christmas time at the farmers market

December 21, 2023December 20, 2023Leave a comment

A couple of weekends ago we held our latest Let’s Draw Davis meet of 2024, a small group in Central Park sketching at the Farmer’s Market. It had been a cold week and I was expecting a chilly morning, but the sun was out and the autumn colours were massive, and it was a really nice morning to be out with a sketchbook. I decided I’d sketch with my brown-ink fountain pen, it really creates a nice tone with the fall colours. There were a lot of people and stalls to draw; the flat earth people weren’t out this time, having probably fallen off the edge of the world. There was a banjo player making some nice tunes. As I sketched a young couple came up and tried to give me a flyer to some party with their church; no thank you, I said, but they were really insistent. I tried to politely make it clear I’m a little busy. They complemented my drawing but said “God gave you that gift”. I’m like, mate no, thousands and thousands of hours of practice gave me this gift, anyway see ya later, have a Merry Christmas. Still they held out the flyer, and then asked “Have you ever heard of Jesus?” I couldn’t help myself and said “No, never heard of him, who’s that?” As they started to actually tell me, and question me on how I celebrate Christmas, I had to say look mate you might try someone else, I’m not interested and obviously busy, and they finally left me to my sketch. Really not got a lot of time for religious converters, and don’t really have to explain why. One of the other sketchers later said they’d also been approached by the same insistent group, and instead had a long philosophical debate with them, and they eventually left him alone. At least it wasn’t the flat earth lot.

I drew more people about the market, I was going to colour them in but ended up leaving them as is, I like that brown ink. I wrote the colours next to them too, people were really out in lots of colourful clothing on this colourful Fall morning. Christmas is just around the corner. While I’ve no interest going to anyone’s Jesus party, I do absolutely love the Christmas carols at this time of year. One of my favourite festive moments since coming over here was attending the annual Christmas Concert at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which I did on a couple of occasions about a decade ago, having illustrated the program and poster for the event. There is nothing like a cathedral for the incredible acoustics of a Christmas concert. (Also, did you know that ‘Away in a Manger’ has a different tune in America than it does in Britain? We learned that song every year in junior school for our nativity play, so it is strange hearing it with a different tune, a bit like hearing Yellow Submarine with the tune of a David Bowie song) (which I have done at karaoke by the way, replacing the lyrics of Modern Love with those of Yellow Submarine, which really worked; I remember as I was going up a woman said to me “I really love this song!” and I said, “Yeah, you’re gonna hate this version”, but actually it really worked. I had this theory years ago that you could shoehorn the words of Yellow Submarine into any song. You can even do it with ‘Away in a Manger’ – try it! Fun Christmas party game). Anyway I love a Christmas Carol. You don’t get carollers coming round to your door any more, at least we never have here. I used to do it as a kid, me and a few other kids on our street would go round knocking on the doors in the Orange Hill area of Burnt Oak singing basically two songs, “Jingle Bells” and “We WISH you a Merry Christmas”. And occasionally Away In A Manger if they wanted an encore. We would get some money each, 10p, 20p, 50p if you were lucky, but woe betide those who gave away a full quid because word would get around and every carol-singing kid from Deansbrook to Stag Lane would descend upon your doorstep singing the exact same rushed verse of “We WISSHHH you a Merry Christmas” and hold out their hands. Ah fun times.

Well there was a group of singers in the park this day giving a performance of festive songs (though it was much more the church hymns than your Jingle Bells), but they were really good and I enjoyed listening to the singing as I sketched, with the fall colours behind. Nobody tried to give me a flyer either. Still I was up against the clock as the sketchcrawl was ending soon and we always meet to look at each others’ sketchbooks and share sketching tips. That Lamy Safari fountain pen with the brown ink is good for the quick sketchy movements of drawing people. These singers mostly wore black or dark clothes so it really stood out against the autumnal trees. Catching this season while I can.

festive times on campus

December 20, 2023December 19, 2023Leave a comment

The long Fall quarter is finally over, though it hardly seems possible, and we’ve entered the holiday break before the winter quarter, which is also shaping up to be quite busy. So it’s the time for festivities. We went to the Staff Assembly Winter Warmer event, which was fun, with delicious hot chocolate and cookie decorating, as well as a performance by the all-female a cappella singing group ‘The Spokes‘. They were really good, and so I sketched them performing (and had them all sign the sketch after). I also did a little sketching at our annual department Holiday Party (below) at the Student Community Center. We didn’t have any signing there (we’ve done karaoke in some previous parties, to varying success) but we did have some fun games like Bingo and Secret Santa. And a very nice hot chocolate bar. Tis the season for hot chocolate! We also had ornament decorating, which I love, except a red acrylic paint pen exploded all over my hand. It looked like I was covered in blood, and took some scrubbing to get off.

