I was walking through old North Davis on the way home when the shadow of this chimney across this little red house on 6th caught my eye and I had to draw it. I have that book about all the old houses in Old North Davis by John Lofland, but it’s in a different room right now and I can’t be bothered to go and look this one up. I do like red wooden houses. They remind me that I’m in America; I wouldn’t see red wooden houses in London, but I would see them in the things I associated with America when I was a kid, which was namely Richard Scarry books, and the A-Team, and I don’t really associate them with the A-Team (unless it’s an old barn that B.A., Face and co have been locked up in, along with a bunch of tractors, and they somehow build a tank and burst their way out, remember they used to do that? We would always play that part of the show on the playground at school). It also kind of reminds me of Denmark; back when I spent a summer in the Danish countryside picking red strawberries, there were many little wooden houses, long and low, many had thatched roofs, some of them must have been red. They would always have the Dannebrog flying from a pole, that’s the Danish flag. But no the main reason it makes me think of Denmark is every time I look at this sketch from the corner of my eye, it the red couple with the pinstripes puts me in mind of the great 1986 Danish kit made by Hummel that was worn at the Mexico 86 World Cup. Always a football kit reference with me. I’ve drawn a lot of the Old North neighbourhood over the years (those are the blocks after 5th Street, up to about 7th or 8th, in between about B and G). It’s a nice little area to stroll. This was on the weekend after my birthday, I must have gone downtown for a milkshake or something.

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.

First page of a new Moleskine watercolour sketchbook, and this was an afternoon get-out-of-the-house bike ride down into Old North Davis, the edge of it anyway. I like the old historic houses in this part of the world, so many stories. At least I assume they have so many stories, to be honest none of them are any of our business. I do really like John Lofland’s book about Old North Davis, in which he goes street by street, building by building, and tells us when they were built, original owners, whether the house was located somewhere else before (around here, moving house sometimes means just that). This one is just outside the Old North Davis zone covered in his book but it’s still lovely. I’ve been running more in this area, south of my house. I like to run earlier in the morning, and listen to podcasts as I go. I’ve realized a few things about podcasts. I am very picky, like with a lot of things in life. I will almost never listen to a podcast recommended to me by anyone. If the voices of the people presenting it are too similar, I can’t listen. Similarly, if they are too different in terms of their pace or volume (particularly true in the current world where podcast guests are all over the place, zooming in on different microphone set-ups) I struggle to listen. If there is too much production – too much incidental music, I can’t listen. If there are ads, well if they’re about 30 seconds long I can skip them easily on my iPod, but if it’s one where the host actually stops mid-interview and starts reading out the ad themselves (and not in an obviously pre-recorded, different sound kind of way), which is far far more common on American radio than on British radio I note (as someone who can’t bare to listen to the radio), I can’t listen. If one of the hosts or guests has a tendency to pause before responding often, making it seem to the podcast listener that maybe their iPod has gone on the blink, and those pauses aren’t edited out, I can’t listen. If one of the hosts has a very whiny voice, I can’t listen. If a guest changes subject mid-sentence in a kind of – and I know I do this all the time, like right now for example – just like that fashion, I can’t listen. If the hosts swear, well if they are British I can get it, there’s a rhythm and context to it, but if it’s an American swearing it sounds all wrong, like they’re trying to be hard, and I can’t listen. If one of the speakers has the sort of voice that when you are in bed and listening to fall asleep to is totally fine, but when you are running and there is traffic but you can’t turn it up because the next speaker has a booming or whiny voice, well I can’t listen. If the guests on the show talk for too long before the next question by the presenter, I can’t listen. If the guest is speaking down an obviously tinny phone line like some Eurosport commentator in the CupWinners Cup in the early 90s, I can’t listen. If the speaker just spends ages listing things they don’t like, pet peeves, in a repetitive and predictable and self-aware way, even if they are being ironic, which let’s face it is worse, I can’t listen. If the speaker goes on about Arsenal too much, I can’t listen. If they always mispronounce French place names, I can’t listen. If they think Snickers is a better name than Marathon, I can’t listen. Etc and so on. I’m very picky. However I have discovered that if you listen to any podcast, any podcast at all , in 0.5x speed, it sounds infinitely better because suddenly you are listening to a bunch of people drunk in the pub slurring about medieval history or decreasing rates of XG in the Bundesliga, and who wouldn’t enjoy that? Alternatively listen at 1.5x speed, and you get them talking really fast, which then makes me run fast and I’m zippingaboutallovertheplacelikeMr.Rush, which helps my pace-per-mile. But never listen to anything on 2x speed, because that will hurt your head.