Toulouse: two lose in the semi-finals

August 6, 2026Leave a comment

The Longest World Cup Ever is over, at last, and I am done with football for a while. FIFA and its All-Powerful Leader, He-Who-Must-Be-Shown-Onscreen-In-The-13th-Minute-Of-Every-Game, have been very quiet since it ended, nothing controversial happening, very low profile. Maybe this will be the last ever World Cup. It’s just the shirts I like anyway these days. The game itself, well good games are few and far between. Certainly the World Cup Final was one of the most boring games I have ever pretended to enjoy. I am glad Spain won that final, Argentina were about as anti-football a team in that game since the Argentina of the 1990 final, unsporting thugs. I didn’t sketch the Final, as it came at the end of a very very busy Urban Sketching Symposium in Toulouse, and anyway who would sketch that game, better to just paint my page and watch it dry. The Third Place Game between England and France was unmissable but I missed most of it, because those games are usually missable, and besides I was busy. I did however watch and sketch what I could of the Semi-Finals. I will post the Symposium story and my Toulouse and London sketches soon (and then get back to catching up from 2025, by which time it will be 2028 and time for the Euros). For now tough it seems a good moment to close out my World Cup documentation. I arrived in Toulouse on July 14, which we call Bastille Day but the French call the Fête Nationale. They held the fireworks the night before on the July 13, and this night was all about the football. I watched it in a bar right across the street from my hotel, O’Brien’s, with fellow sketche Kalina. It was full of locals dressed in the colours of Les Bleus (ie, blue), some draped in French flags, lots of bières blondes (it was happy hour, buy one get one free), and a lot of nervous anticipation. I was probably expecting more noise and atmosphere, as France had been the most exciting team in the tournament and I fully expected them to win the whole thing with goals and panache, but people were not getting carried away. Not like in 2002, when they were on top of the world and the atmosphere in France was triumphal to say the least (I was living in Aix that year), until they completely flopped in the group stage. It was a bit more like 1998, I was there for the semi-final then as well, watching it at my friend Roland’s apartment, and people did not want to get too carried away, until the final whistle blew and wow, they were actually in the Final, and would play Brazil, in Paris, and boy did they celebrate that night. Well this night felt a bit more like that, but with the opposite outcome. Even at the start, when the national anthem La Marseillaise played on the TV, it was fairly subdued, save a few people singing the rousing part “aux armes, nos citoyens!”. I had been expecting that scene in Casablanca, or even Escape to Victory, but it was more like the opening to All You Need Is Love. It was a quiet game too, France could not lay a glove on Spain, who were a defensive masterclass without being boring. I had to add in a few yells at the screen on my page, but even they didn’t really happen (nobody says “Zut Alors!” in France, except maybe in the Tricolore textbooks). It became clear that France were not getting back into this game, so there was very little edge-of-your-seat tension, and people seemed a bit relieved it was over by the end. At least France have won two World Cups in our lifetimes (or one, based on the ages of many in the bar), so it’s not like with England and their famous ‘Years-Of-Hurt-Ometer’ which has now been reset to ‘At Least 64’). After the game, many left but the bar did not empty and we stayed and sketched and had fun conversations with some locals, and it was nice.

I did watch the second semi-final, of course, as it was England vs Argentina, and yeah, I am disappointed with the result. I missed half of the first half because I was at the Symposium Opening Reception, but ducked out early to a pub called The George and Dragon, which is about as sure a place to watch an England game as you can get in Toulouse. About half the people in there, maybe less, were in England shirts, the rest were either not really watching, or were French but cheering for Argentina, mostly because Messi, or maybe because they wanted to play England in the 3rd Place game, if they cared about that game. Mostly they wee not that bothered. England were winning for quite a while, and then they weren’t, and then it was extra time, and shortly before the end they weren’t winning even more, and I went back to my hotel to get some pre-Symposium sleep. Football is rubbish anyway, it’s only the shirts that I like. The Premier League will be starting again soon, how excited am I, ooh I can’t contain myself.

BYT I drew these on the reverse side of the accordion sketchbook that I drew the USA-Belgium game on, in the previous post. I got that sketchbook in Poznan in the Sympsoium goody-bag, and I don;t really like the bumpy watercolour paper much.

Anyway, I was in France and London recently and I have so many sketches to post. And then after that, catch up with 2025 and the first half of 2026. I can’t stop sketching.

