally, I’m running again, albeit slowly and more heavily than before, aiming for the 5k on Labor Day and then (gulp) train up for a 10k by November…

Check back for part 2, a whole spread of downtown Davis.

KDRT interview – Davisville

August 16, 2024Leave a comment

This week I appeared on the local radio station KDRT interviewed by Bill Buchanan, host of the long time show Davisville. It was a fun conversation, talking about my sketching and the stories behind them, about missing London, about interacting with the community, about recording moments in time.

You can hear the show online at: https://kdrt.org/audio/davisville-aug-12-2024-through-his-prolific-sketches-pete-scully-conversing-davis.

half moon bay

August 10, 2024Leave a comment

The first couple of pages of a new sketchbook. It was another stupendously hot weekend in the central valley of California, hitting the 110s in Davis, so we drove down to Half Moon Bay, on the coast just below San Francisco, where it was about 50 degrees cooler. While we have been to nearby Pacifica a few times back in the soccer tournament days, I’ve never been to Half Moon Bay. It was very foggy, and the cliffs were tall and rugged. The town itself was nice, we stayed at a hotel on the edge, and drove down to the walk along the cliffs nearby, and down to the Pigeon Point lighthouse further down the coast (it was all scaffolded up). Near our hotel, the walk to the seashore was made by a little hike through a spooky tree tunnel, created by the leaning of the fog-washed trees bending away from the ocean winds. It was an unusual place, I took many photos but had to stop and sketch, as best I could. I wandered back to the hotel, and managed to get lost on the way, daydreaming little chord sequences in my head and looking at fog. We never actually went down to the beach itself, we couldn’t find the path, but it was very damp, and those sneaker waves were looking a little bit fierce.

Our hotel was located next to a British themed pub called Cameron’s, an older place full of all kinds of British themed stuff that was just begging for a pub sketch. Definitely not named after a useless former Prime Minister who gambled the future of his country on a referendum and lost, and then sodded off. Thankfully there were no pig-themed items about the place. I had a little time before going out for dinner so I got myself a pint of Smithwicks and sat in a little alcove ready made for sketching. At the bar when I ordered my drink, the barman who’d been talking with some of the people at the bar asked me if I was related to another man at the bar, and pointed to someone older, and they were all chuckling. I squinted to see any likeness and said, “oh right, we do resemble each other; in no way whatsoever.” Bit weird. Then again I’m always thinking people look like other people. Only that day I had been wondering if Half Moon Bay was in any way related to the Eastenders character Alfie Moon. Anyway it was nice to have a good pint of Smithwicks (since the Bull and Mouth in Davis doesn’t do that beer any more, unlike its predecessor De Vere’s). It was an interesting place, although all around the pub and the hotel there were British flags which were displayed quite obviously upside down. If you don’t know what way round a British flag should be displayed, well I forgive you I suppose, but the red diagonal on the top left corner should be touching the left edge, ie the flagpole. When you see it painted on the right side of an airplane or a ship it might look upside down but that’s just because the invisible flagpole is on the right and it’s flying against it, and that’s fine. If you see it displayed on a flagpole where the pole is on the left and the bottom red diagonal is touching the pole, then it’s upside down and it means you are a ship in distress, maybe you’ve been captured by pirates or racists or online trolls or something. So imagine my concern when I kept seeing the British flag displayed upside down, I mean we are right by the coast and you never know if there are pirates nearby. Even the logo of the pub showed an upside down British flag. I mean, it’s practically treason. I did want to point this out, but if this is a British themed pub the right thing to do would be to not point this out but to grumble about it to myself privately, in the proper British way, so that’s what I did, I grumbled about it privately for several hours to my family who didn’t really care. Nice beer though, and I’d liked to have spent longer drawing the pub and all the colours (all the flags in view were the correct way round, or maybe I corrected them), but they were setting up for karaoke, and we had to leave for dinner. IMG_1385(2)sm

