not all those who wander are lost (except me)

January 22, 2022January 22, 2022Leave a comment

A big building across the street with a tree in the foreground? Oh go on then. C Street to be precise, right by 4th St, across from the park – I’ve drawn this spot before. I’ve said that before too, “I’ve drawn this spot before”, many times. I drew this on January 6th, on the one year anniversary of January 6th. The day the decorations come down. This is a frat house, Phi Delta Theta. A big old fancy house that isn’t that old; there was a similar looking building here before, but it was knocked down several years ago and then they built this one. I remember that I hadn’t sketched the previous one (surprisingly) and regretted it – people would tell me stories about their student days going to parties in the old one. Well, not many stories. I remember my own student party days. Well, I say ‘remember’, I mean I know they happened. They were a long time ago. Some fun times, going all over London because someone at uni was having a party, there were plenty of long journeys home on the night bus. Well, I lived in north west London out at the end of the Northern Line, but I went to university in east London, and people tended to spread out further eastwards from there. I vaguely remember one party at someone’s house in the Docklands, and afterwards getting totally lost on the Isle of Dogs trying to find my way back to the Mile End Road. No smart phones or Ubers back then, I just used the massive skyscraper of Canary Wharf as my compass – if I was moving away from it, it was probably the right direction. I just followed my nose. I obviously made it home ok. Another random party I remember, I was invited by a good friend to come to a house party in Leytonstone or somewhere, bloody miles away. I had been at my mate’s birthday in Burnt Oak (at his nan’s house) all evening, but I’d said I’d go to this party so it was pretty late by the time I got there, after an hour on the rube and a long walk through streets I did not know at all, not at night anyway (though I remember passing the cemetery where my Scully grandparents are buried; they died before I was born) – I was a bit nervous I might get put in the cemetery myself, some of the lads hanging around. I eventually made it to the party (how on earth did I find the place? Oh right I looked at the address on a map and just remembered the way, 90s style), and my friends there were all massively drunk already, it was definitely a party that was winding down. I think I stayed for about half an hour and had one drink before it was time to go, the long trek back across London. Another time, I went to a new years eve party in Gants Hill, which is like out in Scandinavia or somewhere, it’s that far away, and I didn’t even know the guy who invited me all that well, we’d just met in the student union a few times, as you do in the first year at college. I do remember that one of his friends gave me a lift down to the tube station at least, which was nice, because I’d definitely have gotten lost out there. I spent a lot of time travelling across the city at night in those days, usually on the way to or from somewhere. Formative years. Some things I don’t miss about being younger and being in the big city, but then again, I think I do miss it, sitting on a bus at night with the headphones on, not exactly sure what part of London I’m in. I don’t miss the wandering about at night being lost much, but I always find my way home in the end.

on song in the new year

January 21, 2022January 21, 20221 Comment

First drawing of 2022, a usual north Davis scene, a big old house I’ve admired for years while cycling past, one of many historic buildings. It’s on D Street; I wrote it down as D street, and then for some reason I thought it was on C Street and kept saying as such, joking that I’m out of key by one note, maybe I had a capo on my sketchbook, etc. I thought that was a pretty good joke as well, but it turns out it really is on D Street, so I will have to draw something else and get the street wrong so I can use that gag again. I did write 2021 in the corner and changed it to 2022, but then put 2021 into the wordmark. Start of a new year, I’m all over the gaff.