The Arboretum in December

December 19, 2023Leave a comment

Back in October I sketched this view of the Arboretum (which is where that big old Japanese Zelkova tree used to stand before it started splitting in two, and was eventually removed; I drew that too). Back in October it was starting to turn autumnal; that red and green tree was still yellow, that orange tree and yellow tree were still green. At the start of this month I sketched it again to show the colourful changes. Of course none of this makes sense if you are watching this in black and white, like the BBC audience on Boxing Day in 1967 attempting to make sense of Magical Mystery Tour. In the past couple of days we have had a lot of rain and a bit of wind, and it probably looks a bit less leafy now, I should go and check. December is moving along fast, we keep opening those windows on the advent calendars, the Christmas chocolate actually keeps multiplying despite my best efforts to eliminate the threat by eating it all, and I am halfway through my six mince pies. We haven’t started on the panettone yet. 2023 is wrapping up its presence, 2024 is on the horizon and I’m not looking forward to that. I have a bad feeling about it. I think we should just skip 2024 and maybe 2025 too, and go right on to 2026 and watch the World Cup. Enough of that sense of foreboding, I’ll just keep on recording the changing of the seasons in the sketchbook, and try to keep a little optimism. The Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook itself is nearly over, just a couple of pages left, which I will complete by Christmas, or Boxing Day maybe, which they don’t even have over here. Getting to the end of a sketchbook is a great motivator to keep on drawing. I have done a lot more urban sketching this year than usual, way more than in 2022, and I can’t imagine 2024 will have as much but we will see. The Urban Sketching Symposium is in Argentina in 2024, but I won’t go because it’s in October, no good for me. I’m going to organize more sketchcrawls. Explore more. Take more sketching risks. Or not worry and keep drawing.

i turned my face away, and dreamed about you

December 16, 2023Leave a comment

After a busy week, and after we’d just had our annual Holiday Party at work (my belly filled up with hot chocolate), I popped downtown to have a festive pint in honour of the dearly departed Shane MacGowan, as it was his funeral that day in Dublin. I never drink Guinness, but I felt I should have some Guinness to mark his memory (MacGowan being famously fussy about what he drank), and I don’t like whisky. I went to the Bull’n’Mouth, the bar that was formerly De Vere’s Irish Pub. It’s not Irish any more, but the bar itself is, having been brought over from Ireland in 2011. I found that spot I like in the corner and wrote out some Christmas cards to friends in England before sketching the bar. There were quite a few people out that night; one of my work colleagues who’d been at the party was performing a brief gig with his band and his red Rickenbacker in the plaza across the street, I had just missed it. One of the professors from work, who’d also just been at the party, was having dinner in Bull’n’Mouth with his family and a group of students from his summer course in Cork, it was nice to bump into them. My wife and son were out at an orchestra concert at the High School, so I had a couple of slow beers and got on with the sketch. I overheard a man nearby at the bar ask a woman how to spell “fascist” which was an interesting chat-up line, I probably heard out of context. I was thinking of Shane MacGowan’s funeral, and caught some of it on YouTube. Singing and dancing and music and a priest holding up a box of Barry’s Tea, that’s a great funeral. I loved Shane MacGowan. When a famous person dies and they’ve meant a lot to you, even if only at certain times in your life, it can definitely touch you, and with MacGowan it was that whole thing of being London Irish in the late 80s, all the music and people and that was like our voice right there. And not just London Irish of course, the Pogues weren’t just from London, but all over Britain where Irish people had come and settled. It wasn’t always that great in the 80s for Irish communities in England, but voices like Shane MacGowan’s definitely made it ok to be who we were, at least that’s how I felt when I was a 13 year old listening to this hundred-mile-an-hour band with folk instruments and a drunken frontman from London with missing teeth and a Tipperary-twisted singing voice singing songs about my London, Soho and White City and being down by the Thames. So I have definitely been feeling sad about his death, and he was unapologetic about who he was, and his huge flaws, and I always admired that. His funeral showed how much he was really loved, and the impact he had. Would that any of us get a send-off like that. Slainte, Shane!

