supergrass in san francisco

April 10, 2026Leave a comment

I’d been back from Europe for less than a week and I was off again, this time down to San Francisco to see a performance by the band Supergrass. I had been planning this for ages, and would be staying overnight in the city. I got into Supergrass back in 1995 when I was still just about a teenager, but in all those years I never got to see them play live. They were doing a special tour playing their first album I Should Coco, the mark its 30 year anniversary. Now is the real resurgence of the old 90s Britpop bands, coming back out and playing again; we saw Pulp for the first time in 2024, then they brought out a new album in ’25, but the big news comeback was the massive reunion tour of Oasis (another band I was well into but missed seeing live). I knew there was no chance I’d get to go to that tour, since it sold it out so quickly, and tickets were astronomically overpriced. Supergrass though was such an exciting prospect for me, I loved that youthful optimistic first album, but I was massively into their second album In It For The Money. My friend James in England (fellow Supergrass fan when we were at uni) saw them at the Roundhouse (and was standing next to James McCartney at the show) and had told me how good it was, that they also played a bunch of other classics as well as running through the album. So I was well looking forward to it. Then the night before leaving, I was talking to my wife and she said that, well you know Oasis are playing in Los Angeles this weekend, there are apparently still some tickets. Yeah, but I’m going to San Francisco to see Supergrass, I can’t do both. Why not, she says. We looked, there were still some good seats at the Rose Bowl on Sunday evening. Sure, but where would I stay at this short notice? Flights would cost so much, too days out. As it turned out, I had a Southwest credit from a cancelled trip to Vegas earlier that year (I had planned to fly down meet my friend in Vegas, who was participating in a big poker tournament, but he had to cancel due to illness). My wife was able to find a room at a nice hotel in Pasadena on points, and so I booked the ticker… this was going to be the big 90s Britpop weekend, Supergrass and Oasis, 19 year old me would be freaking out with excitement, and it only took me thirty years and a lot of mileage to finally see them. Sure I was still exhausted after the long summer trip but as they say, here we go.

I took the Amtrak down, sketching the view from the window. I planned to hang about in the city during the day before checking into my (cheap) hotel, and going to the show. I’d be getting up next morning to fly from SFO down to LAX, but as always I try to fit in as much extra sketching as I can, because there’s NEVER ENOUGH SKETCHING is there. I jumped onto the Muni, and headed out to the Inner Sunset area around Irving Street. I like it up there. I drew some of the colourful shops (and then didn’t even colour two of them in). Sketching in the bigger portrait format like this I tend to do larger drawings, and they tend to take a bit longer, and I tend to get bored drawing them. But I enjoyed standing out on this street watching everyone go by and drawing these buildings, I know I have sketched this row before (see how it looked in 2010 when that ‘Easy Breezy’ cafe was a placed called ‘Tutti Frutti’). This place must have a contract that when it becomes something new, it should still have a rhyming name.

I had some lunch in Crepevine on Irving Street, and sketched a couple of people chatting in my little brown book. I just liked the pinks and greens.

Later in the afternoon I went over to the Little Shamrock pub, opposite Golden Gate Park. I have sketched here before; they still have one of my drawings on the wall, which I did back in 2013. It is one of the oldest pubs in the city, established in 1893. I sat on one of the little benches outside and sketched in pencil, but regretted the pencil I was using and wish I’d drawn in pen. It’s this two-page portrait format, it seems like a good idea, then I get bored and impatient with it, the bigger size. Still it’s good to sit and observe. I was being observed by the people at the bar, who would occasionally come out to have a look.

When I was done, I came in for a pint. It’s cash only, I rarely carry cash any more. I do like the interior, there is a lot to draw and usually a good atmosphere, on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve never been in the evening. I sat and sketched this interesting little corner, and then turned and drew the bar area. I used my fountain pen this time. I think I was a little conscious of time, and unwilling to really dive into too many details. I still had to get back to Union Square and check into my hotel, eat something, then head to the Supergrass show.