It’s nice to fall into a trusty subject for me though, drawing houses. One of my favourite local books is John Lofland’s “Old North Davis: Guide to Walking a Traditional Neighborhood”, which details each house street by street in the Old North Davis neighbourhood, generally between 5th and 8th, B and F. I looked up the building in that book – it’s called the “Warner Home” after its original inhabitants, William and Fern Warner, and was built in 1929 as a gift for their wedding; that’s a very nice wedding gift, nicer than a toaster. The style of the house is ‘Colonial Revival’. I particularly like the differently angled slants of the roof, like two houses have somehow merged into the same spot. I love the lamp-post, and the arched gateway into the yard. That chimneystack is so prominent at the front like it holds it all together like an orchestra’s conductor, with the antenna on the roof (something you don’t see as often these days) looking like the baton. This is a very musical looking building – the metal ‘S’ shape on the chimneystack looks like the shape you’d see on a cello. I can hear my voice sounding like the guy from Through The Keyhole, Lloyd Grossman: “the arched gateway, the lamp-post, the cello symbol on the chimneystack – who lives in a house like this? David, it’s over to you.” I used to love that show, always makes me think of the guests they used to have, people like Willie Rushton, Kenneth Williams, Clare Rayner, the usual late 80s/early 90s crowd.

I met Clare Rayner once, she was giving out the prizes at our school’s annual Prizegiving ceremony. I won the German Prize , and she presented me with the book I requested as a prize, which was ‘Teach Yourself Italian’. I won the German Prize twice at school (or it may have been three times; I think it was because I was the only person in the school who got excited about the subject), I recall one year I got the Terry Pratchett book ‘Lords and Ladies’ as my prize, still one of my favourite of his books. I still have that copy, with the little thing stuck in the front saying I won the German Prize. It sounds like it should be a prize for something more distinguished rather than something my school gave me when I was 15, maybe I should start describing myself as a ‘multiple German-Prize winning artist’, in a kind of ‘Arnold Rimmer’ way. I don’t win many prizes. I don’t enter any competitions.

in the hands of engineers

January 10, 20222 Comments

One last sketch from Fall that I forgot to post, this is a view of Bainer Hall, UC Davis, with those yellow-leaved trees in the foreground, another lunchtime sketch. You have to draw the world as it goes along. Those leaves are gone now. There are people in this sketch, three of them in fact, you just have to look for them. This is the place for Engineering on campus. I never thought of Engineering as a thing to do in my life, I didn’t realize the massive scope of what it could be, probably. To me, engineering was being stuck under a rusty old car with a wrench wearing overalls covered in oil, taking a break occasionally to read the Sun and swear about the football, and I figured, no I wouldn’t be any good at that, except the last bit of which I am really good at. I think Engineering may be a bit more than that, and it’s one of those areas where you have to be really really clever and know lots of very technical science, but also probably get your hands a bit dirty. Honestly I have no idea, like with most things. I draw little pictures of streets and things, slightly less complicated. I wonder if I’d have been a good engineer though? I wasn’t all that good in CDT class at school. CDT was ‘Craft Design Technology’, what Americans would call ‘Shop’. With all the big mechanical tools, gadgets, circuits, plastic moulding machines, and I remember being enthusiastic about it, except it was in a school setting where the politics of the classroom meant very little got actually learned. Lining up outside the class was the worst bit I think, there were always a couple of would-be bully lads trying to show off. It’s a shame, I remember I liked my CDT teacher, though for some reason I can’t remember his name, but really I wasn’t all that good at CDT, unless drawing was involved. I remember we learned about Ohms and Capacitors. Thinking back, I wish I’d been good at that class, I just wasn’t. Though I remember one occasion, a competition where we all had to design, make and then race cars out of a couple of bits of cardboard, some elastic bands, a couple of pencils and some plastic kinder egg shells. At least, that’s what I used. And my one actually won! I think my drawings of the design helped, but my actual little vehicle – like a paper airplane with elasticated wheels – won the race as well. One of very few things I actually won at school. I basically retired as an engineer after that, my career in the Formula 1 paddock was never going to burgeon.