songs of times long gone

December 13, 2023December 16, 2023Leave a comment

I still have a bunch of old cassettes from back home, kept in an adidas shoebox unplayed. It’s such a retro item now that even the image of a cassette feels like something from some cool bygone age. I don’t have a tape player any more, since I threw away the old CD/tape deck a long time ago when it stopped playing the CDs properly, and then I stopped playing CDs altogether. Times have moved along. I did however get myself a cheap walkman type device recently, one that supposedly can turn your old cassettes into mp3s (it does, kind of, but not very well), but these old cassettes, well I wasn’t really ready to give them a listen. I only have a few with actual real music on them, mixtapes made for me by my wife when we first met, or ones my mates gave me when I was living in France, and one compilation of old jazz numbers that I taped off of a CD I had checked out of Edgware Library (called “That’s Jazz”, it opened with Fats Waller “Aint’ Misbehavin'”), listened to constantly on my five week trip around Europe on the trains in 1998, each number putting me in mind of foggy early mornings passing through the Austrian Alps or sweaty bumpy nights rumbling across somewhere in southern Poland. You had to carry your music with you in those days on physical things, played in a small cheap device operated by batteries you had to go and buy, it was a different world. That tape is unplayable now, not passing the test of time, I keep it as a souvenir. I do have a couple of old tapes going back to the mid-80s, as evidenced by the Glenn Hoddle sticker on the case, and likely full of stuff I taped off the radio when I was 10 or 11; I am definitely not listening to those, in case I come ear to ear with my 10 year old self, and he asks me what the future is like. Spoiler alert kid, you end up in America, but you are still obsessed with spurs (and we still ain’t won the League). Most of the cassettes I have are actually of my own music, and that’s an even scarier listen. Nobody’s getting their ears on that. Sure I have the tapes of my old band at school, Gonads (great name eh), dreadful recordings on my old rattling yet indestructible tape deck. I actually managed to digitize these teenage recordings way back in about 2007 for posterity with some cables plugged into the back of my pc from my tape deck, and I put them onto a CD and mailed it to my old schoolfriend who sang them. I never liked singing, I played the guitar and wrote songs. Many of the other cassettes are just other tapes from the 90s and into the early 2000s – whenever I would have a song idea I would play it onto a tape so I wouldn’t forget it, and then I’d forget it and often tape over it. I was never a ‘good’ guitarist, I was adequate for what I needed and ok with that. I just had to play and write songs though, even though they were with no intention of others hearing them. I would go through waves of writing songs or bits of songs. I wrote a bunch at school between the ages of 14-17, basic as hell and lyrically simplistic but with some fairly solid chords and melodies (and drawing heavily on the Pogues and the Jam), on my old Westone Concord electric. I got an acoustic guitar from Charing Cross Road at the end of 1996 (which I still have, my beloved Hohner) and suddenly starting playing and writing like there was no tomorrow, like there was all this creative energy that needed to go somewhere and it went there. I taped some of it, occasionally with one of my mates playing a tambourine in the background. I still have those tapes, and I recently listened to them; some decent tunes, but mostly just throwing things at my guitar to see what came out. It’s important to come up with a bunch of utter drivel before you can get anything you like. The ‘doing’ is what’s important, it’s a journey, and there may not be a destination and it will sound awful on the way. We also recorded a few of my friend Terry’s old silly stories from our old days writing the ‘Silly Goats Gruff’ magazine at school, and I had not heard those in twenty-five years, so I digitized them (with poorer quality sound transfer than I managed in 2007 – I need to fix that) and sent them to him – this time instantly over Messenger, not burnt onto a ‘CD’ and mailed in the ‘post’ (it’s a different world now). It was a bit scary re-visiting the late 90s, when I’d sit in my Burnt Oak bedroom with a guitar and a cup of tea, but it felt good to be listening to a time when I felt at home.