with the crowd on G St, watching the footy

July 11, 20263 Comments

And so, in the end, it was not to be for the US Men’s National Team, commonly called the USMNT (they really need a nickname). Three weeks of hope and glory, days in the sunshine, and definitely maybe. Admittedly a lot of the good feeling had been unnecessarily dampened by the whole red card-suspension-phone call-suspension not-so-mysteriously suspended thing. Belgium were well up for it, in their Magritte-inspired kits, “ceci n’est pas un carton rouge”. In the end, the US players were just not as good as the Belgians, Champions League players against MLS. Maybe the whole unnecessary charade got in their heads, but they were not up for this game, even with the Seattle crowd behind them, who only two weeks ago had seen them swat Australia aside, MLS players against A-League. All three hosts went out in the same round, but not in the same way. Canada punched above their weight but were ultimately undone by the best team in Africa, Morocco; Mexico had a barn-storming game against England at the Azteca in one of the wildest matches in the tournament, loved by both sides, and unlucky not to get a result; the US lost 4-1 with a whimper, even with their new star Balogun on the field. None of the nonsense was his fault, really. A lot of people were not unhappy that the US went out, but it is a shame for all those fans of soccer here, but hey, now you all know what it’s like, “it’s the HOPE that kills ya”, they say, ain’t that the truth. If England are like the Spurs of international football, the US men’s team is like the Crystal Palace (or until Palace started winning things last year), or maybe the Newcastle, but with fewer shirtless fans. I don’t know. I really liked the 2002 team, with big man Friedel in goal, Brian McBride as the American Teddy Sheringham, and the youthful energy ball Landon Donovan (I’m not gonna make any comments about his barnet), plus Alexei Lalas already had retired along with his beard but hadn’t yet discovered the podcast, which hadn’t been invented yet. That was the team I watched with my then-girlfriend-later-wife from California, and they beat the mighty Portugal 3-2 in a super wild game. The USMNT now have some more well-known players, household names over here like Pulisic, and the other ones. That wavy red and white kit was popular, not as popular as that Mexico kit, but a lot of people were wearing it. Maybe they still will, now they have been knocked out, or maybe fans will go back to one of the less see-you-coming-a-mile-off kits.

We watched the game downtown on the big screen at G Street. They have been setting it up for the US games, along with a special Davis Soccer Fest full of activities and music, making use of that public space we have down there now. It’s a good community, Davis, and there are people out there that really make stuff happen like this, and people that are out to support it. I wanted to make sure I was there this time, so we went down and saw that the crowd was about three times bigger than the one for the Australia game a couple of weeks or so before. Was that only two and a half weeks before, it felt like a year, this World Cup has gone on for so long. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t World Cup. It Has Always Been World Cup. Even when it ends, it will never end, and you might go four years without a bloated money-grabbing morally bankrupt World Cup and you might think that the days of the bloated money-grabbing morally bankrupt World Cup have finally gone and we can all move on to some other sport, when suddenly the bloated money-grabbing morally bankrupt World Cup is back but this time even more bloated and morally bankrupt, but still we eat it up, we love it, because we remember Maradona and Pele and Nobby Stiles dancing. I am sick of World Cup, but I love World Cup. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a football boot stamping on a man’s ankle, forever, frozen in a VAR check that can never be decided. Hydration Breaks, me arse. They are advert breaks, nothing more. If they are going to have them, at least have them at moments like they used to do on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, you know, when Chris Tarrant (or whoever hosted it here) would have them answer a question, final answer, and then say “we’ll find out after the break!” Well the ref should do that when issuing a card, put his hand in his pocket, slow as you like, and then look at the camera and say “see you after the break!”. There was a moment in the France Morocco game when I genuinely thought the ref was going to do that, just as Mbappe was trying to take his penalty, he kept stopping it, and making him wait. Maybe he should have phoned a friend.

But I love the Davis community, coming together to watch the game like this. In my first summer here in 2006 it felt like nobody cared about the World Cup, except for my mate in the football shirt shop, and some of the faculty in our department. The only channels I could watch it on were all in Spanish, and as I didn’t speak Spanish it made it much more interesting, and I picked up some interesting vocabulary (I already knew ‘gooooooooooooooooooooooooool’, of course, but I loved that every time David Beckham would get the ball they would call him “Beckham, El Spice-Boy!” and laugh. It was one of my favourite World Cups, 2006, ending in that amazing Zidane headbutt to end his international career. One of our faculty did not get live TV but had a VCR, so I used to tape the games every day and bring them into him to take home and watch them later, and he’d bring me a tape back each day to do the same. I still have that video tape, in a drawer in my office, and now none of us have VCRs it is a little historical artefact, and one day centuries later someone will find that tape, invent a new VCR to watch it, and wonder why the Mexican commentators kept calling that English player “El Spice Boy”, maybe they will assume he was some sort of galactic spice trader before taking up sports, I don’t know. This is the sort of thing the World Cup brings up, it truly is the beautiful game.

I drew all this while watching the game, but I added in the colours when I got home, because it was quite crowded and I was stood next to a tree and next to my wife. I draw fast and wrote down what I could. We did however go home for the second half, having seen enough, we watched the rest sat on the sofa, and I wrote down some more of the commentary. It was good to be around the fans though, all rooting for the USMNT (they need a better nickname than that). I like sketching big people events like this, especially if they are all dressed in bright colours, and especially if they all stay where they are for a while. Oh well, USMNT, we’ll watch the Women’s team next, at the Women’s World Cup in Brazil in 2027, a nice normal size World Cup of 32 teams, as it should be. This World Cup though will keep on going on, and on, and on, until in the end all that is left are the ants and the dust, and then, England will finally win it. It’s coming home.