knowing just where you are blowing

January 6, 2022January 6, 2022Leave a comment

Well it is 2022 now, I suppose. The number at the end of the year changed a bit. Due to general busyness (and a few technical issues putting me off of scanning my sketchbook) I’ve not posted in a while so will make up for that now. I have also not drawn that much lately, December was a big slowdown in terms of my sketching output. Ah well. So it’s time to just catch up by posting these sketches from late Fall, when bright orange leaves were still on the trees and in the streets (long since blown away). Above is Rice Lane, which joins up B and A Streets near campus. I did this over a couple of days, so some of the leaves may have moved about a bit overnight, who knows. I was listening to a Terry Pratchett audiobook while drawing. I remember that because that’s what comes to mind when I look at my sketches, the sounds in my ears. Those are the things you don’t see. You’ll never look at a sketch I did of, say, Community Church and think, this puts me in mind of the Great Vowel Shift, but I would because I was probably listening to a podcast about that when I drew it. Associated sounds are personal. It’s good when visiting new places to keep the earphones out and listen to the city itself, the crunching leaves, the traffic, the language of the passers by, the sizzle of a hot dog, whatever. If I’m just here in Davis where I always am I want to listen to stories through my headphones, I already know what Davis sounds like.

Above is somewhere on D Street. I have long said we should rename the lettered streets to something more memorable, maybe something to do with university subjects, like Anthropology Street, Biostatistics Street, Chemistry Street, and I guess D would be Design Street? Drama? Then I thought in the spirit of fraternity / sorority we should rename them with Greek letters, so Alpha, Beta, C would have to be Gamma confusingly, but D would automatically be Delta. You don’t want to be Delta. Well now it’s Omicron that’s everywhere. This pandemic, it’s never going to end. I’ve been a bit depressed about it all lately (me and you and everyone else) and now the new year is here it’s like, oh, 2022, it’s going to keep going isn’t it. On and on and on. We will run out of Greek letters for variants, we will need to start using the NATO phonetic alphabet, you know, Foxtrot, Charlie, Bravo, those ones. Except Delta would still be Delta, and who would want to say they caught the ‘Mike’ variant? It gets a bit problematic that alphabet. Or maybe Father Jack naming scale? The ‘Drink!’ variant, followed by the ‘Feck!’ ‘Arse! and ‘Girls!’ variants. No, that might be problematic too. That would be an ecumenical matter. You can’t use the Care Bears scale (“Tenderheart”, “Love-A-Lot”, “Grumpy”) though I’d like to see that scale used more for weather (“Hurricane Funshine”), but I could see the Transformers scale working (the “Megatron Variant” sounds terrifying) though maybe not the He-Man scale (really, the “Fisto Variant”?) I’ll leave naming conventions to the experts.

Speaking of Greek letters, I drew this Alpha Chi Omega house on C Street (we are back to regular alphabet for street names then), in mid-November. They are a pretty old women’s fraternity, dating back to 1885 in Indiana, that’s a long time. I have drawn this building before, because I date back to Davis in 2005 and that’s a long time for a sketcher. I remember when I first came to Davis, I was a little bit fascinated by all the fraternity and sorority houses, with those big greek letters outside, because this whole ‘panhellenic’ society thing you get at universities here is pretty alien to me, we don’t have those at British universities, at least not to the scale they have here. They would have their big Rush periods with their big dress up events, and their hazing (though I think there’s much less of that nowadays), but I was already well beyond student age when I came here and I just kept getting older, so anything the youthful did looked a bit alien to me. So I just occasionally draw the big old buildings with the big mystic-looking letter combinations on the wall. Sometimes there will be lads playing beer pong outside. I daresay these buildings hold a lot of memories for people.