The tape I was interested/nervous to listen to though was one with a label “Charleroi 99-00 Songs”. That’s why I drew it, it’s a recording of a year (well, ten months) spent in Charleroi in Belgium, a formative year for me that’s as mythologized as it is barely remembered. I’m always banging on about that year I spent in Belgium, leaving out that most of the time I was bloody miserable and it rained constantly for months. What I did have was my guitar, and time on my hands. I had brought my acoustic guitar over from England after the first couple of months there, carrying it with no case on the old Eurolines bus, and instantly my mental state started to improve. My next-door neighbour in La Vigie – the tall university residence where I lived when I worked at the Université de Travail, a tall tower block with clean floors and so much echo – he had a habit of playing one particular Celine Dion song every single morning over and over and over, at full blast. My guitar evened the score a bit. I would sit at that window on the thirteenth floor overlooking the rain and the smoke from the factories and the car crashes. I bought a cheap notebook from a shop called Wibra, and I used that for song ideas. In Charleroi I wrote a lot of words and thoughts in a different book, that I would take to the pub or to the park or just in my room, so it was good for me to direct that energy into something else. I was not drawing in those days – even though I’d drawn since I was a kid, back in my early twenties I was just not doing it, and I regret that I didn’t spend that year filling sketchbooks. I made up for it since. Most of the songs I wrote were complete pants – probably 95%. The interesting thing listening to this old tape is that there’s a clear progression, too. The earlier stuff, from about late October or November or whenever, this was basic and uninspired, dreary and self-pitying, whatever would come out. I wasn’t in a great place, didn’t really know many people and my relationships weren’t so much train-wreck as leaves-on-the-line. It was a painful listen, the 23 year old me writing more weakly and feebly than the 15 year old me, when I was cocky and didn’t care. The occasional fun song came out, but mostly it was diabolical dross.

As the tape went on though there was a definite improvement, and a growth in confidence. I remember listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and Burt Bacharach, and there was definitely one song I wrote where I was trying a bit too hard to channel that to gut-wrenching degrees (though I have not stopped humming the tune since, so it was obviously catchy). That song is funny played back though, not for the cringe lyrics and poor country singing, but that when I finished I could hear a loud bang on my door and me saying “oh for fuck’s sake, what now”! As the tape moved along further there were more songs I had forgotten about, some terrible, but some were pretty good; by about April, I definitely had a couple that I still play now. By about June some were decent enough for me to show other people in the building where I lived, most of whom could not understand English well enough to tell me the lyrics were still cheesy, but alright. I wouldn’t show them now. Overall I was a bit reticent to listen to this old tape, and a lot of it was a scrunched-up-face cringe at 23 year old me being bored, but it was interesting to listen to the progression. I always said you had to create 99 shit things to get 1 good thing. It’s the same with drawing, you might get 99 drawings you are not showing anyone until you get to the point where you’re like, yeah that’s alright actually, that turned out like I meant it to, and you build off of that, what didn’t I like, get rid, what was cheesy, get rid, what can I improve, work on that. I’m still doing that thousands of drawings later, the point is to apply yourself if you want to improve, but you also improve by just doing, over and over and over. After that year of not having much to do and being stuck in Belgium I was usually busier with life so never kept that up as much. I’m still not exactly great at guitar (I just love playing what I play), I still can’t sing (never tried), and I never write songs any more (I used the music memo app on my phone to remember chords and tunes occasionally then forget about them). But I have been playing my guitar more the past couple of years, and the ukulele, and my Hofner bass I got last year, so it’s just fun having music as another thing to fall back into to relax. The old cassette tapes though are a thing of the past, and at some point I might listen to the others. Not any time soon though…

daisy daisy, i’m half crazy

December 2, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Here’s another from November, I didn’t include this in the last post because there were no autumnal trees in it. It did have a food truck parked at the Silo which I had to sketch, Daisy’s, I think they serve cakes or desserts or flowers or something. I never feel like getting dessert stuff at lunchtime so I’ve never gone to one of the dessert type food trucks. I usually eat Shah’s Halal, chicken over rice (spicy), and that’s a pretty huge meal. I had Jojo’s Hawaiian the other day, and I’m still full from it. Anyway it is December now, and I really need to go and draw some other things, I wish I were in London or somewhere, getting a bit antsy in Davis this Fall. The trees are lovely and all, but I need to go and explore. It’s tough seeing social media all the time, looking at other sketchers around the world drawing all these places I want to go to, and then also seeing loads of posts of cool places in London and thinking, I really need to go and draw that while it’s still there, while it still looks like that. I’m currently feeling like I’m too long between trips back home, even though it’s not really that long since last summer, it’s long enough for me. Made harder the past couple of days with Shane MacGowan passing, listening to old Pogues songs and pining for those stinking streets and the banks of the Thames.

november’s gonna november

November 30, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Since today’s the last day of November, and tomorrow is December, here’s a bunch of sketches from around Davis this past month showing the colourful trees they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, the trees they have now, with all the colours. It can be very exciting, especially for the person with a paintbox who just has to record it somehow. Above is Oak Street, I cycle down here every day, and now the sun sets so early I cycle up it every evening in the dark, and there are no streetlights (but occasionally piles of leaves in the bike path). This was back on the 19th; today is the last day of November. I heard this morning that Shane MacGowan has died. He was 65. I am really pretty sad about it.