Watching Haaland in Soccer and Lifestyle

June 28, 20261 Comment

The World Cup continues. Still during that first round of group games, I went to the local football shirt shop, Soccer and Lifestyle, to watch the second half of Norway vs Iraq. I sketched the store; the last time I had sketched inside was in the previous location was also during a World Cup, but back in 2014, twelve years ago. That is a long time ago. I drew this all while the game was going on, but coloured it in at home. There was a woman in there wearing a yellow and green Mali shirt, with ‘F Kanoute’ on the back, which I though was incredible. I really liked Freddie Kanouté, who played for Spurs for a brief period in the mid 2000s, and I told them I actually saw him play and even score, at White Hart Lane in 2004. There are a lot of good shirts in that shop. I bought my shirt for the tournament there, the Japan away kit, a couple of weeks ago. That one is white with a black collar but has really nice colourful pinstripes. They were out of the USA shirts already, they had sold out before the first USA game. There is a ‘Soccer Fest’ on G St before every US game, and a big screen is set up to watch them. We saw the second game there (I’ll post the sketches later). The USA home shirt this year is a zany affair, red and white made to look a bit like the flag waving, and be reminiscent of the amazing 1994 kit. I don’t like the 2026 one much, but if they do well, it’ll probably end up iconic. The game that I saw in the shop was a bit one-sided, with Norway being the one side, not surprising since Haaland is on the team.

So, flashback to twelve years ago, watching France vs Switzerland…

Hop you are enjoying the World Cup. It’s big and bloated and there are too many games, and I hate the ‘hydration breaks’ which are just blatantly obviously advert breaks (well done America, you broke soccer), but there have been some good moments already. Messi closed out the group stage with goal #6 for him, and DR Congo won their first World Cup game (against Uzbekistan admittedly) to qualify for the knockouts. The ‘Round of 32’ started today, and Canada beat South Africa with a late winner. There are a lot of games still to come, a lot of ‘hydration breaks’, a lot of Beckham and Messi adverts…

Some Time in Soho

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026Leave a comment

Back in London from Berlin, I rested for a day before heading down into central London on Friday for some more sketching before heading back to California. I had a standing ‘groundling’ ticket to see Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre, but since it looked like rain and I was not up for a trek to the South Bank, I decided to go down to Soho and sketch around there before meeting up with my friend Roshan. If I’m going to stand for a few hours I may as well be sketching. I like exploring Soho. I made my way to St.Anne’s Churchyard on Wardour Street. I always liked the steeple of St. Anne’s. Many years ago when my mate Rob lived in Soho at the end of the 90s we could see the steeple from his living room window. It reminded me of a Teletubby. They have those big round ear things, if you remember, I didn’t really watch Teletubbies. I stood in the Churchyard and sketched the colourful bunting, love a bit of bunting, especially love the word ‘bunting’, it’s so ‘England’. Takes time to draw though. While sketching, two women (Romanian I think, I recognized some words) came in and sat in the churchyard dragging oversized suitcases with them. One of them was very noisy, yelling at the other in a loud raspy voice. It was a bit distracting, but you don’t really expect silence in Soho. I stood next to a tree, and soon an old man came up and started throwing bird seed on the ground, right in front of me. I didn’t think I thought I was a bird, but right away several dozen pigeons came out of the trees and surrounded me. This would make a good magic trick in a story, I thought, the old man throws birdseed, you are surrounded by pigeons and then VOOM you are gone, transported to a pigeon dimension. Actually that would be quite a bad story, the sort of one that would have been made in the 1970s and replayed right up to the 90s in the 5:10pm slot on BBC1 kids TV. I’d still watch it. At least no pigeons pooed on me. I was going to say ‘SHOO’ but remembered that this is an anagram of ‘SOHO’ and I thought, better not, magical anagrams and all that. It didn’t rain, a few droplets, so I drew the steeple as well. It doesn’t really look like a Teletubby, now I think about it. I looked up their website; St. Anne’s was built by William Talman, who was ‘clerk or works’ to Sir Christopher Wren, and consecrated in 1686. Then the Blitz came and destroyed it in 1940. It was rebuilt in 1990. I didn’t go inside, but being outside under the bunting was enough, like being in a village churchyard.