And this last one, another from November, a little bit more autumn colour but not much, standing outside Walker Hall and looking towards Shields Library. I used to spend a lot of time in Shields when I first came to Davis, because my default mode was sitting in big quiet libraries looking at books (usually about language). I’d finished my Masters not long before flying out here (I had handed in my MA dissertation – about the relationship between the English and French languages within England in the late Middle Ages – a week before emigrating; my wife had originally set the leaving date for the day after I handed it in, but I’m really glad I had a week of non-library time before flying off, time to say all my bye-byes and party a little. I’ve lived in America ever since.) This library was the only place I could access the internet at first, so I would send my long emails home from here, update my old blog, and start looking for jobs. I was still a bit shell-shocked after moving countries so coming to the big Shields library felt like finding a little bit of familiar me-space, and even after I started working on campus I would come here at lunchtimes and try to translate some old Anglo-Saxon texts, most of which I’ve forgotten all about now. It’s 2022 now, I suppose…

Everybody Loves Tardigrades

December 15, 2021December 15, 20211 Comment

They do, don’t they. Everybody loves tardigrades. This is a sculpture of a tardigrade, also known as a ‘water bear’, outside the Academic Surge Building on campus, next to where I work, home to the Bohart Musuem of Entomology. I took me three attempts to spell ‘Entomology’ by the way, going through ‘Entemology’ and ‘Entimology’ before finding the right spelling. I knew it probably wasn’t ‘Entamology’, and ‘Entumology’ looks very wrong, and ‘Entermology’ is right out, but looking at it, it should really be a word for something and it’s a shame it isn’t. When I first came to campus I actually interviewed with the Viticulture and Enology department, and they actually offered me the position despite my response to “what is Enology” being “it’s insects, innit.” No, Enology isn’t insects (it’s actually wine science), but Entomology is. So, they have a big tardigrade sculpture outside, because yes, everybody loves tardigrades. Except students awaiting exam results, they don’t like tardy grades. Here’s one, “what is the difference between an Aquarius and a Tardigrade? One is a water bearer, and the other is a water bear.” Ok that joke needs a bit of work (actually I think that joke needs a different job), but it’s true, everybody loves tardigrades. They are tiny little super beings that can live in any temperature and in any environment, although even they probably avoid parts of south London after dark. They are miniscule, and have been found in every part of the Earth, from volcanoes to the deep oceans, from the Antarctic to the Amazon, from Tesco to Asda, they are everywhere and can survive any conditions, although even they probably couldn’t sit through half an hour of watching Mrs Brown’s Boys. Thanks to humans feeling the need to pop off into space, tardigrades are probably already colonizing the moon, and are watching down on us wondering why it’s taking us so long to come back and get them. They are sometimes called ‘Moss Piglets’ but that might just be their band name. They have survived all five mass extinctions, though I still don’t fancy their chances under the Tories. They don’t actually live for very long, about 3 or 4 months, but that’s still longer than most Tottenham managers’ careers. Everybody loves tardigrades.

in rust we trust

December 9, 2021December 9, 2021Leave a comment

This old car has been parked in old north Davis for years, I’ve passed it many times thinking, I must draw that some day. That is definitely a thing to sketch. And then days pass into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, years back into months, and then months gives weeks a miss and jumps right back into days. So finally, on the day I ran the Turkey Trot, I took the afternoon to sketch around town. I decided to finally draw this old thing. It’s nice with the autumnal leaves all about. I saw fellow sketchers Allan and Alison while drawing this, they live nearby now. It was a nice afternoon, it had been a nice morning. I had a good race, I shaved 2.5 minutes off my previous 5k race time which I’m still well pleased about. For the first race back since early 2020, I didn’t feel rusty at all. I felt pretty good afterwards too, runnin’ makes you feel good. I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts. I do want to draw some more old vehicles. There are at least a couple I’ve had my eye on sketching for a while, one near my house which never moves and has a lot of cobwebs on it, I’ve just never sat outside drawing it. I like the ones that just sit there getting rusty. I like rusty.

