making all his nowhere plans

February 16, 2024Leave a comment

The start to 2024 has been long and stressful, and full of tiredness and wishing to be far away somewhere with a sketchbook and my headphones on, nowhere that I have to be. But you need the busy times to keep you busy, I could just do with a lot fewer headaches from the rest of the world. My way of handling it is and has always been to go into my sketchbook and draw things, I’ve said before I think it is a way of getting a little control of a small bit of the world by putting it onto some paper. Anyway on this one weekend day of rest, not a lot going on, I went downtown, had a milkshake, and chose a stretch of street I don’t think I’d drawn before, along D Street. It was sunny, and I’m drawn to those big leafless trees at this time of year, with the lovely bark textures. I listen to podcasts when sketching, probably something about the Beatles. I noticed a police car going up and down the street a few times, I don’t think he was looking at me sketching but you always get a bit paranoid. It was a nice day, a lot of people about downtown, pretty much as every other day. All these days blend into one don’t they. Another two-page panorama sketch, another for the book of landscape Davis sketches that I want to make some day. If I ever get there. I remember at a talk I gave years ago a lot of people saying they’d like to see a book just of my Davis sketches, but I still haven’t done it. I just never have the time to figure it out. So I keep drawing instead, and working. I spend a lot of energy trying to solve problems, come up with plans and schemes, try to unlock solutions, but I can never really figure out my own ones. So I keep drawing.

first street, ten years later

February 5, 2024February 5, 2024Leave a comment

Last week, we held our monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis!’ sketchcrawl down at Davis Commons. It was an overcast day, not rainy as it had been, but not sunny. Colours had to be a nit muted, not as bold. We had a good group of sketchers there of all ages, it was nice to see so many people out with their sketchbooks. I decided that I wanted to revisit a scene that I had drawn exactly ten years ago (ten years and a few days, that is), looking across 1st Street towards where the Natsoulas Gallery and the frat houses are. You can click on the image for a closer view. It has changed a fair bit in that decade (haven’t we all). I stood in pretty much the exact same spot as in 2014, though I think I must have been seated back then. The Natsoulaas has seen some big changes – the large cat outside, as well as the big colourful dog (just offscreen here), where before there was a big colourful man figure. The big frat house next door is still there, but is part of the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) fraternity now. The building to the left of the pole (which I have used as the middle of the page both times) is new, and home to the ΘΞ fraternity (Theta Xi, or ‘The Taxi’ as I’d always say). They used to be in the building TKE is in now, plus a couple of other smaller houses next door, which have been knocked down. Well in my 2014 panorama, they were still there, as you can see below. It was much sunnier in January 2014 too. There were more trees then, but that teensy tree just to the left of the street signs is now a lot taller. Anyway, I was just interested in seeing the change after a decade. I was ten years younger, belly a bit thinner, hair a bit redder, eyes a bit younger, plus a whole load of other physical or personality things I’m not going into now. I’m still drawing in my sketchbook, I don’t know if I’ve realistically improved much but I’m still going. Stop worrying, keep on sketching. The sketchbook is a place to record not so much a place, as a point in time.

I also recorded some people too. While eating lunch (a huge chicken sandwich at a newish eating place I had never seen before) I sketch some people with my brown ink fountain pen. Not a sketchcrawl unless there are a few people sketched. I spent most of my sketchcrawl working on the panorama piece. At the end we all got together and did our usual show and tell. Someone asked if we could put all our sketchbooks on the floor, like they do on other sketchcrawls, but I don’t like that, because the best way to see peoples’ work is not standing nearly six foot above it looking down onto a damp sidewalk. (I also don’t like the feeling of comparison when doing that, always makes me feel a bit shy). I know, I’m a bit of an outsider here not going along with the whole “throwdown” thing, it’s become a tradition now, and people like to get that shot to share on Facebook, but we always like to take a group photo at the end where you see the sketcher with their sketchbook. The thing I always loved with the original Worldwide Sketchcrawls, especially the ones in San Francisco when Enrico Casarosa was doing them, was that at the end you would mingle with other sketchers and look through each others books (because more than likely you would have multiple sketches that you had done, not just one particular page) and just chat with everyone. We’ve kind of evolved into a group show and tell almost by accident, but anyone that doesn’t feel comfortable sharing their sketches doesn’t have to. On my very first worldwide sketchcrawl in 2005 (when my fellow Davis sketchers Alison and Allan were there) I was too shy to even go to the final meet-up. Anyway, we will be holding more Davis sketchcrawls in 2024, dates coming soon.