I remember coming down there as a teenager in the early 90s wandering about exploring London, when I would occasionally sketch but mostly just explore the city, make a map of it all in my head. This corner of Soho was a bit like stepping into a different, dangerous world, a Dickensian London but set in the 70s, all sex shops and seedy cinemas and prostitutes openly hanging about on a Saturday lunchtime. The corner below, leading into that little alley of Walkers Court just off Brewer Street, was one of the seediest spots, I remember being shocked at all the neon lights and dark doorways leading to god-knows-what, it was a world that I wasn’t part of and definitely didn’t want to be. Rupert Street facing it had market stalls and newsagents alongside shops selling bondage gear and ladies of negotiable affection calling out to passers-by, and passing down the narrow Tisbury Court back up to the relative normality of Old Compton felt like a brief passage through a frightening dimension. I found it fascinating that this was a real place in the middle of the city, and yet also just another neighbourhood where people lived their normal lives. I remember at school, we were tasked with doing a project about ‘community’, and I struggled for ideas, but I remember walking through this area (I think it was with my uncle who was going to a cool movie poster store down the street) and realizing there was a community living in Soho, even here in this bizarre world of neon lights flashing ‘girls! girls! girls!’ and shifty men in doorways. Soho is a blend of communities but it is and always has been a residential area, a village in the middle of the city. London has a lot of those. A few years later when I was at university and my mate Rob lived on the corner of Rupert Street and Winnett Street with his girlfriend, it was still an area of sex shops but already seemed less scary, and we would pass through Walkers Court on the way to the supermarket to buy milk and tea, not paying any mind to the red light district we were passing by. I remember that we stayed up and watched the whole Star Wars trilogy (back when there was only one trilogy), while from his kitchen window you could catch a glimpse into other windows, where there were other fantasies going on, some in full view (did these windows not have curtains?). These days, this part of Soho feels quite different. There are a few sex shops and the big green Soho’s Book Store on the corner of Walkers Court feels less like a seedy emporium and more like a cheeky part of Soho’s adult-themed heritage, but this mostly this area feels like it has gone upmarket now with fashion stores and such. Raymond Revuebar, the big theatre and strip club that I felt was the centre point of Soho, opened by Paul Raymond in 1958 but finally closed in 2004, having stood lighting up this corner for decades. I vaguely recall going to a gig there in about 99 or 2000, or maybe that was at Madame JoJo’s next door. When my friend lived around there he actually met Paul Raymond, and said he really was the King of Soho. There’s a fashionable clothes shop there now. I stood on the corner of Rupert Street to sketch this, thinking about all of this past, and how everything moves on.

Below, the spread of Wardour Street, just a few steps away from the last sketch. I feel like I spent a lot of the 90s down this street too, a busy but relatively narrow thoroughfare splitting Soho in two. I stood in a precarious location to draw this, a traffic island that has been converted as a parking spot for those electric bikes you see all over the place, with a narrow bike lane to my right. As I took a quick picture of the scene before starting to sketch, a policeman came up and said, “ello ello ello, what’s going on ‘ere then, you gotta be careful sah, there is ‘orrible tea-leaves on bikes who will nick your dog-and-bone, sunshine”. Actually he didn’t say it like that, my head was still in old 1970s films. He just said to eb careful taking pictures with my phone as there are people on bikes who will snatch it from my hands very quickly. I knew this is a particular plague of London these days and have been quite careful with this, though especially here you can’t be too careful, and I actually smiled and felt genuinely grateful that there are police out there watching for this and warning people. Though what I said was, “oh it’s ok, this is my old phone”. which it was – I used my old phone when out and about in London, just in case – but I was grateful and thanked him. Still, I held tight onto my sketchbook as I drew the scene, out of the way of the e-bike bandits. Wardour Street was always one of my favourite streets, and it contains The Ship, one of my favourite pubs in London. It used to contain The Intrepid Fox as well, the best rock pub in the city, where I sometimes would meet up with my friends from the Hellfire Club (on Oxford Street) and attempt to listen to figure out what each other was saying over the loud heavy metal music. It was sad when that place closed (it actually moved to New Oxford Street before closing for good). For a little while in ’96 I went out with someone from Italy, and she used to work in an arcade further down Wardour Street near Leicester Square, before she switched jobs to work in Las Vegas, not the city but the arcade on the left of this sketch, which still has the same sign as it had 30 years ago, a Soho relic. Cinema House is next door; this area is at the heart of the British film industry too, or at least it was (Cinema House has a fashionable clothes store now, because there aren’t too many of those). What was the Intrepid Fox next door is now a steak house, but you can still see the old stone sign of The Intrepid Fox on the outside corner. The sky was looking nice, above Oxford Street in the far distance. You can just about make out the Telecom Tower poking through on the right (follow the arrow). For some reason I remember being about 19 or 20, walking down here on a late afternoon having been to the Virgin Megastore, where I’d bought myself the Beatles Complete (Guitar/Vocal Edition), a massive book with all the Beatles songs in it (which I still have), and treating myself to a pastry and some tea at a nice cafe as a self-reward for finishing up all of my college projects and homework, and that being quite a nice moment down here. It often feels a little too busy or a little too cramped to stop and sketch on the corners around here, but I’m glad I spent the time looking at it again. Soho is always worth sketching. I’ve been back to London since this trip last summer, and I was in Soho sketching again just last month. By this rate I post my sketches on this blog, those will probably be up by about 2028. Click on the image to see it bigger.