ol’ bobby dazzler’s

December 8, 2021December 8, 2021Leave a comment

Yeah I know, these ones are from just before Halloween, and it’s already December. Halloween, alright grandad, that’s so fifty years ago, we’re decorating gingerbread houses now. The Friday night before Halloween, some of the players from our youth soccer team went to a pumpkin patch (we had a tournament the next day in Roseville, in which teams traditionally wear costumes; we had Spider-Man uniforms, many of the others were really elaborate, one team we played were dressed as Pac-Man ghosts, others dressed as robbers, one team were all cow-girls (the coaches had inflatable horses), one team were aliens, and there was even one team all dressed as Jake from State Farm (the coaches dressed as Flo form Progressive) (they were popular; people like adverts. One team even got the current zany Spurs away kit and all dressed as that. If I hadn’t been coaching that tournament, I would have enjoyed sketching everyone. Unfortunately our team ended up being drawn against some high-level opposition and we lost all our games, but at least the costumes were fun to see. I say high-level, because two of the teams were two divisions above us, while the other one literally play in the foothills of the Sierras, at a higher altitude than Davis. A bit like playing Bolivia, or West Brom. Anyway, the night before we went to the pumpkin patch and I drew some pumpkins, and this big old hearse, which was being driven by a skeleton. Bobby Dazzler’s is the place, it’s just outside Davis. Here are some pumpkins I drew as well. I had to draw them quickly because they were going to turn back into carriages. I’d never been to Bobby Dazzler’s before, it was pretty good. I suppose it made me think of Bobby Davro, a TV light entertainer and panting mimer from the 80s in England, and also leader of the Daleks if memory serves (nope, memory doesn’t serve). Bobby Dazzler is the sort of thing people would say in the old days up north, “he’s a reet Bobby Dazzler” they’d say, in the working mens’ clubs. Also, they are both the names of X-Men characters, Bobby and Dazzler. Maybe Bobby Dazzler is the younger brother of Adolf and Rupert Dassler, the founders of Adidas (short for Adolf ‘Adi’ Dassler) and Puma (Rupert’s spin-off which is short for for Poo, Man) (actually Puma was going to be called ‘RuDa’, true story, after Rudolf Dassler, but everyone said that sounds RuBbish). Maybe Bobby was the youngest Dassler and maybe he could never have a voice with his siblings so instead he voiced his sibilants. Ooh that was a stretch. Anyway enough rambling. They also have a Christmas tree farm in November and December and so I might go back up there again. I won’t get a tree though, because our Cat Overlords don’t allow such things, we just re-use our old plastic one.

dream a little dream

December 1, 2021Leave a comment

Catching up on posting October sketches still, although November actually ends today. Can you believe it’s December 2021 already? Wow. It’s a good job I finished making this year’s advent calendar already. This year I made an unusual one, not so much a single calendar as 24 plastic baubles on a miniature tree that are opened each day to reveal the chocolate inside. Oh and each one is painted with a Studio Ghibli character, in acrylic, because of course it is. We should have gone to Japan this November, that was the plan. That was the plan last November too. The pandemic put paid to our plans across the Pacific. We were going to Tokyo, and one of the things I wanted to do was visit the Studio Ghibli museum. My son and I are both big fans of those films. We were also going to Tokyo Disney, my wife is a big fan of the Disneylands. I was also hoping to see my oldest friend Tel, who has lived in Japan for ages now. We still message each other, usually stupid messages. My son saw over my shoulder me and Tel were just messaging the word ‘bollocks’ to each other for ages. Needless to say, we aren’t debating Proust. In fact I can already imagine the jokes if we ever met someone who wanted to debate Proust. Still it’s been bloody ages since I saw him, would be nice to go and pay him a visit. I actually had a dream about him last night, or rather I had a dream and he showed up. That happens sometimes, I dream about my old mates. In this dream I met up with him and two other old mates (Rob and Roshan if I recall) and we went to a bar, but I was waiting at the bar so long for our drinks that I didn’t get to spend any time with them, and every time the drinks came they were wrong, and then everyone had to go home, and I didn’t see anyone again for years. I mean, I miss my old mates, but come on, in real life we would probably all stand at the bar while we waited for the drinks. Who knows, dreams don’t make sense. It’s also true that nobody actually cares about your dreams, they are not actually interesting at all. Like, literally the most boring thing is to talk about what you dreamed about. You may as well just say, I had this stupid thought, isn’t it weird I had that stupid thought, I wonder what it means. You happened to be asleep of course so you thought it was real. You never say, I had a thought the other day, and you were in that thought, but you were painted green and driving wheelbarrow made of ham, no people would be like, right, ok mate. That said, back when we were kids Tel did tell me about a dream he had, about Robin Hood and his Merry Men all dressed in skirts and dancing about singing “Don’t F*@k with me, I’m Robin Hood”. That made us laugh all the way down Green Lane. So I turned that into a song. Well a four-song musical actually, which we performed as part of our Expressive Arts drama class at school (though my teacher Mr. Hart made me change the words to “Don’t Muck With Me, I’m Robin Hood”). We didn’t wear the skirts. It went down well, I guess, nobody cared that much probably. I think I played Robin Hood? It was thirty years ago. A few years later, Tel did tell me he never actually dreamed that song, he just made it up for a laugh. So I mean, that’s the same thing.