I stood on the corner of Russell and Miller to draw this. Russell and Miller sounds like one of those comedy duos you used to get, one of those ones that were extremely unfunny, but had absolutely no idea how unfunny they were. A bit like Hale and Pace, but even less so. I also sounds a bit like the sort of law firm you have to call if you get bitten by a dog, or if your foot gets run over by an e-scooter. In the foreground is one of those ‘Spin’ bikes, you’ve seen those, those e-bikes they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, you use an app, there’s a bike, it rides a bit faster and you can appear suddenly behind regular bikes on the bike path like “surprise!” before whizzing by saying “see ya later suckers!” and then when you want to stop using it, you can just get off an leave it in the middle of the sidewalk in the way, so someone else can come and have a go. There used to be ‘Jump’ bikes, now there are ‘Spin’ bikes. There are also these ‘Hump’ bikes, looking more like modernized mopeds but completely silent and people ride them on bike paths at twice the speed of a normal bike. They give me the ‘ump.

In the sketch above, I drew with the full intention of adding in the yellowing oranges and browning greens of all the foliage, but didn’t get back to it later, and so I left it up to your imagination. The great thing about this is I can re-use it in April or May, and colour the leaves in a more spring-like green. It’d be like going back to an old song and reworking the bass or adding better lyrics. This was on 4th Street, in the run up to Veterans Day.

So, Shane MacGowan has died. The first record I ever owned that was all mine was The Fairytale of New York, which if memory serves my mum got for me as a present a few weeks before Christmas in about 1987, and which became an instantly beloved classic in our home, and everywhere else too. I still have it. We had a lot of Irish music in our house, a lot of music in general, but we loved the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan sang in an Irish accent, though he was from London, and was absolutely one of a kind. Our world was Irish north-west London, this was us.

This one above was drawn on one of those Saturdays when I needed to get out and sketch, to look for those autumnal leaves, and grab a milkshake before cycling home on my regular acoustic bike. I listened to a podcast talking about George Harrison and the Travelling Wilburys. I loved George, but back when I was in my early teens, the Wilburys were a bit of a joke, a bunch of grandads (in their forties). Back then, I became obsessed with the Pogues. I was obsessed with the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, but at the end of the 80s I loved the Pogues. I remember buying the Peace and Love album from a record seller at the Irish Music and Dance Festival in Southport (at Pontins, Ainsdale Beach). We would go to every year for a week of listening to Irish greats like Brendan Shine and Philomena Begley, and I’d get to hang out with other Irish immigrant kids from all over the UK, getting pals from Glasgow and Lancashire and Birmingham and all those Irish bits of London. I never got to see the Pogues live. I think my mum did, and I know my cousin had seen them playing in Archway many years ago. I listened to their greatest hits on my cheap portable tape player, travelling all over London on the tube or on the bus; walking down the south bank of the Thames listening to ‘Misty Morning Albert Bridge’; I remember sitting opposite Parliament, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, long before the London Eye ever came along, and drew Big Ben, and was chatting to this homeless guy from Liverpool, and he told me all about his situation, I remember giving him the drawing when I was done, and he was really nice, and I remember thinking a lot about that conversation on the way home. I think about those years when I hear the Pogues, I was an awkward skinny freckly lad with untamed red hair and creative energy fighting to get out, and I played my guitar a lot, badly I might add, and I played mostly Pogues songs because they were easy as fuck, three chords in a few different ways, and lyrics that were picked right off the littered streets where I was living. I used to get this book of Pogues lyrics out from the library. I actually used that book for a study in poetry for one of my English GCSE exams; I don’t think my teacher was impressed with it. But they were presented as poems, and they read like poems. They were illustrated by this guy who would mostly just scribble in biro and it would be brilliant, and I loved that complete looseness, matching the ‘tripping-over-the-kerb and getting up again’ of the lyrics, telling so many stories about the simplest things, a freedom of expression I found so hard to achieve. I could not sing, I still can’t, but Shane MacGowan, his voice, his looks, his whole presentation, it felt like you didn’t have to be ‘good’ at something to be great at it, he was great, the Pogues were great. I played songs with D and G and A a lot, to the point that the frets on my Westone Concord (which is still living at my mum’s house, hiding from view) are to this day completely worn down in the chord shape of D. Three chords is really all you need mate, boom there’s a song. Years later at the end of the 90s, while I was living in Belgium, I actually wrote a song called ‘Misty Morning Waterloo’, a tribute in the title (though actually about those foggy mornings leaving London on the Eurostar to go back to Brussels, I always hated leaving London behind), and that only had two chords in it. If I’d just tried a bit harder, I could have got away with one chord.