swensen’s, at hyde and union

August 7, 2024August 6, 2024Leave a comment

This heat though. It’s like being under the boot of a massive invisible giant, whose feet are very very hot. The Central Valley just gets a bit carried away when the temperatures go up. We’re not Phoenix or Vegas or Mercury, but when it’s like this you don’t want to go outside and do anything. Except drive an hour and a half away to a place where temperatures are about 40 degrees or more cooler. Where is this magical place, is there some land of snowy peaks where massive invisible frost giants hold sway? (What is it with all these giants today?) No, it’s in the other direction and it’s called San Francisco, the foggy city between the Bay and the Ocean where Mark Twain famously said “brrrrr”. Interestingly enough, San Francisco does have Giants, and they played at home that day against the Twins, winning 7-1. Nice way to connect my previous metaphors there. We drove down to North Berkeley, jumped on the BART and spent a nice lunchtime around the Embarcadero, before getting a cable car up to Nob Hill. It was so much cooler down there, and we had a fun family day of exploring the city. I was surprised to see you now have to pay to go inside Grace Cathedral, quite a lot as well, so we decided to skip it. I remembered though the two fantastic Christmas concerts I went to more than a decade ago, when I had illustrated the cover of the program. We looked about the Fairmont, we love that hotel (we spent an anniversary there years ago), and decided we’ll definitely do afternoon tea there on a future visit. We then decided to walk down and up hill towards Lombard Street, quite a way but we got our steps in. The cable car going down Hyde was sadly not running that day, but we were exploring. I was happy to find the old Swensen’s Ice cream shop on the corner of Hyde and Union, I had always wanted to draw that, so we rested a while and I sketched it (I added the colour later). This being the last page of my sketchbook, I was glad to have something interesting there. I’m not saying the Varsity and Orange Court Davis are not interesting, but you know, something new. This sketchbook has Davis already, and loads of areas of London, Aix, Nice, Monaco and finally San Francisco. We didn’t get an ice cream (we were actually feeling cold…). After zigzagging down Lombard, and that really steep downward slope after that to North Beach, hard on the knees, to sit in Washington Square and then go and eat pizza, and browse City Lights Books. We covered a bit of ground on this day in the city, as usual, but it was just nice to be out of that Davis heat, for a little while.

the start of another long hot summer

August 5, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve done quite a lot of drawing since I got back from England, despite this awful heatwave we have had. July was perhaps the hottest on record. I did a lot of at-home drawing, not around the house itself (that was so 2020) but more drawings of places in London that I can put on the wall, not in the sketchbook, and I’ll show you those later. I have been getting out to sketch where I can though. Usually when I return from London I’m in a don’t-wanna-draw-Davis type of mood, but I needed to finish the sketchbook as I only had three pages left, so I went downtown and got working on them. The one above, that as you all know is the Varsity Theatre, sketched while stood in the shadier north side of 2nd Street. I liked how the faded red parasols stood out against the shaded cinema. This was the day before July the 4th, which was the day of the UK General Election, when the Tories were booted out after 14 years of misrule, and now everyone’s being nice to each other over there (checks news; oh). It was also in the middle of the Euros football tournament in Germany, where England got to the final and (remembers the game; oh). Still not talking about it. I’m still not talking about the Euro 2020 final either. It was hot, 102 degrees and rising, and it got way hotter the week after, hitting 116 at one point, July had more triple digits than the whole cast of the Simpsons (I had to think about that one, and I still don’t think it’s right) (Simpsons cartoon characters have three fingers) (no I don’t count the thumbs). I like the Varsity, it was the first building in Davis to have air-conditioning, so the stories say. The first film I ever saw in here was An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary by Al Gore about global warming (eighteen years later Al, we are living the dream!) and the most recent film I saw there was the 25th anniversary re-release of The Phantom Menace (love it). I like going to the movies. I also like drawing this building, this is probably my 20th time drawing the Varsity, and I’d draw it again later that month, because I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

The next one I drew was on the morning of July 7, that was a Sunday and Lewis Hamilton had just won the British Grand Prix (what a race! His team-mate George Russell had to retire his car, but at least was able to come back and grab a win at the Belgian Grand Prix a few weeks – oh). This is on E Street (That’s “On E Street”, not “One Street”, it’s not a typo), at Orange Court which I’ve drawn before. Name a place in Davis I haven’t drawn before. It’s less of a mission to draw everything in Davis now and more a joke repeated over and over. Though it was still only mid-morning, boy it was hot. In the end I went to Mishka’s and got a nice cold smoothie (or was it an ice-cold smoothie? One of the two). Still, I was pleased with the sketch. I’ve never eaten at the Dumpling House, but I have eaten at Sophia’s more times than I remember. The long hot summer starts.