So I did that. My hotel was the King George, and it was a bit crummy to be honest, the room was pretty grim. I was going to stay in the nice new hotel next to the Warfield, but figured I was not going to be there long enough to need anything nice. In hindsight I wish I had; the couple of blocks or so between the King George and the Warfield were, well very sketchy to say the least, classic Tenderloin. It did not feel very safe walking down there during daylight, and I’d have to come back this way after dark as well. A lot of very dodgy people hanging about, it’s not a great place to be by yourself. I got to the Warfield early; it’s a fantastic venue. I last went there in 2015 when we saw Noel Gallagher, and the acoustics were very impressive, like being inside a gramophone. A lot of famous bands have played here over the years. My seats were good. There were some Italians seated next to me; I was wearing my AS Roma shirt. The opening band were pretty good, I did do a quick pencil sketch of them singing about the A1 road in England (or maybe it was a song about European paper sizes, I don’t know). Then Supergrass came on, and I was 19 again. Well no, if I was 19 I’d have been pogo-ing about down in the crowd and not wearing glasses. They were really good, for being older (they weren’t very old when they first started so we’re about the same age; singer Gaz Coombes is a month younger than me, the drummer Danny Goffey shares my birthday but is two years older, the bassist Mick Quinn – not the former Coventry and Liverpool striker – was born in 1969 so he is ancient). We all look good for our ages I think. Supergrass had a lot of fans in San Francisco, mostly of a similar age to me. They played the whole of the I Should Coco album, including my favourite track from that, Sofa of My Lethargy, which I used to listen to over and over in my old bedroom in Burnt Oak. They stopped and started on a couple of tracks, maybe a bit out of practice, or maybe some of the album tracks are just well difficult to play live, they were really creative with their switching of time signatures and interesting chord sequences. This was live music though, man, and it felt pretty real, hearing these songs I only knew from my old CDs being played in real time. Watching the drummer put in a proper shift. It was great stuff. They played a few other classics, including Richard III, which I rocked out to in 1997, Late In The Day, and Sun Hits The Sky, which definitely had a different element to it as a live track. There were no fancy theatrics, just really good live music. They finished with Pumping On Your Stereo, which was never my favourite of their singles but had a fun video, and was a feelgood way to round off the show. Well enjoyed it.

I didn’t enjoy the walk back to the hotel. Market Street after dark was not somewhere to hang about, and there were plenty of spaced-out unpredictable people outside the venue. I took a slight detour away from Mason Street, which was dark and foreboding but was the quickest route to my hotel, and grabbed a chicken burger in Carl’s Jr a block away, though that was a fairly scary experience itself, like I was stuck in a scene from Blade Runner. When I finally got my greasy tasteless food, I left the grotty fast food place and headed towards the hotel. There’s an Irish pub on the way that I remember going to once (with my Mum, when we stayed down here years ago; she actually loved the Tenderloin), Johnny Foley’s, so I popped in to have a post-show beer and sketch. There was a band playing old 60’s numbers, they were really good. I sat at the bar and sketched it, while tourists from China came in and drank pints of Guinness next to me. It was then time to to go to bed, because I had a long day ahead of me on Sunday – Oasis in Pasadena.

Poznań Symposium – (Part 1) – Arrival

February 4, 2026February 14, 2026Leave a comment

And so, finally to post my many sketches from the 2025 Urban Sketchers International Symposium in Poznań, Poland. I arrived by train from Gdańsk, a ride of about three hours across the Polish countryside, and I could tell Poznań was a much bigger city. My walk from the train station to the hotel took about twenty minutes, and I nearly got run over once, but it missed. I got quite lost walking from the hotel to the symposium hub, which was in the conference area of the Novotel Hotel, near a big (and very nice) mall, but I arrived in time to check in and get suddenly lost and overwhelmed among the hundreds of people. It was my first Symposium since 2019, that’s six years, and I didn’t see any familiar faces at first. I picked up my goodie bag (there were so many goodies this year), mooched around the Art Market, and eventually bumped into a few sketchers I met at previous Symposiums and chatted for a bit while looking at all the art materials in our goodie bags. (I still have stuff from Portland 2010 in my art cupboard!) I find myself extremely shy these days when in a big crowd, and nervous about meeting people I don’t know every well in case I don’t remember them, or them me, but we’re all sketchers and all a bit like that I think. I did see a few sketchers who I’ve followed online but hadn’t met yet, but was a little shy to go and say hello. So I went outside to start sketching, because that’s what we are here for isn’t it, before the big evening reception that would kick the whole thing off. I sat on the steps outside the hotel and drew this scene above, which lots of solo sketchers were also sat about drawing. It was a busy road looking over at an old brewery building that had been converted into a mall and entertainment area, and this would be the starting point for most of the workshops and sketchwalks. I had a Workshop Pass where I’d take just one workshop (with Fred Lynch, big fan), and just sketch free on the other days. The sky was interesting, the paper in my sketchbook however still horrible, and this was shown up when I pressed the Symposium stamp on the paper, it looks like a brass rubbing with a crayon. Still as I sketched I did see people I knew occasionally and got up to greet and hug, it’s been a really long time. I saw Liz Steel from Australia and Paul Wang from Singapore, both of whom I’ve known since the start of Urban Sketchers, and so we got our now traditional photo of the three of us, which we’ve done since Lisbon 2011.

