December 2025 in Davis, California

August 16, 2026Leave a comment

I am still playing catch-up on 2025, but we are at December now. In other news I am all caught up with scanning my current sketches, but since I keep drawing more, there’s always more scanning to be done. I often wonder what it’s all for – a record of places and my time within them, fulfilling an urge to draw all the time that I have had since I was a toddler, a way to stay sane in these far from sane times, creating content to share with the world so that they may be inspired by them as I have been inspired by others (which was the whole idea behind Urban Sketchers), or maybe it’s like regular exercise that I need to stay fit. It’s all of those things, but it’s also because I just love to draw. Despite the thousands of sketches, I get self-conscious about my ability, that voice in my head that I am probably doing it ‘wrong’, the same voice I hear when I am playing my guitar or training for a race or working on a budget or even just having a conversation. It’s like those clickbait YouTube videos that are titled things like “You Are Folding Your Clothes Wrong!” or “You Are Listening To Music Wrong!” or “You Are Living Your Entire Life Wrong!” Hey, I was ALWAYS told I hold my pen wrong, and wow, did people like to point it out at the Sketching Symposium. The other voice is my voice saying, no you are doing it your way, even if it is ‘wrong’, and fortunately I listen to that stubborn little voice the most. Anyway, here is a two-page drawing I did in early December of the Yolo County Library, the Mary L Stephens branch in north Davis near my house, and I think I got it pretty damn right. It was late afternoon, I was at home that day and finished up early, and walked over to the library. The sun was setting and the autumnal leaves were amazing, they usually are in early December. Davis gets boring to me sometimes, when it’s really hot and there’s not much to do, but I love living here and I love that time of year. I stood on the street corner and sketched and painted until there was little light left; I had to finish off the paint at home, but I wanted to catch that sky, those leaves. The library has a lot of arches which is why I don’t sketch it very often (I don’t like drawing arches, just as I don’t like drawing circles, or feet, or hands, or dogs, the list goes on; for someone who loves drawing there’s a lot I don’t like drawing). I went into the library after this and had a good look through some books; I read almost the whole of ‘Abundant Harvest’ which was a detailed and illustrated history of UC Davis, it fascinated me, full of old stories and old photos. I realized also that this library has a pyramid roof, just like Burnt Oak Library, my ‘home’ library growing up. Here it is in a post from 2022. That cannot be a coincidence right? I think I had never really noticed it before. This library is bigger, though. They did make a display of my sketchbooks back in late 2011, shortly before my first solo show at the Pence, I had almost forgotten about that. A lot of time has passed since then, a lot of sketches, and a lot of improvement too, a lot of ‘doing it wrong’.

Ok, I have a lot of sketches from December because that’s the way it goes, so I might divide them into ‘December’ and ‘Christmastime’. One day I will get back to one post, one sketch, one story, but that day is not now, I have lagged behind too long. I drew the scene above while on our monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawl in December. It was quite cold out as I remember. I drew a festive shopfront (of Avid & Co) but that will fall into the Christmassy post. This one is the Varsity Theater on 2nd St, I have drawn it many times before. If Davis were bigger and had more interesting things for me to sketch, I would still have sketched the Varsity about the same amount. There’s no point linking to old posts with Varsity sketches, new ones come along all the time, like Spider-Man movies. In fact my most recent one from July 2026 actually does have Spider-Man on it.

Here’s another from that day, sketched just across the street at the corner of 2nd and E. I liked the colour of all the trees, plus I liked that Jeep, and went to great pains to make sure I sketched seven grille slots as is the case for all civilian Jeeps, unlike the military Jeeps which have nine grille slots. I overheard someone saying this at the California Automobile Museum many years ago and it stuck in my memory. I kept thinking I should release a YouTube video titled “You Are Drawing the Front Grilles of Jeeps WRONG” and then shaming all those who draw 8 or 6 or don’t even bother counting. You will notice I didn’t bother drawing other car details (except for the Jeep’s distinctive circular headlights, and you know I hate drawing circles, but I had to get those right) and the other car barely gets an outline.