morning walks in Burnt Oak

August 2, 2024Leave a comment

And so to the end of my sketches from the recent trip (over a month ago now). I’ve been back in the excruciatingly hot summer of Davis, a record set of July temperatures, and trying to get back into the groove (what’s the difference between being in the groove and in a rut?). The summer is long, and I’ve been wishing to be back in London again. It won’t be long, I hope, but it is nice being there when the sun rises early and sets late, and now there’s finally a new government too after the mid-summer election. England losing the football final was a sour note. Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix (and British drivers suddenly winning F1 races in general after a long dominance by Max Verstappen) was a nice moment to celebrate. I prefer watching those races early in the morning over here in California anyway, on my couch with a cup of tea. I wasn’t always an early riser, growing up in Burnt Oak I wasn’t anyway. When I travel though I’m usually up first, and I’ll get some time and some nice breakfast with my Mum, those are the times I miss when I have to fly home again. I also like my morning walk around Burnt Oak, where I can see all the things that have changed or stay the same. Here are a couple of sketches from those morning strolls, after we’d returned from France and before we were going back to the US. Above, that is the Annunciation Church on Thirleby Road, though I sketched it from Gervase Road. I always loved this building. This is the main Catholic church for Burnt Oak, and so most of the Catholics I knew would go here, and go to school at St. James’s, or St. Martin’s for the juniors, or at the Annunciation Infant School next door to the church for the very young (my little sister went to those). I’m not a Catholic myself (having been christened at the local C of E church St. Alphage when I was a baby), and I’ve never been religious, so I didn’t have to go to church; I’d get to stay home on Easter when I was a kid and eat my chocolate eggs, but I also had to hoover the floor and dust the shelves, small price for being a heathen. I did go here many times though for one reason or other, weddings, christenings, funerals holy communions. My mum and dad were married here when I was 15 (though I was late, as I went to collect my great aunt). Mostly I spent time here in the community centre, in the Annunciation club upstairs where our local community would drink regularly (we would do the Quiz Night regularly, and my Mum would always win that; we loved a Quiz in those days, and when it was my Mum, my older sister and brother, and me together, we were an unbeatable quiz team in the Irish pubs of our neck of London back in the 90s). I remember watching USA 94 in there, the great moment when Ireland beat Italy and the place erupted. I spent a lot of time in the Annunciation Youth Club as well when I was 16 or 17. My (also non-Catholic) mate Terry and I would go there, hang out with the other kids, play pool, and watch TV; I remember watching the Euro 92 final in there, Denmark beating Germany. It was a good place for local kids, give us something to do, keep them off the streets and out of trouble, not that me and Terry were out getting into trouble, we used to just play football down Montrose, and walk over to Vibratanks the tropical fish shop to look at guppies. The youth club all went on a camping trip to Devon one summer, to the little town of Watchet, looking back at it they were great memories, you don’t think too much about them at the time. I remember telling ghost stories to everyone by the fire on the beach, the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor, the Beast of Exmoor, all those old chestnuts I used to read about. My mate Terry, now in Japan, used to live on Gervase Road so I would be down there all the time. We actually went top school on a different school on Thirleby Road, Goldbeaters, just a short walk from here. As I sketched, being morning there were young kids being walked to school by their mothers just as we had been decades before. I heard quite a few speaking Romanian, Burnt Oak has a big Romanian community now. I thought to myself, I remember the language our parents used to use in the mornings, when we were late for school. All the memories, I spent a good deal of time around here growing up.