I started sketching in my small brown sketchbook which I was reserving for the quick people sketches I knew I would do a lot of on the trip. I often keep a small ‘people’ book at the Symposiums. This is my opportunity to draw as many people as possible, and I’ve remembered sketchers years later just because I drew them. I’ve been drawn many times myself, I look very funny when I sketch. Below are Delphine Devoilles, who I didn’t know but is from Clermont-Ferrand (I’ve met a few sketchers from there), and Reham Ali from Egypt, whose work I’d seen before. They got to be my first sketched people of Poznań!

After this, I took a break at the hotel (first of all getting extremely lost in the underground car park of the mall; ‘flight of the navigator’ strikes again) before heading back over to the hub for the Opening Reception. That was a lot of fun, there was food and drink, and I got to see many familiar faces from past Symposiums. I wandered and sketched people, and the current Urban Sketchers leadership as well as the organizing team from Poznan opened the massive event. I was lucky to get a ticket. When registration opened, it was the middle of the night over here in California, and I was out of town with friends visiting from England, so my wife got online and was able to get me registered when it opened at 3am our time. Tickets sold almost immediately. I knew a lot of people who could not go, and many came to Poznan anyway to join in with the activities open to the public. This event was for registrants only, and it was revealed that of the 500 people who registered, more than half were first-time Symposium attendees. Only a handful of us were there at the first one in Portland (but we got together on the last day for a special photo). I drew Ronaldo Kurita, from Brazil, speaking to the crowd. My first few people sketches were a bit shy and fast, but I got into the swing of it eventually. I drew the tall German sketcher Stefan Günther who I had never met before, this was a good trip for meeting new sketching pals, though I was still shy to say hello to people I did recognize but had not met yet.

There were a few women dressed in traditional looking dresses with massive (and heavy looking) floral headwear; these were the ‘Bambers‘ and are from Poznań. Well, as they explained, the Bambers were actually originally from Germany, from the city of Bamberg, but had moved to Poznań centuries before. In the early 18th century, this part of Poland experienced a terrible loss of population die to war and plague; in Poznań, the population had gone from 12,000 to 3,000. The Polish King Augustus The Strong (definitely a pro wrestler) invited families to settle in Poland, as long as they were Catholic (and especially if you wore massive hats made of flowers), and many families from Bamberg settled in Poznań and became known as ‘Bambers’. I think one went on to host the TV quiz show University Challenge many years later but I may be mistaken. The Bambers became very ‘Polonised’ (a new word I have learned, which means ‘assimilated into being Polish’ and has nothing to do with bees or indeed flowers, but I can see where you might make the connection). They are a very important part of Poznan’s identity and culture, and another reminder that every area in this big country has so many stories we might not know unless we go there.

I went around sketching some more people; above are Alexandra Rudneva (‘Barsketcher’) from Germany, who I had met briefly in Porto (she was in my sketchbook though I don’t think we spoke at that time), and Sybille Lienhardt, also from Germany, who I had met in Amsterdam and have followed her work since. I always enjoy meeting the German sketchers, there were a lot more at this Symposium being geographically so much closer, and I finally got to meet Detlef Surrey, the Berlin-based illustrator whose work I’ve been a fan of for years. I sketched him below. Also above are a couple of sketchers I’ve known for many years, Daniel Green (who I had already seen briefly in Gdansk) from Minnesota, and Elizabeth Alley, from Memphis, who I first met in Portland in 2010, another Symposium Original. It was really nice to catch up with them; I did sketch Elizabeth’s talk about her adventures in the Arctic which was so fascinating, I’ll post that later.

