Tag: burnt oak

did yer mama always tell ya that the old ones are the best?

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christmas back home

It’s Christmas, here in Burnt Oak, back where i grew up, and here’s the big tree at my mum’s house, drawn this morning after the baby went down for a nap. It looks so Christmassy here! I haven’t been outside yet; it’s been sunny, and cold, and cloudy, and I just know it will rain when I do go out. Urban sketching! I turned on the TV last night, couldn’t sleep, and on came “Merry Cliffmas”. Yes, he is still around (I won’t write his name because the search engines will bring a load of people here looking for him), but I suppose he is at least someone I’ve heard of. The longer I’ve been gone, the fewer ‘celebs’ I’ve heard of here.

My son however discovered the Tweenies this morning.

because you’re mine, i walk the line

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just unnoticed

Part three of a series. Presumably this means I will have to make more. This is the outside of a very famous station. Well it’s not that famous but many thousands of people have heard of it, maybe millions. More people over the course of seventy years have heard of it than, say, Jordan and Peter Andre. And they’re pretty famous for not doing anything particularly noteworthy. I suppose you could say this station has spent it’s entire life on the line. The Northern Line. Anyway here it is in line and wash.

get thee to a nunnery

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flaws, mostly

Part two in a series. This is the old convent up on Orange Hill Road, Burnt Oak, the one that provided the nuns for the adjacent St. James’ school. Opposite there was another school, Orange Hill. I went to neither. Both are now gone. My old school though, in Edgware, is also now gone, demolished, an old comprehensive replaced with a futuristic brutal looking academy. I’ll bet the bogs still fit heads down them though.

the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

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things have changed

I finally sat down and started a new series, much in the vein of the ‘you see, davis’ set, but this one being situated in the town where i was born (and hence called as such). actually burnt oak isn’t really a town, it’s a suburb, a part of london still lost in the middlesex postcode, long after middlesex has been wiped off the map (i suspect this is what ahmedinedjad really meant by that phrase). This is also my entry for illustration friday this week, the theme being ‘opinion’. I am glad that my opinions change over the years, that even though i am very opinionated I can still change my point of view. Or maybe my mind is just drifting along and ultimately doesn’t care about any opinion either way. Maybe we will never find out. For example, I hate arsenal, but actually felt sorry for them this week. Oh who am I kidding. Anyway i think it was muhammed ali who said, the person who thinks the same at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life. Or something like that. I’ll find out when i’m 50 i guess, when i’ll probably think that was all bollocks.

pissing down with rain on a boring wednesday

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This week’s Illustration Friday theme is ‘detach‘. Here then is my entry: a picture of Burnt Oak tube station.

burnt oak station

I think the reason is that, each time I go back home, I feel more and more detached from the place I grew up. How much further detached from it will I become; am I even really detached, or is it all just imaginary? This is Burnt Oak station. Second from last stop on the Northern Line. Not a particularly nice place to hang about of an evening, you might say (or daytime either). It’s on Watling Avenue (previously seen here). I’d come out of the station, look up the hill to see if my bus was coming, and if not, I’d walk home (only one bus stop away up Orange Hill). A favourite hang-out for dodgy kids with nothing to do.  

And it rains there. It doesn’t rain here.

in the town where i was born

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watling avenue (burnt oak)

A familiar skyline to all Burnt Oakers: Watling Avenue, in the rain, leading downhill towards the tube station. While most of the shops change over the years, the skyline of sloping chimneys has remained the same. Actually one shop that’s been there all my life is Vipin’s, the stationers where I bought my pens and paper growing up. It hasn’t changed a bit. (I do wish they’d stock Micron Pigmas though!)

This is my contribution for Drawing Day 2008. Micron Pigma .01. It’s also my Illustration Friday entry (theme: ‘forgotten’, because I felt like I’d almost forgotten what it was like in Burnt Oak, until I went back just recently and was quickly reminded; this skyline, however, will never be so quickly forgotten).