There are certain themed subjects I like to fill my sketchbooks with if I can. The old urban sketchers rule that every sketchbook needs a dinosaur and a classic car, well I try my best there, even if the dinosaur is me. Fire hydrants, I try to sketch ’em all, like Pokemon Go. I never see people out playing that any more. Pubs, especially old pubs, I try to draw as many as I can especially in England, because they are all disappearing, like the Pokemon Go players. Tube stations, they might not be disappearing but some of the older ones are getting knocked down and expanded into bigger more modern stations, and I like those old historic buildings. Some of them. The other thing I always feel a great need to sketch are bookshops, independent bookshops preferably, as they play a major role in their local communities and are also constantly under peril. Before moving out here I worked for a small bookshop in Finchley in north London for a few years (not in the shop bit, but the office in the basement) and it was a good place to work (and I like Finchley as an area), but also a real insight into how hard it is for small businesses in the face of current market forces. They ended up closing less than two years after I moved out here and I wish I had at least sketched the store for posterity. Many other small bookshops were closing at the time, and replaced with what, more estate agents? So fast forward twenty and I’m pleased to see that, over here and over there too, there are still many small bookshops hanging on, and in many communities really finding their place again. The first place I worked when I came to California was a small independent bookshop, the Avid Reader, and they faced the challenge of Borders and Amazon until Borders went away and Amazon didn’t. They are still there (with new owners now) and always busy, I’d say one of the most important places in downtown Davis. However one of the first bookshops I went into when we first moved to America 20 years ago was this one, Moe’s on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley. It’s a big store with new and used books over several floors, and feels like an old-school well-used bookshop. Anyway, Summer holidays had started and so one day I went down to Berkeley with my seventeen-year-old to get out of Davis and look around Berkeley, we spent our time walking about campus, visiting that big games shop, spending ages in record shops, and looking around Moe’s, among other shops. We were having those massive waffles at the place next door, and while waiting for them I dashed across the street to start a sketch of the bookshop. The big red and white awning is characteristic of this store. Inside I found a big old illustrated book about old myths and witches that I used to have when I was a kid, I would be obsessed not only with the stories but mostly with the drawings, which would inspire me to draw and write my own stories. I should have bought it, but instead I bought a copy of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda for some reason. I had to stop myself buying this big illustrated book of Celtic legends (Celtic as in Irish and Scottish, not as in the football club from Glasgow, it wasn’t full of pictures of Henrik Larsson or Roy Aitken). I had to save some money to spend in Amoeba music. I’m glad to see Moe’s is still there and doing well, and now it’s another bookshop in my sketchbook. I see this though and it makes me hungry for those waffles.

Here are some sketches from the Amtrak train we took down to Berkeley from Davis. Above I am practicing my perspective as I always do on the train. There’s California outside the window, the view going over the Delta (the yellow bit on the right is higher than the eye-level yellow bit on the left, perspective fans, because of ‘hills’). It was a bit bumpy but I enjoyed sketching quickly in that brush pen. I sketched a couple of characters too, below, I mean passengers not characters, they are not in a story. Well maybe they are in a story, but who am I too judge. I’ve done a lot of quick people sketching this year, it’s good practice. I heard that they have recently ended the UC Berkeley-UC Davis shuttle connecting the two campuses, which is terrible news, especially as I never took it in twenty years of living here.