Poznań (Part 8) – Sunday morning

February 14, 2026Leave a comment

The Symposium was over, and it was the last morning in Poznań. I had a train to catch to Germany, but still a bit of Poland to sketch. I slept ok after getting back from the closing reception and the drink-and-draw that went on well after midnight, but still got up early to go out into the sunshine and finally draw that colourful row of chocolate-box buildings on the main Stary Rynek square. I drew fast and used my fountain pen; I didn’t have time to colour in there so did that later, but I drew a lot in a short amount of time. It was so nice out. There were still some sketchers about, and I even finally bumped into Joe Bean who I’d been trying to meet with for a few days. So many people at this symposium, it was hard to find everyone. I wonder how many others I didn’t get a chance to talk to this time. The little stalls in the arches were setting up, it would have been a really good day to just spend all day in the square sketching, but I was ready to move on from Poznań, interesting city though it was, Berlin was calling me. I did have time to do one more sketch below of a fountain I’d wanted to draw, which again I had to colour in later, but then I had to dash back to the hotel and get a cab to the train station.

Here are a couple more Poznań sketches, that I started but didn’t draw until later. Some graffiti I had spotted while about town, I really liked the two-headed cartoon pig. There’s the sign for Zabka, the little mini-market conveniently located everywhere, I missed that when I left. And below, I had really wanted to draw one of the nice manhole covers, these are the things I like to look out for in new cities. So that was my trip to Poland, a week in a very interesting country that had nice people, great architecture, good trains, convenient stores, fresh beer, good food, an attractive sounding language full of long words with frightening spelling. I’ll definitely be back to explore more some day, maybe I won’t leave 27 years in between trips this time.

And so, on to Berlin.

Let’s Gdańsk

January 31, 20262 Comments

Time, finally, to post my sketches from last summer in Poland. This is what I should have done in September, but I was busy, then I was busy in October, very busy in November, December’s a write-off, and well January is almost finished. See how quickly time flies. While I was in Poland I kept a daily diary, which I have not been doing for years, but I did so because I knew I’d probably post months later and forget all the details. Now I have forgotten where that diary is. I’ll do my best. I have always wanted to go to Gdańsk (which I may or may not write with the little accent above the n), since I knew it was an important port in the Solidarity era of the 80s, and also a really pretty Hanseatic city on the Baltic Sea. I had this idea over twenty years ago that I would like to do a tour of the whole Baltic, starting and finishing in Copenhagen, exploring all the different but connected cities and cultures along its shores, and drawing them too. It’s something I’ll never get around to (and I will probably never get to visit St. Petersburg) but it’s a fun dream project. Gdańsk was one of the big attractions of that project. It seemed like a lot of people didn’t really know about it, though it’s more popular today. When I heard that the Urban Sketching Symposium would be in Poland in 2025 (in Poznań), I knew I had to take the opportunity to attend and finally visit Gdańsk, so I booked a couple of nights at a nice hotel in the city centre and flew over from London. I was definitely not disappointed, and my sketchbook got a lot of exercise. I had been dreaming of drawing the view above, the view from the banks of the Motława river, with the big pirate ship (one of two that give tours) moored on the quai. I woke up early to go and sketch this, taking about two and a half hours to draw it all, though I did bump into a couple of urban sketchers from the US who I’ve known for years (Amber Sausen and Daniel Green) which was really nice. I was surprised not to see more sketchers about, since many of us who were in Poland for the symposium were doing our tours of the country before the big event. There was a big pre-symposium meeting hosted by the local USk group on the weekend before, that I missed. I enjoyed sketching this, a big relaxing panorama, but it was a lot of windows, and a beautiful day. I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, but my mind does sometimes go to all the places I miss out on seeing because I’m sat there sketching. When I was done, I walked down the river a little bit more to draw one of Gdansk’s most well-known buildings, the tall 15th century crane standing high above the river. It was built in 1444 – it was destroyed in 1945 in the Siege of Gdansk (quite a lot went down in that year) but it was restored in the 50s, and then completely renovated just a few years ago. I stood in the ever-decreasing shade next to the moving footbridge (it swivels in the middle of the river to let the big ship pass by).

I had arrived in Gdansk the evening before, and this was my first time back in Poland since 1998. The country has changed an enormous amount since then, but so have I. Poland is so much more modern than it was in the 1990s, but so am I, with my iPhone and my credit card. I went to an ATM to get some cash out at the airport when I landed, but the options of denominations were confusing; I would have ended up taking out hundreds of dollars without realizing it, but I noticed the exchange rate and decided against. I exchanged some dollars at a bureau de change, so I at least had some cash (I was shortchanged by 20 zloty, though that isn’t much), but everywhere took credit cards even for small purchases so I hardly used any cash while I was in Poland, unlike in Berlin where a lot of places said ‘cash only’. Meanwhile back in 1998 I had all my cash for the trip in a little plastic tube around my neck, I had no phone, a cheap film camera and a small backpack with a few changes of clothes for a five week trip around 12 countries. I travelled light enough in 2025 though, but I had more sketching supplies. I didn’t sketch much in the 90s, but I wrote a lot on that trip. As soon as I left my hotel to walk about in the evening I was in love with the city, and knew I’d enjoy my time in Poland (which I really did). I had expected it to be full of drunken tourists from the north of England (not just the north, other regions’ drunken tourists are available), or huge groups of American college kids but it was full of Polish families, many with young with kids, visiting from other regions of Poland. Poland, by the way, is a really big country, much bigger than you think. I could spend a few weeks exploring it all and see a real diversity of cities and regions. In fact I realized that I actually knew very little about those regions, which was highlighted when I went for lunch that day at a ‘Kashubian’ restuarant near my hotel. I wondered where Kashubia was, I thought it was maybe in the Caucasus or somewhere, until I realized like an ignorant tourist that I was actually in Kashubia, and this was the local food. After a bit of reading I discovered that Gdansk actually is not technically in Kashubia, with that region being just to the west, but it’s still considered Kashubian. For a long time Gdansk was ‘Danzig’, a German-speaking Prussian city, but that’s just one part of this interesting city’s long and complex history.