Above, Detlef Surrey (as I mentioned), he also gave a fantastic talk about his book which was all about sketching where the Berlin Wall was (I’ll post that later), and a local Polish sketcher Katarzyna Kostera (Kasia), who was volunteering at the event. There were so many volunteers, and they kept the Symposium running so well. Kasia noticed I was busy sketching and didn’t have a drink so offered to go and get me a beer with my drink token, which was a really nice thing to do, so I sketched her with her beer. The beer was very good, and the food was nice too, but the opening reception was soon over and I wandered home to bed, a long roundabout walk since I still had not found the shortcuts. I did however see this incredible fire hydrant on the way, and stood to draw that, and a German sketcher who had been at the reception stopped and talked for a while while I drew, but I didn’t catch their name. I felt pretty tired by the time I got home, and it was a busy schedule next day. Check back at some point for part 2…

I Wanna See Some History

February 27, 2023February 26, 2023Leave a comment

And in the end, they put the Queen in the ground, and that was that. The Funeral was a Real History Moment, the sort that gets played back in years to come on history shows, with the AI clone of Simon Schama in the year 2081 stating solemnly, “Even for us smart-alec artificial-intelligence history bots, just simple bits of code flying around on a Silicon Valley server, even we had to stop sniggering and start paying attention, knowing with a suspicious lump in the HDMI cable that something immense had happened, the death of a matriarch; this was history happening right before our very photoreceptors.” We had to watch, of course. The Queen’s Funeral was long, solemn, and quite the spectacle. It was like the Avengers Endgame of British royalty and politics, and although the Queen’s last words probably weren’t “And I Am Elizabeth II”, she did somehow snap her fingers and make Boris Johnson disappear into dust. She worked right up to the end, and one of her final acts was to usher in a new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who managed to hang on to her job until just after the Queen’s Funeral. We didn’t watch the Funeral live; we watched it on YouTube after getting home from work. I’m glad I was in America. My friends back home said the mood in Britain was getting out of hand, which doesn’t sound like Britain at all does it, and said the BBC had started to be called ‘MournHub’. In the end though, we got the show, we got the pomp and pageantry, and I will admit, the version of the National Anthem that they played in Westminster Abbey, in that place, was easily the best version you will ever hear, much better than the dreary durge they belt out at England matches, or that used to be played on BBC2 at about midnight before Close. This stirred the soul, it made my feel feel ticklish. I think it may have been the last time we’ll hear the God Save The Queen with that lyric in a while, in my lifetime anyway, it’ll be all God Save The King now. Sounds a bit off, like something Lord Whats-his-name would say on Downton Abbey.

I drew the Westminster bit in Procreate, before taking a break and then watching the Windsor part on my iPad, drawing on a brown envelope, making those red coats of the Scots Guard stand out. It was a long old drive up to Windsor Castle. The Queen was buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and now we have a King, Charles III. Honestly when I first saw that headline, I thought it read “Charles ill” and I thought, oh here we go again already.

The last event like this I’d actually watched was the Funeral of Princess Diana, back in that frankly bonkers period of time in September 1997. Anyone who was alive at the time will remember this, but for those of us in the UK the response was utterly ridiculous. I had no idea the country could react in such a way to anything. On the night Diana was killed in that car crash in Paris, along with Dodi Al Fayed, I remember that I was unironically eating in an Egyptian restaurant just around the corner form Kensington Palace which had pictures of Diana on the wall, and I even said “wouldn’t it be funny if Diana and Dodi came in right now.” They had not been off the front pages of the newspapers all week, their fling in France being like Christmas and birthdays rolled into one for all the tabloid editors, gossip columnists and paparazzi. They were ruthless; she was not the ‘People’s Princess’ or the ‘Queen of Hearts’ back then, that would not be until a few days later. I didn’t know Diana had died until early the next morning, when my Mum woke me up to tell me the news. She was shocked and upset, being a big fan of the Royals, and it was very shocking news. Throughout my young life I’d grown up watching the Diana story unfold – the wedding of Charles and Diana was one of my earliest memories, and we had a street party for that, one in which my dad won the “dad’s piggyback race”, where you had to run to the top of the street with your kid on your back. My mum did meet Diana at least once, while working on catering jobs, though she regrets that she never got to meet the Queen. The most famous person I met while working on those catering jobs (because I used to work as a waiter when I was first old enough to work) was Ronnie Corbett, and he was brilliant. Anyway, we got the first edition of the Sunday newspapers, News of the World or one of those old rags that don’t exist any more, and the first few pages were pure Historic Moment – the shock, the tears, the gushing about the Queen of Hearts is dead, the anguish, the instant canonization of Diana – and yet, because editors had to get this newspaper out in time for people to grab the papers with the biggest headlines, they had not yet updated all the articles a few pages deep into the paper, which were still full of “Diana is disgracing the nation” and showing long range pictures of her in skimpy outfits with Dodi on a yacht off the Cote d’Azur. Still, I had no time to join in the national mourning, because I was off to France myself, taking the coach to Strasbourg with my friend Terry for a few days of being silly, a little vacation before I started university. While we were away, people would ask us, “are you doing ok?” and we’d be like, “er yeah, we’re fine,” thinking, strange thing to keep asking us.