So yeah, I’m very sad about today’s news, and I’m going to spend the next few days thinking about Shane MacGowan, listening to the Pogues, thinking about London, listening to ‘London You’re A Lady’ (which is probably my favourite Pogues song, an absolute belter of a poem and always makes me sad thinking of my old home town). But it wasn’t the only news of one of my late 80s London heroes dying. Terry Venables, ‘El Tel’, one of my favourite Spurs managers, died last week too, and we all loved him. November 2023, you took a toll. The sketch above was drawn on campus, in the middle of the month, those colourful trees were just begging for someone to sketch them. It’s December tomorrow, and then this godforsaken year is nearly over, and then there’s another godforsaken year coming right up. I’ll keep on scribbling. Below, last one in the set of November’s trees, another escape downtown catching the colours at the corner of 3rd and D. November is done with now.

the tallest building in davis

November 8, 2023November 7, 2023Leave a comment

Another campus sketch, drawn after work last Friday, the last workday of the year where there’s any daylight to draw anything, because the clocks went back on Sunday morning; enter the dark times, cycling up the streetlamp-free Oak Street hoping not to bump into a random pile of leaves and sticks left helpfully in the bike lane. The building in the foreground here is the School of Education, the Learning-Place of Learning. It’s a pretty nondescript typical campus building, nothing to see here, never featured highly on my sketching lists. Interestingly enough the building rising behind it has not been sketched much by me either, despite being I think the tallest building on campus. That’s Sproul Hall. all nine floors of it. It rhymes with ‘scowl’ not with ‘school’. I remember going to a meeting up on that top floor years ago back when I was a grad coordinator, and wondering if I could get back up there to draw the view some time, but I never did so. I don’t suppose the view will be that interesting, it’s a very flat landscape. They do languages and literature in here, you know. That was my area of study, once upon a time when I studied. I wonder sometimes if I miss being a student. It was so long ago now. I did do a Masters degree before moving out here, and while I loved spending my days in the library, I hated the constant feeling of having some sort of homework to do, that I’m behind on something, that some library book was due. I miss being younger, that’s not really the same thing. Being a student over there is not the same as being a student over here. Besides, I did drama for my undergrad, and we were all a bit different. It’s November now, and everywhere I look are trees I want to draw, it’s distracting me somewhat. I’m anxious for them all to go orange and yellow and red, and for me to catch them before it gets windy and blows them all bare. There are still a lot of nice greens around though. It was the blues reflected in that glass that I was interested in here though.

eighteen years later

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023Leave a comment

Yesterday, November 5th, marked eighteen years since we moved to Davis. I had never even heard of Davis until a few weeks before. I knew quite a few people with last name of Davis (actually mostly Davies), but when our plane landed from London in the fall of 2005 I was unaware of the college town in the central valley of California that would come to define this latter part of my life. I didn’t really have an idea in mind of what life over here would look like when we emigrated, find a place to live, find a place to work, turn thirty and get busy living in America until we got bored and moved somewhere else. I remember the first visit to Davis; my wife had a job interview here at the university, so I tagged along and waited downtown while she did that. I liked the downtown; there were several bookstores, including the Avid Reader (where I eventually got my first job in the US) and the now-gone Bogey’s Books, which was where Bizarro World Comics is now located (they used to be on 5th Street), and they had a good language section. There was also the Soccer and Lifestyle football shirt shop, which to me was a massive bonus, and the guy who still runs it was the first person in Davis I ever spoke to. I remember asking if they got the Spurs shirts in, but he said that Kappa are really bad at distributing in the States. (Spurs are made by Nike now and they always have our new shirts in stock). I wasn’t sure about the landscape around Davis, this huge hot, flat valley that reminded me of Tatooine, and it was a fair ride from Santa Rosa where we had been staying with my wife’s family, the idea of moving to America being that we’d be closer to them. When she accepted the job, we came back one more time to look around at apartments, using the DavisWiki site to look for apartment complexes, and we ate at Sudwerk back when they still had genuinely decent German style food (we ate there again a few weeks ago in the newly reopened restaurant part; their food is pretty bland now, though the beer is still nice). And then on November 5th, remember remember, we moved into our new apartment in south Davis. I just recall walking down to Nugget and getting a bottle of London Pride beer, which was a nice find, to celebrate our new home and also celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, which is (obviously) not a thing over here, but was always one of the big days/nights when I was growing up. Bonfire Night. It sounds strange explaining it to people over here. I remember hearing on the news here back in that first year that November 5th was ‘Britain’s Fourth of July’, which made me laugh. I would tell people, no it’s America’s May the 11th, which took some explaining. Those first few months were an adjustment, living in Davis. Those first few eighteen years have been an adjustment.