The first sketch I did in the city was of that pirate ship down on the river. Yes, I realize my ignorance of tall-masted boats by calling it a pirate ship, but hey I like pirates, I used to dress up as a pirate and go to the Swashbuckler’s Ball in Portland, and this my friends is a pirate ship. Standing on the quai in quickly fading light I could not get super detailed, but I was very excited to have this be my first sketch in Poland. The first of many, a great many. You can see though that the horrible new watercolour Moleskine paper gives it a rough and bumpy feel, it wasn’t much fun to draw on either, and I’m not using those Moleskines any more (unless I can find some with the older, slightly smoother blend of paper), I’ll stick with the Hahnemühles. On this trip I brought both brands, a landscape Moleskine and a portrait Hahnemuhle (the umlaut was there but it kept rolling off), you can see I used the smoother but still slightly textured Hahnemuhle for the crane sketch. That’s enough paper talk, maybe I will do a post about my materials for this trip another time.

As a pirate, and wearing my Portland Timbers football shirt, I naturally had to take a trip on the pirate ship. There are two of them, and the one I drew the night before was called the ‘Czarna Perła’ which I think means ‘Black Pearl, and if that’s not a pirate ship name then my name is Kapitan Jacek Wróbel. This was my tourist time, I wasn’t going to sketch (except for that very quick one above – I can’t help myself, but look at that bumpy paper, it looks dirty but it’s not). I went from the cool shade to the sunny deck to enjoy the view as we toured up the river towards the historic shipyards. I got a nice big beer, and we were told all the stories about Gdansk’s maritime history, its importance as a Hanseatic League city, its shipbuilding industry, and as the birthplace of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement led by the magnificently moustached labour leader Lech Wałęsa. I remember hearing about him on the news as a kid in the 80s, and he appeared to be a lion of a man. It was in these shipyards that the old Soviet bloc started to fall, and Gdansk is very proud of their role in history. I didn’t get off the ship at the destination in Westerplatte to explore and sketch the big old shipyard cranes, instead I stayed on the pirate ship to have another beer and listen to the Polish folk singer with his guitar, I sketched him in the small brown sketchbook below. He was really good. There is a little bit of industrial architecture in the background.

Below is a sketch I did on the fairly busy main pedestrian street of Długa, the ‘Long Lane’ I enjoyed all the flags, but I kept this quick and sketchy. It leads up to the ‘Golden Gate’ (Brama Złota), but the tall tower you see in the distance is the, wait let me look this one up, it’s called the ‘Przedbramie ulicy Długiej’. Now one thing I must point out, I am usually pretty good with European languages and do a fairly passable job with pronunciations, but when I see Polish my brain just says ‘leave it Pete, you’ve embarrassed yourself enough!’. I had this Berlitz European Phrase Book when I was a kid and I got my head around Hungarian and Russian, but sheepishly slowed the book when I would read the Polish pages. I love hearing the language, listening to people speak it was beautiful, and I really appreciate its consonant heavy words and those letters with diacritics you don’t see anywhere else (like that l with a line through it that sounds like a ‘w’). If I ever get a chance to take some Polish lessons where I can hear it and say the words out loud, I would like to do it. Reading it though I get a block, because I have to hear it out loud (I have a similar issue with Irish, even though it’s actually a more phonetic written language than English; it’s probably why I can’t read music). So when I see ‘Przedbramie ulicy Długiej’ I know it’s not really that difficult, but my brain says its deep water and you can’t swim well, so can you look up the English name? Well, it looks like it is called the ‘Foregate of Long Lane’ but part of the building is the ‘Katownia’ or, er, ‘Torture Chamber’. Moving swiftly on. The other part of this sketch is just what I could draw while eating my Kashubian lunch, which incidentally was chicken soup with dumplings (they love a dumpling here), followed by potato ‘plince’ with cream cheese and trout. It was delicious. I enjoyed it so much I went back to the hotel and had a two hour nap. I must have needed it!

I have quite a lot more Gdańsk sketches to share before we get to the Poznań stories, but first I have to show the in-flight sketch from Stansted to Gdańsk, reading Agatha Christie on Ryanair like a boss. I watched Poland unfold below me and wanted to visit each village, though I knew I’d never be able to pronounce their names. Check back for part two.