Christmas was coming alright, but I will include this one here. This is Mabel’s Market on D Street, in an old building that has been many things since I came to Davis, but is now a very nice shop; I really love their jam and like to buy it as presents for people. I like drawing that building though. I decided not to colour it in when I forgot to colour it in later, but that’s ok because the red stands out more, very festive. Also, it was very foggy at this time of year, it had been far foggier than usual, and so this is reflected in the lack of colours.

Speaking of D Street, well here is another one. The unusually thick Tule fog had finally lifted that day, and the bright mid-December colours really burst into life. I was just outside Mabel’s Market (in fact I had just bought some jam) and I drew Cloud Forest Cafe and the red phone box next to the Mustard Seed. It was so colourful I just had to stop and draw. It’s another scene I have drawn a lot, but after over twenty years here what do you expect.

On the day that I drew this, the now-closed Mamma’s restaurant on 3rd St (formerly Bistro 33, plus various other things). By the way I understand this location will soon be home to a noodle restaurant, and when I walked past the other day they have removed all of the red paint from those distinctive metal fences. Well at least I have drawn them here in that red.

Ok this one is late December, the building that is part of Newman Center on C St, just past 5th, in the Old North Davis area. There’s a bit of a crack in the building. I like all the brickwork though. I think we had just got back from Santa Rosa where we had been on Christmas Day and the day after.

Further down 5th Street, another Old North Davis house, another ‘triangle with a tree in front’ special, two in fact, plus a special mention of a picket fence on the right there. Weather was nice. There had been a lot of very heavy rain over the Christmas.

And finally, Tres Hermanas on 2nd St, near the train station. We love this place at work, some of our favourite staff lunches have been here. It always makes me hungry for their enchiladas. This was drawn on the day before New Years Eve, and it was very cold and foggy again. So, apart from the few Christmassy sketches I will post next, that’s pretty much it for 2025. The question is, shall I go ahead and post my Toulouse sketches while they are fresh in my mind, and then go backwards again and play catch up for 2026? I say, yeah why not. Otherwise it will be 2027 before I talk about Toulouse, and hey I’m getting older, the memory is not what it was. I’m probably doing this all wrong.

the very hart of campus

March 2, 2024Leave a comment

Last weekend we held another meet-up of local sketchers as part of the monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawls, this time in the very heart of the UC Davis campus, meeting up outside the immense Shields Library. I had worried it would be a pretty wet day, but in the end we had lovely sunshine. It was a short sketchcrawl at just two hours, enough for a couple of decent drawings for me; above, Hart Hall, one of my favourite buildings to draw at UC Davis, especially on a bright day like last Saturday. I was terrorised by a squirrel while drawing this (in so much as a squirrel can be a terrorist, it might be a bit of a reach to say that coming up to me occasionally saying “yeah come on then” in squirrel language amounts to terrorism, or just normal squirrel behaviour whenever someone sits next to their favourite tree). We share this campus with the squirrels, and as I know too well we are all competing for our little bit of space. I sympathized with the squirrel to be honest.

We had quite a turnout, a lot of students, local sketchers, sketchers from out of town. I drew my second in front of Shields Library, you can see one of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads there. Some sketchers are dotted around. It was a nicely bustling kind of Saturday afternoon on campus, not too busy but not quiet either. At the end we all gathered in a circle outside and did a show-and-tell of our sketches, some really nice diverse styles on show. I was however criticized in front of the whole group by one sketcher from out of town who complained to me that I’d chosen such an “inconvenient” location (“the middle of nowhere” they said) for a sketchcrawl, because it was far from the parking lot they’d parked at. It’s the heart of the campus, the main library, very much “the middle of somewhere”. I was a bit stunned. Oh well. Anyway the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be on March 23rd in the afternoon, this one will be downtown at Mishka’s cafe on 2nd street, easy enough to find. Though I will have just done the Lucky Run 7k race that morning, so I will probably be a little bit shattered, but still sketching.