And on my second last morning in Burnt Oak, I walked down Abbots Road, cutting past the old allotments and over to Deansbrook Road. I stood in the shade of a tree on the corner of Cressingham, looking out over the little parade of shops. There’s still a newsagent there, I got myself a cold fizzy drink. No Lilt any more, that delicious drink has now been replaced by yet another flavour of Fanta. I used to pick my little sister up from school when she went to St. Martin’s juniors in the Meads nearby. I hardly ever come down this part of Deansbrook any more, except for fish and chips. When I was a kid there was a good Chinese shop here that I’d be sent to pick up the takeaways from. My big sister lived nearby so I would also come into the shops on the way there when I’d walk over, usually on the way to babysit her kids. Of course the main attraction of Deansbrook was the Dassani Off License, which I note is still there. They had a video rental store at the rear, and that’s where we’d go on a Saturday night and pick out whatever action film we’d watch with my dad, and get some Munchies. They also had video games you could rent, so I’d get Nintendo or SNES games to play for a few days, when I couldn’t afford to have the actual thing. On the whole though, I’d often avoid this part of Deansbrook growing up, it was always seen as a bit rougher; even if the Watling was probably rougher, it was a bit closer to home, though geographically it really wasn’t; I lived between the two. You get this sort of thing into your head when you’re a kid, it might just be that the kids over this street were more likely to beat you up than the kids over that street, who might know you or your mates more, it’s all a bit random now looking back. Anyway, I finished this sketch but added in the colours later, on the plan back to California.

We flew back next day, into the long Davis summer, fiscal close, triple digits, and scanning the travel sketches, and a huge desire to just go back to London again. A day will come when I can’t go back as much, and I’m always wanting to get as much of it as I can until then, and bring my sketchbook to watch it as it keeps on changing.

Monaco

July 30, 2024July 29, 2024Leave a comment

One of the reasons for coming to the South of France was so we could visit the tiny independent principality of Monaco. We last came here in 2022, but my son had never been and since we are such big fans of Formula 1, this was definitely a must-visit. Plus it’s another visited country off the list. We took the bus from the harbour in Nice, riding along the coast through Villefranche and Beaulieu, although the sky was still cloudy and the sea still grey. The sun started coming out later that day, but the glitziness of Monaco made up for lack of sunshine. I sketched the above after the sun was out, later in the afternoon, and spent a good time standing in the shade by the famous yacht-filled harbour (and what huge yachts!) overlooking where Formula 1 cars whizz by. We had just tried to go to the Monaco automobile museum, to see the Prince’s incredible collection of classic cars – but it was closed. Dammit, I should have checked. We first went to Monte Carlo, and walked down through the big sloping gardens leading down to the Casino. That’s the view below, which I started sketching but finished later (on the plane), as we wanted to get down to look at the all the flash cars. Outside the Casino, we’d never seen quite so many amazing expensive cars, including many Rolls Royces and Bentleys, the place was so full of money, and this was no Las Vegas imitation, this was the real thing.

We enjoyed walking around this part of Monaco, they really do pack a lot in. We walked down behind the Casino to the famous hairpin turn, the one you see on the TV. It’s amazing how narrow the streets where they race are. Monaco’s always a very difficult place to overtake, you can really see why. We sat and watched cars go around the bend, many super cars, and even some classic old 50s style open-wheel race cars.

When the sun came out it got pretty warm, and it gets tiring going up and down all the hills. We took a lot of photos, marveled at more cars, but we ate a less expensive lunch from the local supermarket and admired the boats. One day, one day, I’ll have a yacht, sit in the Monte Carlo harbour with my top hat and my butler, in my guitar-shaped jacuzzi, with a chimp playing a banjo on a skateboard, I dunno that’s what I imagine rich people have. I couldn’t be rich, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It would probably involve Monaco though, and loads and loads of sketchbooks. My family went back to Nice while I drew the harbour; when I was done I got the train back. The platform at Monaco was enormous, but also absolutely rammed with people. It was like coming out a football stadium, it was so busy. When the train came, people tried to barge on quickly, almost causing an injury to the people getting off the train, to the point where some platform guards (or Monaco police?) actually came and started grabbing people out of the way to let passengers off. When I got on the train I had to stand on the stairs, there was such little room. Not a fun way to leave Monaco! Now I know why people come by yacht…