Burnt Oak Broadway, corner of Stag Lane

January 10, 2026January 9, 2026Leave a comment

Here are a couple of drawings from Burnt Oak that I did last summer. Specifically, Burnt Oak Broadway. I mentioned in a previous post that Edgware High Street was part of Edgware Road which is part of Watling Street which was an ancient Roman Road running from Dover to Wroxeter, passing through London and running in a north-westerly straight line, give or take. The A5, in modern parlance. It was probably a route before the Romans came as well, used by the ancient Britons, and we don’t really know what it was called before the Saxons migrated here from mainland Europe and called it Watling Street, or Wæcelinga Stræt, after a tribe that lived around what we call St. Alban’s now, the people of Waecla, or Waeclingas. Watling Street also marked the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under Alfred and the Viking-ruled territory of the Danelaw. Our side of the street, in Burnt Oak, that would have been in the Danelaw, which explains a few things about us (what’s the Old Norse for “yeah what you looking at, come on then”), with our longships and our Odins, while those posh Saxons lived over there in Harrow with their burnt cakes and their Wodens. Burnt Oak is where I was born and grew up, and supposedly has its origins in Roman times (what’s the Latin for “yeah what you looking at, come on then”) and refers to the old practice of burning an oak tree to mark boundaries (a simple sign would have probably been easier). When we say we are going ‘Up the Watling’ we are not referring to Watling Street, but to Watling Avenue which turns downhill from here. This part of Watling Street, Edgware Road, the A5 whatever, is called Burnt Oak Broadway. Hey this is Britain, we can have as many names for things as we bloody well like. One summer morning I got up and walked up to the top of the Watling, and stood on Burnt Oak Broadway looking over at the junction with Stag Lane. This junction is ancient, and you could grow ancient waiting for the bloody lights to change, and is probably named after the Bald Faced Stag pub which would have been to my left on the Broadway before it was closed about a decade or so ago. All the old pubs are closing, there will be none left soon. There are none left around here. That’s a different story. The large building on the left with the clock on top has stood there for many years, and reminds me so much of being a kid. It was a department store for a long time, but it reminds me of my Nan, because I would see it when going to her flat, which was just across the street further down the Broadway, or in the Stag, where she would spend most days. Across the junction on Stag Lane, that building painted an ugly blue is now an amusement arcade and casino called Silvertime, well I say amusement, who really knows. It’s in the former location of Nat West Bank, and this was my branch when I opened my first account as a kid, do you remember those porcelain NatWest piggy banks? My mum or dad still have them somewhere I think. Sad to see the bank closed. There used to be two NatWests in Burnt Oak, both closed now. There is another blue Silvertime across the street, also located in a closed down bank, where the old Midland Bank (later HSBC) used to be. Funny how these casinos open in old banks. I really don’t know why they have to paint these old buildings bright blue though. Next door is a Romanian food market, and a restaurant next to that. There’s a sizeable Romanian community in Burnt Oak now, that was not there when I left. My mum did have a friend from Romania when I was a kid, she used to work with him and we would often meet with his family. He had escaped Ceaucescu’s brutal regime in the 70s or 80s (hiding in a box, apparently), and was able to bring his family over after that. I still remember when the communist regimes fell, and he was finally able to go and visit his homeland. Last time I saw him he had opened a bakery on Burnt Oak Broadway, about seventeen years ago just down from here, and he gave me a massive plate of pastries, but that’s gone now. Everything changes, you can’t stop it, but we’ve all got our stories in these places.

Further down the Broadway, opposite the flats where my Nan used to lived (when she wasn’t in the Stag), I stood under a tree and drew this on the morning before heading off on my trip to Poland. This building is in a sorry state, disused, boarded up. When I was younger it was a Mecca bingo hall, but closed more than ten years ago. We love leaving this big old buildings empty and derelict. Years ago it used to be a cinema, when my Mum was a girl, the Savoy, she remembers seeing Calamity Jane there as a kid. Someone contacted me to let me know that there are proposals to convert this space and the spaces next to it into new flats, with concerns about some more local history being lost to the march of redevelopment. Luxury flats are probably better than bright blue ‘adult gaming centres’, but London is at the mercy of big corporate property developers these days. Communities would be nice, and they still exist, if you want it. Pubs would be nice, and newsagents, and a post office, and banks with humans, and a cafe where you can get a nice cup of tea. It’s funny, I like drawing these big old buildings whose presence echoes so much through not only my own history but that of my family and local friends, yet I think I only ever stepped foot in here once in my life, when it was a bingo hall when I was a kid, and I am probably misremembering that for somewhere else. Memory and Nostalgia are funny things. I was considering writing a book called “I Remember When Things Used To Be A Little Bit Different From How They Are Now” but things keep changing and changing again. So I will just keep on drawing what I see, until it does. These were the only sketches I did in Burnt Oak in this trip but I did more around London, stay tuned for those, they won’t all come with maudlin’ nostalgic stories, but most will.