shields

October 10, 2023October 9, 2023Leave a comment

Now everyone is back on campus, it’s busy, etc and so on. I miss the summer, all that quiet. In a weird way I miss the pandemic times, when everyone was at home, and campus was eerie and quiet, I would still need to come in fairly regularly so I felt a bit like a guardian, keeping the torches lit until the return of All The People, if that day would ever come again. Actually mostly I was drawing maps of our building, with little diagrams in shared spaces to show that people would be at least six feet apart. The ‘worksite plan’. I had to do a lot of that, but I liked making colourful maps anyway. It was great to finally get people back on campus back then. I’m not saying I prefer it quiet, I do like the bustle of an active campus and having lots of people about our department, but I do appreciate those quiet moments. Here’s one place for some nice quiet, the Shields Library. It’s a massive library, one that I regrettably don’t visit as much as I used to. The first few years I was here I’d often check out books, mostly related to medieval language, but then I just stopped. I’m no longer studying in academia; for a while, before we moved out here, that was my life, long days and evenings in the library researching as best I could (did I really have to read every published article that referenced medieval alliterative poetry? I didn’t really know what I was doing, did I). I liked the quiet, the smell of the books, the space for ideas. One idea I had was ‘move to America’, so I did. I didn’t know what to do with myself when we first arrived in Davis in that November in 2005. Some days I wouldn’t really leave the apartment until late afternoon, and the only place I knew I’d feel at home was this place, Shields Library. I’d be here until it was time to get the bus home for dinner, writing emails home and updating my blog (this was before we got working internet at home), exploring the halls and picking up a pile of books about things like Chaucer or Anglo-Norman language to sit and look through, taking notes that would end up nowhere. I was glad when I finally got a job, but I’d still come here on my lunchtimes to get my head back in shape, before I really started sketching on all my lunches. All these years later, I am still needing that break to get my head back together, and usually that involves a sketchbook more than a book about Caedmon’s Hymn. I enjoyed drawing this. In fact it was sketched one day before my 18th anniversary of moving to the US. I always feel a bit funny around that time, always remember how I felt in those days, a mixture of excited and confused, and in desperate need of Weetabix.