We didn’t know that back in England the place was slowly becoming Diana Crazy. I sometimes call Britain “Totally Normal Island”, but this was the country at it’s Most Totally Normal. The sea of flowers in front of Kensington Palace was only part of it. When we arrived back in London on our coach from France the country had been gripped with the Diana Fever for several days already, and we were a little taken aback. I went to Kensington Palace to have a look at the flowers; hundreds of people were standing around, many bawling their eyes out. My mum signed the remembrance book down there; I didn’t know what to write so I just put some Beatles lyrics in there, I can’t even remember what. It probably wasn’t ‘I Am The Walrus’. Then the Funeral took place. The whole country closed down, shops, schools (I mean it was a Saturday so they were closed anyway), and we all sat around the telly while about a million people lined the streets of central London, watching on big screens down at Hyde Park. This was Funeral with Entertainment. This was the 90s, we had an excited new young cool PM Tony Blair steering the ship Cool Britannia, and Diana was friend of the famous – her good pal Elton John performed a rewrite of one of his classics, singing “Goodbye England’s Rose”, his eyebrows bobbing up and down as that guaranteed number one echoed through the hallowed stones of Westminster Abbey. And the Diana was put into the ground up at the family home at Althorp (which we learned was pronounced ‘Awl-trup’), and then over the next few weeks the country blinked and looked around as if coming out of some trance and went, what the bloody hell was that about? I started university a couple of weeks later and even then, people were not sure what had just happened, and how we were supposed to think about it other than some collective temporary madness. It’s something we can all look back on though, all remembered slightly differently, all with different degrees of cynicism or sadness, but it was a Historical Moment and gives expatriate Brits like me us a funny story to tell Americans.