San Francisco panorama from Nob Hill

September 9, 2025September 9, 20252 Comments

Hello everyone, I am very behind in posting because I was in Europe for a whole month (London, Poland and Berlin) and have an extremely massive amount of sketches to post, and I am still nowhere near caught up with posting the pre-vacation sketches – I have enough to last me forever, if you can keep up with them all. I draw a lot, that is for sure. It’ll never say on my gravestone “Here lies Pete, who didn’t draw enough”. Yet I always feel I need to draw more. Even since I got back little more than a week ago, I have been busy, running a 5k race (beating my time from last year) and then taking a weekend trip to San Francisco to watch Supergrass and then fly to Los Angeles to watch Oasis! I have hundreds of sketches to scan. In the meantime however I should finally post again here on my old-school sketchblog, and to get going again, here is a big drawing I did this summer (based on sketches I made back in February while looking out of the window of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco’s Nob Hill). It’s big, it’s detailed, it’s of a great city view, and I loved this one. I worked on it while my family were away in Disneyland and I was home alone for the weekend. Telegraph Hill there on the right, Russian Hill there on the left, Alcatraz (long may it remain a tourist attraction and National Historic Landmark), and Powell Street sweeping down to the bay. I liked the buildings on the left in the foreground going uphill like books lined up on the stairs.

Anyway I’m showing this one now because as of this week it is on display and for sale at the Pence Gallery’s annual Art Auction! I have two pieces in there this year, the San Francisco panorama and a drawing of the Primrose Hill Bookshop that I made last year (I did visit that bookshop again on my recent trip, bought a nice book by David Gentleman there, signed copy). You can find out about the Pence Gallery’s Art Auction on their website, pencegallery.org/events/art-auction.

You can also see the listings themselves at the Auction Catalog. My listings (and you can bid on them if you like!) are available to see here.

Anyway, I’d better start scanning the mountain of summer sketches, because Fall is about to begin…

some trees on campus in april

June 22, 2025June 22, 20252 Comments

April was a long time ago now but I’m still posting old sketches. I am forever behind but it’s good to see how the world used to look in the before-times. It’s midsummer already (astronomically, though not seasonally, summer has just begun). Here are a few from a couple of months ago which are very tree-focused, two trees from campus below plus a panorama of the UC Davis Quad showing a lot of trees all at once, like some kind of tree party. The annual Picnic Day is around this time of year but I avoided that kind of thing this year, wasn’t up for the crowds and walking around feeling hot and bored. No sketching Picnic Day 2025. This drawing was done after work one day when the novelty of extended periods of sunlight in late afternoon had not yet worn off, and it wasn’t too hot yet. I like this one a lot though, I might use it in future things at work if I want a regular campus panorama scene. Here are a couple more trees.

Way Up Above New York City

June 2, 2025June 2, 20254 Comments

My dream as a sketcher is always to go high above a city and sketch everything below – not too high above, I still want to see things. (Click on the sketches and you will see it all in bigger detail). New York City is easily the most exciting place for this. Our hotel was located on 6th and 28th in Chelsea, in sight of the One World Trade Center, the Chrysler, and the Empire State Building which loomed outside our bedroom window. It was too big to include in the view above but would be just to the left of that view. The above panorama was drawn while sitting on my bed. The light and colour of this view changed enormously throughout the day, and I did this in a couple of sittings, about a couple of hours total at most, but I drew much of it in the late afternoon/early evening while the sky was all purples, pinks and blues. Below, cars moving slowly in lines, the famous yellow cabs weaving in and out, and people the size of ants, all looking for the jam. What excited me most is not all the windows or the depth or the movement, or the feeling that I am in the Spider-Man video game, but the water-towers.

The distinctive New York water-towers really are everywhere you look., especially in the view above which was drawn from the roof of our hotel, just a few floors above our room, about 30 stories or more above the street. I was looking south towards the One World Trade Center on the left, and across Chelsea on the right. I was a little overwhelmed by how many water-towers there were, and on another day I might look at the pictures I took and draw a big detailed one, all coloured in. On this day I stood up on the roof of the hotel, which was open to the elements with just an elbow-high glass fence keeping me safe. It was thankfully not too windy. It was late afternoon/early evening, the sky was an interesting collage of shades, and the tall towers in the distance were just blue-grey silhouettes. I drew fast (this took less than an hour and a half) but could not quite finish it, and left a gap which I never had time to fill, and felt that my mind’s eye would fill in the gaps. My eyesight is not that great anyway, and while I sketched one of my lenses actually fell out of my glasses, thankfully falling on my side of the barrier and not hundreds of feet to the sidewalk of 28th Street. I popped it back in. There were taller buildings to my right, and my eyesight was not so bad that I could miss the sight that greeted me there, a man at the window completely, well, ‘stark bollock naked’ as we say and possibly oblivious to the fact anyone could see him at all. I tried not to stare, and thankfully he was not very long. By the window I mean. I think I understand that song about being ‘caught between the moon and New York City’ differently now. I kept drawing (not that obviously) until I could draw no more, and we went for dinner. I was so glad to have the opportunity though to draw New York from above, which is always a dream, and to stay in a hotel where I have the time to actually do it and not feel rushed to leave, even though I still drew faster than usual. New York, all those movies, all those photos, all those paintings and songs and stories, all that culture that has played with our imagination, all right there below me. I want to draw more of it!