back to burnt oak library

August 11, 2022August 11, 20222 Comments

At the end of May I finally returned home to London, having not been back since before the pandemic started. This was my longest period of time not going back, and it was great to see my family again. My older brother was getting married to his long-time partner (I was best man and gave a speech). It was the first of two trips back to London this summer, and both times I would be going off to France for the second half of the trip. It’s been a busy time. I also managed to get a lot of sketching done, as well as many drawings I would start now, finish later (gives me something to do on the plane home). I felt a bit odd flying across the Atlantic again after all this time, but it wasn’t so bad, and I landed at Heathrow and took the brand new Elizabeth Line, London’s newest train line, that had opened only a day or two before. It was pretty exciting getting to ride this new train so early in its existence. The Elizabeth Line (formerly called Crossrail) station within Tottenham Court Road was like an underground cathedral, at least compared to the tube platforms. Anyway, I made it up to Burnt Oak on the Northern Line which is where my family still live, and this is where I got my first sketch of the trip in. This was a London sketching day and I was headed down into town to fill my book and wander the streets, as I do. I like to explore. But I had to stop here on Orange Hill Road and draw Burnt Oak Library. This iconic landmark of Burnt Oak (opened 1968, designed by B. Bancroft) was like a second home to me growing up, I spent so much time in here. These days only the top part is the library, greatly reduced in book numbers, while the bottom floor is all council offices for local services now (very useful of course). When I was a kid, the children’s library was upstairs while the main library was downstairs. I still dream about the library from those days. There was a smell, a bookish smell, and as you walked in the main doors (which are in a different place now since the remodel), you were greeted with three maps on the wall (I think it was three, maybe two?) showing Burnt Oak as it was when it was all fields and a few roads, then a small village in Middlesex, and then how it looked in the 60s all built up and part of the Greater London suburban metro-land. Burnt Oak is on the Edgware Road, which is part of the ancient Roman road called Watling Street, shooting dead straight in a general north-western direction. It’s from Watling Street that we get the name Watling Avenue, the main road that cuts from Edgware Road (called ‘Burnt Oak Broadway’ in this section) downhill and past the Underground station towards this intersection with Orange Hill Road, and that’s where you find the library. Watling Saturday Market by the way, from the sign in the sketch, was the market that was in the parking area behind the station. I don’t know if it even still goes, and I think the stairwell down there from Watling Avenue has been closed off, but we used to go there on Saturdays and look around the stalls. The little street to the right is Park Croft, a tiny cul-de-sac that just backs up to the train lines. The library itself didn’t used to be painted in such a dark grey colour, but was white (not a very clean white admittedly) and looked quite striking. Then they painted some colourful patterns on the interior parts, and when they did a big redevelop in the 2000s they painted it an uninviting dark grey. There didn’t used to be a fence around the grassy bit, well there was a small shin-height barrier we used to jump over, so we could sit in the shade outside the library windows. I remember getting my library card as a very young kid, possibly on a visit from my infant school which was just up the road (Goldbeaters), the librarian upstairs in the kids section had brown curly hair and was friendly and kind but serious, you couldn’t make noise of course without a stern look, but I remember her teaching me all about book care (I still remember her advice that it’s not a good idea to turn the corners of pages in your books to mark your spot, and to this day I still don’t). I do remember that I forgot to take some books back when I was a kid, and it turned out they were in our loft, and the two books were a very silly children’s story about colourful teddy bears getting into trouble, and a heavy book about the Soviet manned space program. Two more completely different books you could not have chosen but that was the sort of thing I would read, I guess. As I grew I would read lots of adventure books, but I’d mostly spend ages poring over the travel books, especially the Insight Guides which have all the colourful photographs in them. New Zealand, Hong Kong, Germany’s Rhine Valley, Brazil, the fjords of Norway, Australia, Japan, the Trans-Siberian Express, there were all these places I read books about at that library but have as yet still never visited. Some day. When I was an older teen I would study in the library, especially on the evenings when it would stay open late until 9pm, I could get some quiet study done and also if I needed to study with friends, but usually it was a quiet place for myself. I would go to other libraries too, I remember studying hard for my Maths GCSE in Edgware library every day, and the big library at Hendon was a favourite for me, I’d sometimes spend all of a Saturday in there getting lost among the language books, and they also had an excellent music library where I would check out vinyls (I often used to get the old BBC Sound Effects records, for some reason). Libraries were such a big part of my growing up as a place where I could find ideas and let the imagination bubble, and I carried that on into adulthood. When I lived in Hornsey Lane, when I wasn’t working I would spend most of the day in Crouch End library. When I moved to Davis, similarly I would spend a lot of my time in the library, looking through books that might be interesting. I think it’s always a massive shame whenever public libraries close, they need to be protected. While it’s a lot smaller than it used to be, I’m glad Burnt Oak Library is still there. Probably not quiet enough for me to do my homework in now though. And I wish they paint it white again.

Behind the library it looks like they are building some sort of extension on top of Silkstream Parade, that changes the look of the street a bit. I’m interested to see how that turns out, but I hope it’s not some big redevelopment scheme like we saw in Colindale, which is a completely different place from when I left the area. I miss it round Burnt Oak, so it was good to be back for a little bit. I did do a few more drawings round here while I was back, will post later. Next up – central London sketches…