By the way this is a sketch of Kerr Hall (background), on the UC Davis campus, while stood outside California Hall, the fancy new building in the foreground.

rear windows

November 23, 2021November 23, 2021Leave a comment

This is the rear side of the building where I work on campus, the Mathematical Sciences Building, though I am no mathematical scientist myself. My window is one of those ones up on the top there, and I’ve surprisingly never drawn the building from this angle before, though I have drawn from those windows a few times. I was walking back from the vending machine in the next building over one lunchtime (the drink machine in our building is a bit temperamental when it comes to actually accepting your card payment; you tap the card, it gives it the whole “authorizing payment” wait, and then on some days it says yes, and on others it says nope, we’re not doing that today, cash only and good luck with that, what’s ‘cash’, why not write a check, why not barter some oxen, caveman”) (I always imagine the drink machine talking in a very stroppy voice, or being like Barry from High Fidelity). Anyway I was walking back that way and decided that this was a good angle to stop and sketch, with the bins in the front, and the sky was looking interesting. We’ve actually had rain lately, and now the weather is cooler, like you’d expect for November, but this has been an unusually hot year in the west. The big return to campus this Fall has been successful, although a good number of staff are still working partially remotely, a situation that looks like it will continue, but the students and faculty are back and all learning in-person again, and it seems to be going well. Hopefully it stays that way. I couldn’t go back to fully remote myself, I would need a better desk for one thing. And a better chair. I should probably get a new chair for work anyway. I’ve had my current office chair for sixteen years, and it was my predecessors’ chair, back in the long long ago, so it has seen some mileage, or whatever the sedentary non-moving version of mileage is, just “age” I guess. The wheels are coming off the chair a little bit but it still works. Some other people in our department are getting new chairs now and the prices have really gone up since before the pandemic, the guys who bring the chairs told me, it’s incredible. Same with a lot of things I guess. That’s 2021 for you. And it’s nearly over, this 2021, this strange successor to 2020, and then we will have 2022, the grandchild of 2020, with whatever fun that brings. I should probably get a new chair.

mechanical monsters

November 17, 2021Leave a comment

This behemoth of a machine was parked at the corner of our street last month during the seemingly endless roadwork project going on in our part of north Davis. There was no question, I had to sketch it. Look at this absolute beauty, this enormous street dinosaur robot creature. There was another one a little further down, I would have drawn them both but the wind was picking up. I imagined them battling in the street, the biggest robot battle since Sir Kill-a-Lot first killed a lot (little Robot Wars/Spaced reference there), those cones being their minions. One cone was stuck on the robot’s tail, those cones eh, they should make a movie about their japes. I do love a bit of detail though. It’s very relaxing to get stuck into a drawing like that. It was a Sunday afternoon.