nice to see you, to see you nice

July 28, 2024July 26, 2024Leave a comment

We took the TGV from Aix to Nice. I do like taking the train in France, and the TGV – I mean, the ‘Ouigo’? – took us through Marseille’s mean quarters and along the rocky coast, which was a lot more grey than azure due to that weather we’d been having. I didn’t mind so much. The previous times I’d been to Nice I had taken a direct coach from Aix, because the regular trains were so slow, taking most of the day stopping at all those Riviera towns. We arrived in Nice in the early afternoon. I had forgotten just how big Nice is, it’s a huge bustling city with a lot of shops. We stayed near the old town a few blocks from the sea. I love being near the sea. The beach at Nice is pebbly, but wide and full of people enjoying the evening. We walked along the long Promenade des Anglais, the traffic intersections were a bit scary when we had to cross over, but it was nice being somewhere so different. I drew the scene above after the family had gone back to the flat, the daylight was still good even quite late, and I sat on the stone steps and sketched.

Before that, we were walking through the old town and saw that the England vs Denmark game was about to start on a big screen outside a tapas bar. Good place to grab some food and drinks and watch the football, it should be exciting. Well, the football may have been one of the most boring games I had ever seen (that is, until the first 94 minutes of England v Slovakia), but it was nice to sit and eat and sketch and listen to the people around us, there was a Danish couple who kept giggling whenever I would complain about how Højbjerg’s shooting and passing was, knowing him from Spurs (and yet, he got man of the match in this game, fair play to him, everyone else was terrible). Occasionally a few drops of Mediterranean rain splashed onto us, but it was fun sketching this and with the lettering at the top it reminded me of a comic book. England would be ‘The Fantastic Bore’. The old town was busy, but much busier on the second night, the same night France were playing against the Netherlands in a game that was equally if not even more boring. We didn’t watch that one out anywhere, not really wanting to be in a big crowd that went crazy after a goal, so we put that one on the TV in our flat in the background. We need not have worried, it ended 0-0. These Euros group stages, man.

I got up in the mornings and went for my usual walk-sketch-boulangerie routine. It was still cloudy on Nice, and I walked down to the old town and drew this pink clock tower, the Tour de l’Horloge, dating from 1718. One thing we were going to do but didn’t was to go up to the big hill with the castle on it, looking over the city and coastline from a great height. The views up there are breathtaking, but so is the walk up the steep staircase, and since the elevator was closed we said, nah we did that in 2002. We walked about the base of the big cliff though, got the same view but from lower down, and saw all the signage for the upcoming Tour de France which was to be ending in Nice this year (Paris being a little preoccupied with Olympics preparations). The sun was out by now, we took some photos and finally the sea was that shimmering azure.

I did get up early on the final day and walk over to that blue sea. The pink dome of the Negresco hotel looked lovely. I want to stay there some day. It’s very expensive, and I’ve stayed in some very nice hotels now but this one is classy. There are a lot of places along the Cote d’Azur I’d like to visit, or return to such as Villefranche sur Mer which I always loved, a short bus ride away. But Nice is far away from California, so who knows when next we will be back. It was easy to get to the airport on the tram, although the experience of waiting in the impossibly slow Ryanair check in line at Nice airport put us off flying through there for a while. I’m not done with my Riviera sketches though, as we did visit one other place on this short trip, somewhere that we as Formula 1 fans have wanted to got to for the longest time – Monaco!