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…

bum bum

October 25, 2018October 25, 20181 Comment

This is another scene from UC Davis, showing the side of the huge Shields Library, with the metallic sculpture called “Bum Bum, You’ve Been Here Before”, which is by the artist Tio Gianbruni. I don’t think it’s ever appeared in any of my campus sketches before. There’s a lot of public art on campus, many sculptures. We’re a campus with a rich history of sculpture. ‘Bum Bum’ is found near the Arts Annex. I drew this in dark green pen. I like the dark green. Those red flowers make it feel like Spring, but it’s very much Fall. Mornings are getting cooler, though daytimes are still very much sunny and in the 80s. Shields Library is named after Peter J Shields, son of an Irish emigrant and Gold Rush rancher, who was one of the founders of UC Davis. When I first moved to Davis, before I was working at the university, I would come to the library and read medieval language books, riding on the back of my recent studies in the subject, though I never carried on. Shields is massive. Lots of places to read in peace. I miss spending hours on end in university libraries, doing research as best I could. My undergrad was spent in the large library at Queen Mary in London, which was always busy but had a great video library section (I did a course in German film). My Masters was spent mostly in the quiet corners of the Maughan Library on Chancery Lane, one of the main libraries for King’s College London, and I spent many hours every day there (though my best friend worked on the same street and there was a pub right across the road). I also spent a great deal of time in the medieval literature corners of the huge Senate House library, the central library of the University of London, near Russell Square. That really became a home from home while writing my MA dissertation (about the antagonism between English and French in the middle ages). In addition to Middle English and Old French I studied a fair bit of Old English (particularly the alliterative poetry, much of which I’ve forgotten now), Old Gothic (Wulfila and his bible), Old Saxon (the Heliand), and Old High German (Althochdeutsch; I did read the actual Abrogans, the oldest thing in German, at the beautiful Stiftsbibliothek library at the Abbey of St.Gallen in Switzerland) (I love telling people that) (makes me sound clever). Now, I draw pictures, and remember library time and dictionaries of languages I never learnt properly.

the library years

May 20, 20177 Comments

This is the Mary Stephens Library in Davis, our local public library. I like it here, and am super thankful for the fact that public libraries exist. I spent so many years in the library, looking for the exit. No when I was a kid I would go to Burnt Oak Library after school and read every book I could, mostly the ones about other countries, I always wanted to travel. I never thought I would end up in America; I do remember reading all about Australia, and Germany, and Hong Kong – there was this one book about Hong Kong I used to read over and over, and to this day I still have never been. Nor Australia. I used to read a book about Australia and learn all about exotic things such as Lamingtons, Flying Doctors, Funnel Web Spiders. I loved the library. Sometimes I would go to Hendon Library, a couple of stops away on the tube, but it was much bigger and had a music section. I would check out records there, they had a lot of old BBC Sound Effects records I used to enjoy for some reason, you know the ones with “Door Creaking” or “Thunderstorm”, I remember they would check the record for scratches before giving it to you, marking each imperfection with a yellow crayon, and don’t even think about bringing it back damaged. Hendon Library. I spent so many Saturdays in there, sat in the Languages section, they had a lot of books about Languages. That’s where I did most of my reading about Languages when I was a boy of 13 or 14, amazed that there were so many in the world, I tried to learn different alphabets and was especially enthralled with the Cyrillic alphabet, this being back in the days when the Cold War was about the end and it had such a distant and exotic feel, and I loved how different languages that used Cyrillic did it in their own different way, the special letters in Serbo-Croatian (the Serbian side anyway) that the Russians didn’t have, and then all the others across what was then the Soviet Union. I devoured those language books. History too, I would read whatever I could about anywhere, especially the remote far away places; I read one book about the history of the Falkland Islands once, cover to cover. I didn’t only read about Languages and Countries and History but also a lot of fiction, especially fantasy fiction, though my favourite books were always the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, I still have my collection of them (except a couple which I lent to my nephew many years ago) but I would read many many more at the library. Sometimes I would go to Hendon Library on a Saturday after lunch and get a bunch of books at the library, and then get the bus from The Burroughs, the 183 to Harrow, reading book after book on the way, and then in Harrow I would go to the bookshop near the St.Ann’s shopping centre and read more books, mostly about Languages, before popping by the Games Workshop to buy some colourful dice, getting a bag of chips from the chippy, and getting the 114 back to Burnt Oak. Those really were the days. When I grew into adulthood I still spent ages in the Library, like Crouch End Library when I was jobless in Hornsey, or the Maughan Library when I was studying at King’s, and of course the massive Shields Library at UC Davis, the first place I ever came to spend my time when I first moved here, reading as many books about Old English as I could find on the shelves. Libraries were always my natural home, my quiet retreat, and they still are. I stand up for libraries. This one here in Davis is near my house, and I sketched it one afternoon before picking my son up from school, with grey clouds hanging in the sky. We went in afterwards, and spent some time with the books.