So on this day, eighteen years later, I cycled downtown just to get out of the house for a bit (being stuck in the ‘I am bored but don’t want to actually go anywhere’ rut, and the ‘there’s nothing to do in Davis’ rut), and stopped in Central Park to draw that caterpillar sculpture I think I’ve never sketched. It’s very autumnal right now, and we had a little bit of light rain, Fall is here. I was listening to something about the Beatles. ‘Now and Then’ has been stuck in my head since Thursday, growing on me more and more. I can’t stop playing it on my guitar.

And I go back to thinking myself about Now and Then. 2005 was a different world, the last year of my twenties, the last year of my life in London, in Europe, with my ever-expanding family back home. When I think about how that was eighteen years ago I can’t help but think about where I was eighteen years before that. The answer was the first year at Edgware Secondary School, I was a lot smaller, everyone else was a lot taller. I had left my primary school Goldbeaters a few months before, and Edgware was a big new world, school uniforms, bigger playgrounds, getting the tube from Burnt Oak and walking up Green Lane, all those different teachers, some nice, some scary, some bored. It was not long after Tottenham had lost to Coventry in the FA Cup Final, the only one I ever went to, I’m still not really over that. Most of my friends from Goldbeaters went to Mill Hill County High, but I made friends at Edgware, including one who I knew from Goldbeaters but we didn’t hang out together until Edgware, that’s my friend Terry who I’m still friends with but haven’t seen in years, because he moved to Asia at the end of 2006 (he’s now in Japan). We both moved out thousands of miles from Burnt Oak, never to return. So eighteen years before my move to America I was 11; you can’t compare the difference between 11 and 29 with the difference between 29 and 47, but there’s a lot of life in between. I was obsessed with drawing and Tottenham when I was 11, and I still am now. Next year it will be nineteen years, and so I’ll be comparing nineteen years before that, when I was 10; in 2025 it will be twenty years, and so on. Eventually it will be fully half my life. You might say in reality it already has been. Well I’m still here now, and now and then I think of the old world.

the arboretum in october

November 4, 2023November 3, 2023Leave a comment

More brown De Atramentis ink sketches, this time from different lunchtimes in the UC Davis Arboretum, at the end of October 2023. This October has been long, and I’ve been feeling super exhausted a lot of the time, mentally, physically, metaphysically, geographically, mathematically, you name it. I also got my Covid and Flu shots for the season, one in each arm, so it was hard to sleep on my side for a couple of nights. I’ve not been exercising enough, and the stress of the world at large is creeping in. It’s good that we have the Arboretum here at UC Davis, a place to go and relax for a while among the trees and greenery. I sat on a bench out overlooking Lake Spafford, where that tree used to be, and sketched. It was sunny, and the foliage was colourful.

On the next day I also sketched in the Arboretum, on the little path near our building, in sight of the water tower. It’s a nice view this. A very nice view, once you commit it to paper. Draw where you live. This is a nice part of campus. A lot of people on their lunchtime walks, getting their 10,000 steps in, while I let that brown ink jump all over the page. In the lunchtime sketch below, I think it may have been working a little less well for me in places, but I did discover that if you draw directly onto watercolour paint (dry, not still wet), you can’t get a thin exact line as it will expand to create thicker lines, though it does come out that bit darker too. I’m still getting used to fountain pen sketching, and this ink in particular, but it’s fun to experiment. The Arboretum has many bridges like this.