rainy days in the south of france

July 26, 2024July 25, 20242 Comments

Provence is usually sunnier than this. I woke up one morning for my usual early sketch and pain-au-chocolat run, to the sound of heavy rain against the cobbles. We were heading to Nice that morning, but with this storm rolling over it looked like the Cote wasn’t going to be as Azur as we’d hoped. We get enough sunshine in California. Still a little bit of rain didn’t deter me. I remember that it poured down the last time I’d been in Aix-en-Provence, a torrential downpour that nearly caused me to miss my TGV to Strasbourg. Doesn;t stop me from sketching. I walked over to Place Richelme, where the mornings are alive with colourful fruit and veg stalls before being whisked away by lunchtime for the cafes. It’s one of our favourite squares in Aix, and I found a dry doorway to stand in and draw, and listen. People passed by me on their way to work in the building, each one with a pleasant “bonjour” to me on the way, this is how they do it in France, people say “bonjour” to each other, and I like it. Looking across the Place, I remembered there was a pizza stand on the other side years ago where you get big slices of Neapolitan style pizza very cheap, the ones so big you fold them to eat them, and we’d get those at night after a couple of drinks at the nearby bar Le Brigand, we had many evenings sat outside there. When I first met my wife we went there with some friends and I think I surprised her by having three conversations at once, one in French, one in English, one in German, with people I knew around us. I would struggle to have one conversation in English nowadays. Le Brigand is still there, unchanged. There was another place nearby called Happy Days, which is now gone. I would sing the theme tune to Happy Days as we passed, but in French, and deliberately bad French for comic effect. I hummed that to myself as I sketched the market. I listened out to the market people greeting each other, the thick Provençal accent I once heard described as ‘soupy’, or “le Parlé de Chez Nous” as my old barber would call it. “Dang dang dang,” they would say, meaning “Wait wait wait” (“Attends attends attends”), and “ah put-aing!” when they swore. “Vous dessinez bieng!” one man said to me as he looked over my sketch, I smiled in thanks. I love listening out for that southern accent. I drew as much as I could, and dashed off to get breakfast.

This church tower rises above the narrow and busy Rue Espariat, which sneaks uphill through the old centre-ville. This street always brings me right back to the early days in Aix, a sit was easy to get lost but here you knew where you where, more or less, and it is always a short hop over to the wide Cours Mirabeau. On this day, I had left my family at the shops to go and sketch, but no sooner did the sketchbook come out then so did that warm dusty rain, turning the air as soupy as the accent. I’m really doubling down on that word ‘soupy’. I still wanted to draw, so I stood tight against the wall and did my best. I had to go and sit down somewhere to add colour and shading, the raindrops were starting to glomp onto the page. I walked down to the Place des Augustins to a familiar old pub.

I do wonder when I write these posts, show these sketches, who is reading, is it anyone I know? Anyone that I knew from Aix, that has stumbled across all of this? If so, hello there, bonjour, I hope you’re doing well. My memories of people have faded a lot over the years, names and even faces, , though I still have a lot of old photos, and my year in Aix was during the time of physical photos that you had to get developed at a shop, then keep in a box in a cupboard, unseen. Anyway I went into O’Sullivan’s, a pub we all used to meet up in back in the old days, and it’s unchanged. I did last come here on that trip nine years ago and sketched the bar, just as I had done once in 2003, though much better. I didn’t want to sketch the bar this time, I just sat with a beer outside under the dry eaves, and I sketched a couple of people sat evading the rain opposite me. I remembered the street opposite, there was a little kebab shop I think, where my flatmate Emma and I would sometimes run into a local guy we knew called Corentin who played a djembe drum. He was a sweet guy, I remember he liked to climb trees. It was in that very little square that my future wife and I had our actual first date, eating tapas at a little restaurant across from me. We had met at my birthday party a few days before, on a much rainier night than this.

It was time to go and have dinner, but before meeting up with the family I had one more sketch, a fountain that I definitely also drew back in 2003, the one on the corner of Cours Sextius. I used to pass it on my way to visit my future wife, so it always reminds me of that walk. Cours Sextius is another tree lined boulevard, busy with traffic, well shaded, and I remember there was a club there called the Bistrot Aixois which I didn’t really like much, very popular with the American frat boys spending their semester abroad in France. I had never heard the term ‘frat boy’ before coming to Aix, an American guy I knew brought me to a party held by some frat boys. I remember having a lengthy discussion with one guy about how Robert De Niro is not actually a good actor, he just plays Robert de Niro all the time. There were a lot of American students in Aix, for many it was their first time outside of the US, and it’s not a bad place. I got to know a lot of art students while I was there, though I was only just starting to get back to drawing myself. And of course I met my wife, from California, and that’s how I am now living in Davis of course. This was a short visit to Aix, it was nice to see how the place is doing, though we’ve come a very long way since then. It was time to leave for Nice. Until next time Aix, jusque’à la prochaine fois.