the egg of good luck

August 13, 20157 Comments

Another Egghead, this one is called “Bookhead”, by Robert Arneson (1991). It is located outside the Shields Library at UC Davis. There is a legend that students touch it for good luck. Really. I think that is one of those things that people just say, and then people do because people just say, “it’s a tradition”. It’s one of those things that people say because there are no other interesting stories to tell about it. Yes, I know this old trope, I used to be a tour guide too. “Legend has it the lions in Trafalgar Square will get up and dance if Big Ben strikes thirteen,” that sort of thing. Nonsense with no evidence at all. Or “Charles Dickens used to drink here, even the plaque outside says so,” when he may have popped in for a pint on his way to his next bar; he drank in pretty much every pub in London, it’s amazing he wrote any books at all. Ok, so here’s what I would like someone at UC Davis to do. Have someone stand next to this Egghead and every time someone touches it for luck, have them give their name, and then have them come back with their mid-term results or final term grades, perhaps include their grades prior to touching the Egghead for a comparison, and then do some sort of statistical analysis to see whether touching the Egghead gave them any particular advantage over those who did not, or if it signaled a shift in their general academic progress, and maybe have them indicate if they had won any competitions or survived an accident, or if they had bad luck, like, well the opposite of those things. Then perhaps we will know the truth. In the meantime I am willing to hazard a guess that it does not give any magical gift of luck, and I might even have a sign posted next to it warning people that touching it will not give any guarantee of an upturn in your fortunes, and that UC Davis is not held responsible should your luck be not quite as good as you expected. In fact, just move the whole thing completely, put it somewhere else, on the roof maybe , somewhere nobody will be able to touch it. Then there could be a story behind it, “too many students were using ‘Luck’ to affect their grades that the UC Regents voted to have it moved to ensure academic integrity”.

Or perhaps tour guides could just not mention this obviously misleading legend at all, let it die a death, and perhaps use this opportunity to tell perhaps the most appropriate joke there is to tell when faced with a big egg in a book. What did the chicken say in the library? “Book-book-book-book…”

No? Alright, keep telling the silly ‘good luck’ story. Doesn’t make it true.

pete in the library

November 4, 2011November 4, 201112 Comments

Exciting News! For the month of November, my sketchbooks and drawings are currently being exhibited in a public display cabinet at the Davis Public Library! I’m very honoured by this. If you are in the area, please pop by and check it out! The Library was redeveloped last year and it’s a really nice place to visit. Here are some photos I took on my iPod after setting it up (apologies for the quality, I’ll take better photos!).

Many thanks to the kind folks at the Mary L Stephens Library for giving me this opportunity. I have more exhibitions in Davis coming up soon too, so I will announce those very shortly…

quiet time in the library

March 11, 2011March 11, 20115 Comments

The Mary L. Stephens public library in Davis reopened a few months ago after a big refurbishment; I popped by last weekend to check it out. I had forgotten just how much I love libraries. I used to spend hours and hours in libraries, searching through the books, letting my imagination go wild in silence. When I was a kid, I would go to Burnt Oak library and spend ages reading books about space and dinosaurs and languages. As I grew up the love of libraries never left me. I spent a lot of time at this library when I first came to Davis. It was nice being back. I think libraries are incredibly important for our societies. In these days of budget cuts and ‘austerity’, I’m more thankful than ever that we have them. It’s amazing, in a way; while record companies vehemently fight tooth and nail to stop illegal downloading of songs and file sharing of copyrighted material, it’s perfectly normal for us to go to a library and borrow for FREE any published book they have. It’s a lesson to those moneygrabbers; free lending libraries have usually helped rather than hurt the publishing industry. Nowadays we have the internet of course, the ‘reliable’ Wikipedias and Googles and other such instant sources if information, on our iPads and iPods and Kindles and Blackberries and Raspberries and other smart-fruits, people might think libraries are less important, just places for people with nowhere to go. I however think that a society which wilfully loses its libraries loses its link to culture, learning and freedom of thought. In Davis, for one, the library seems to be as popular as ever. Long may our libraries last.