holier than thou

February 6, 2023February 6, 20234 Comments

This is a three-hole puncher. It’s very heavy and fairly large, taking up an excessive amount of space in my office for the little work that it does. It’s like the SUV of hole punchers. It’s even called a ‘Hummer’ as if to say, I may be made of steel but I’m full of irony. It was one of those days, one of those lunchtimes. I wanted to draw, but I am sometimes out of inspiration when drawing Davis on my lunchtimes these days. So I got the extremely filling Chicken Over Rice (Spicy) from Shah’s Halal food truck, took it back to my office, and drew this big hole puncher on an old brown envelope. It’s a beast. If you dropped it from high up enough it would certainly destroy a car, and maybe even threaten some smaller life forms with extinction. I don’t have a lot of things that I put into three-ring binders any more. I still have a few, and some that I keep on my desk and refer to because it’s easier than looking up on the screen, and I can bring those binders to meetings and show people, but that happens far far less than it used to anyway. In my old office there is still a range of ring binders, colour-coded by theme of what was inside, which seem to have been kept in there now more for the nostalgia factor. I use this hold puncher far less than I used to, but I still use it, so it stays. This was a big difference I discovered after moving to the U.S., the ring-binder system with three holes. In the U.K., we use two, fairly close together, middle of the page. That means that my handy little two-hole punch, the sort you get for a couple of quid from Smiths and is light and small so you can keep it in your backpack or your jacket pocket, is useless over here. People do have the single-hole pinchers, but honestly they can be a little crap. They never punch through that many pages at once, and if punching three holes in a page you’ll always get at least one hole just off. With this big puncher you can measure the edges better with a little sliding metal ruler that comes out, but the three holes are always the same length apart. You can really punch through a lot of pages at once as well, if you press down quickly enough, although I’m sure the mechanism has blunted a little over the years. The paper size we use in the U.S. is also different to the U.K. In America, it’s letter size, while in Britain we have the standard A4. It’s like we are completely different countries. Now I am used to the letter size, if I find old papers from England in the stuff I brought over years ago, documents and certificates and such, the length of them is a little jarring, and they are that bit narrower. I do like the letter size, it kind of feels a bit nicer, like an old TV screen. I see the benefit of the three-hole system though, because after a while papers in British folders tend to get pulled down a little at those top and bottom inside corners; not so much with my American binders. This has been here a while; it still has the name of a former employee, Prather, who I think left us at least a couple of decades ago, before even I joined the department. It’s probably been in the department a lot longer than that. This is starting to feel a bit like an episode of Time Team, like I have dug this out of the shores of the Thames or something. This thing could probably last the centuries too. In the 41st Century, someone may come across this and wonder about this ancient civilization where we needed to press little holes into things, perhaps in that ancient substance they called ‘paper’, or maybe in their skin, or as a way to identify animals, and there would be this major debate as to why the large devices they have found on the big western continent are designed to make three holes while the smaller devices on the eastern landmass only make two, and they would become known as the ‘three hole civilization’ and the ‘two-hole culture’. And of course there would be people that say no, people back in those days could not possibly have had the technology to create such a device and made their holes using sticks fashioned out of fish spines, and that these devices can only have been made by aliens. And people would believe it of course, because people in the 41st century are not that different from people in the 21st or the 1st, and they would still believe in aliens, and they still definitely would not have ever met one. Or maybe, and I’m wrapping this up now I promise you, maybe they would think this had some religious purpose. And someone would realize that ‘hole puncher’ sounds a bit like ‘holy puncher’ and, wow. It was a device to make things ‘holey’. There you have it. The Holy Hole Puncher.

her majesty was a pretty nice girl

September 8, 2022February 14, 20232 Comments

You probably heard the news: the Queen is dead. She died today in Balmoral, peacefully and with her family. We all knew it was going to happen some day, but it was a surprise, nonetheless. 96 years old, that’s quite the innings. I did always hope she would make it to 100, not least so she could write a letter to herself. There will be a lot of things said over the next few days and weeks by a lot of people, but it is undoubtedly the passing of an era, a real historic moment for Britain. Whatever any of us think about the whole monarchy thing, Elizabeth II was a good person, a very likeable person, quite a funny person and a very popular Queen, even if people didn’t like many of the rest of them. She was The Queen for 70 years, all my life, almost all my mum’s life, one of her earliest memories is the coronation. I was in London with my mum during the Platinum Jubilee. In her time the Queen had 15 Prime Ministers, with the newest one coming in just this week. She did manage to get quite a few Prime Ministers in her last few years. She saw England win the World Cup and Spurs win the Double, both of which were a really long time ago now. She saw the rise and break-up of the Beatles, and was still around when Get Back finally came out. Ironically, last night I learned the ukulele chords to ‘Her Majesty’, not knowing that the next day she would die. I drew this tonight, it has been a long time since I drew on one of those brown envelopes, I still have a big stack of those. I’ll probably give it to my mum. Sh really loved the Queen. I expect the Funeral will be fairly massive. And then I saw that Charles was ill too, and I thought wow that’s all they need, but I misread, it actually said ‘King Charles III’. So Prince Charles is now King Charles the Third. I always thought he would take on a different name when crowned, such as George or Henry, but that might have been too confusing for all those people who get confused when someone changes their name. It actually happens a lot. Many monarchs were called something different, Popes do it all the time, Anakin Skywalker changed his named to Darth Vader. I like the sound of “Charles III”. We need a new national anthem now – I know we just keep the same one and change “Queen” to “King” but maybe now is the time to choose an all-new anthem, one that’s a bit livelier at the big sporting occasions. I do have to get an updated ruler now – I have one of those ones with the names of all the English kings and queens on it – but that’s what happens when a monarch dies, you get a new ruler.

So rest in peace your majesty, you longest-serving British monarch, it’s going to be a long time before anyone breaks that record, and will Britain ever have another Queen? Probably not in my lifetime.

schoolboy’s own stuff

February 9, 20132 Comments

Paul Gascoigne, as I will always think of him. For those who read my blog and don’t know the names of every footballer I mention (and I mention a few), Paul Gascoigne – aka “Gazza” – was a player from the late 1980s to early 2000s, who had perhaps his greatest playing period while a young cheeky lad in the white shirts of Tottenham, scoring a bullet of a free-kick against Arsenal in the FA Cup Semi-Final in 1991. As an England player he was perhaps the most ‘gifted’ player of his generation, playing with unrivaled passion yet a tinge of tragedy, famously crying on the pitch after receiving a yellow card (undeservedly) in the 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany, meaning he would have missed the final, if England had been any good at penalties. He became a national hero and an international icon. His golden spell at Tottenham ended with an FA Cup medal in 1991, though he never finished that match, having been so hyped up that he attempted to kick a hole in the chest of one player (laughed off by the Gazza-loving ref) before seriously injuring himself trying to remove the legs of Nottingham Forest’s Cary Charles. That injury put him out for a year, after which he was transferred to Lazio, and so on and so on. You can look up his history in Wikipedia or something. While he had a few moments of wonder, such as his amazing goal against Scotland at Euro 96, Gazza never quite reached the heights we knew he was capable of. Injury, personal issues, drinking, (cf Chris Evans and Jimmy Five-Bellies), famously being left out of the 98 World Cup squad, he never could live up to the hype of being Gazza. For me and so many other Tottenham fans, that free kick against Arsenal was the defining moment (and for me, all the more fun as I watched the match with my Arsenal-supporting dad). At his best there was nobody in the country even close.
Gazza has had a lot of trouble in his life since his glory days, alcoholism, domestic troubles, mental health issues. And now last week he was admitted into a treatment centre in the US, having suffered another setback in his health. It’s unlikely he will ever be free of his demons, but I’ll always think of him like this, young, cheeky and brilliant.

AVB-in

January 12, 20134 Comments

AVB – or Andre Villas-Boas as he prefers to be called – is the manager of Tottenham Hotspur. He is also Manager of the Month for December, following Spurs’ fantastic run lately. He is young too, and the first Spurs manager ever who is younger than me. He doesn’t like shaving (I can relate, though I can’t do stubble for very long without getting grumpy about it). I drew him yesterday lunchtime, when I was too tired to leave the office for lunch, and stayed in to draw on one of many envelopes I get at this time of year (this one is from Shandong University in China). It has been a very busy week, with an even busier one to come. In fact I was so tired yesterday that when I got home I fell asleep almost straight away, and when I woke up at half past five this morning this man was on the TV, leading Spurs in a 0-0 draw against his predecessor, Harry Redknapp, now boss of bottom-placed QPR. I like AVB. “A valuable boss.”

jumping the shark

October 4, 20121 Comment

Here is a beer for the hot weather (and, while today has finally cooled off a little, we here in Davis have had a very long hot summer). Great White is brewed by Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka (I always read that as ‘Lost Coats’, with images of standing around by those coat places in nightclubs), and is very refreshing and tasty on a hot evening. In the pub, the beer pump is shaped like a shark. This is sketched in my ‘beer’ book, a brown paper sketchbook I’ve had for a while.

two moons

April 10, 2012Leave a comment

Last Saturday was national beer day, apparently, so I partook by having (and drawing) a couple from the Blue Moon Brewing Co. They make a nice wheat beer, but also make nice seasonal beers, my favourite of which is the Winter Abbey Ale, below, which is now off the shelves. Above is their Belgian style pale ale, Pale Moon, which was also very nice. I drank them and drew them (except for the bottle below which I drew later) while watching a movie on cable, “I Am Number Four”, which I think may have required more than two beers to fully appreciate the subtleties of.

ce n’est pas facile d’être bleu

March 9, 20122 Comments

Chimay Bleu, a very popular Trappist beer in Belgium. When I spent a year there I only had it the once, it wasn’t really my thing, very dark, but the Charleroi locals loved it, king of the Trappists. I like the glass, and brought my Chimay glass with me to America, it’s nice to eat ice cream or trifle out of. Anyway, my wife got me one recently so I had it tonight while watching the telly, and of course I had to draw it in the brown paper beer book.