Walker Hall, ten years later

January 25, 2024January 25, 2024Leave a comment

I have been getting the ‘on this day ten years ago I drew this’ bug, because it’s a decade since my worryingly over-productive January 2024 set of drawings around Davis (I mean, January was always my busiest month at work, yet I had the energy to produce a lot of two-page drawings that month). It’s always a good moment to reflect on the changes. This week my then-six-year-old son became a sixteen-year-old son, which scares me to think how fast that’s happened. I’m working in the same department, just in a very different job, but I’m still plugging away with drawing campus on my lunchtimes. I’ve published two books since then, had a successful retrospective sketchbook show, been interviewed by the chancellor of the university, done a lot of travelling, and there’s been a pandemic in the middle. The world has been an ‘Interesting Times’ sort of place in the past decade, give me the decade before that any day. But looking at just one spot and tracking the changes, this view of Walker Hall above, the new modern Graduate Center in the historic refurbished building, is a good example. Regular followers will have seen my sketches of this building as it was slowly turned into the center that we see today, and many of my in-progress sketches are still on display in the lobby there, which is a massive honour (as a former grad coordinator I always maintained good relations with Grad Studies, and it was the previous Dean Jeff Gibeling who gave me the idea to draw the progress of the construction when it was first announced a decade or so ago in a meeting). I think I may have already known the future plans when I drew the panorama below, or maybe that was a little afterwards, but this view was always one I wanted to draw like this, and of all the panoramas I drew in January 2014 this one was my favourite. Now it has captures a moment in time that has passed. I liked the big diagonal shadow against the windows, and trying to convey the large E-shaped building using curvilinear perspective. It was drawn in the old Seawhite of Brighton book I was using then, while the newer one above was drawn in the watercolour Moleskine (side note, in recently comparing older scans to newer ones, I’ve decided I don’t like my current Epson scanner at all, I cannot seem to capture the right amount of clarity no matter how much I mess with the settings, unlike with my older (now long-departed) HP scanner. I’ve rescanned some older drawings recently and they don’t even compare with the older scans, regardless of 300dpi or 72 dpi. It’s subtle when they are small but I really notice it now. Time for a new scanner.) Anyway, this one above might put a final bookend to my Walker Hall series of sketches. It’s been a fun journey, but the building’s finished now and it should look like this for its foreseeable future. You can see them all in this Flickr folder.

make me understand or i’ll forget

January 23, 2024Leave a comment

First two-page panorama of 2024, click on the image to go to my Flickr page and see it bigger. In fact you can see all of my two-page (or more-page) panorama drawings in one album there, currently 218 of them and counting. Cast my mind back ten years ago, I decided to go a little bit overboard with the two-page panorama sketching, I called it ‘Panoramarathon’, sometimes I called it ‘Januarama’ or whatever because they were mostly in January 2014, when I was for some reason ridiculously productive. I’ve been looking back at some of those and even doing ‘ten years later’ versions, I’ll post that later. I have drawn the scene above more than once or twice over the years, usually from slightly different angles. This one shows the Heitman ‘Hog Barn’ on the left as always, with a bit of the South Silo, the Bike Barn occluded by trees, those standing stone thingies, that big leaning tree and on the right, the newest bit, that Chemistry Building wing whose construction I’ve been following in my sketches for the past four years. One change from sketches made over a decade ago is there used to be another big tree to the left of the big one there, it had a more interesting shape to draw, but was unfortunately in the way of the path they wanted to make so off it went to the big carpentry shop in the sky. I like all the colours. I know I draw these scenes over and over, Davis is not that big and I always say I’m bored of drawing everything again, but if I lived in London or New York I’d probably get bored of that too wouldn’t I. I like drawing the changes, as we’ve established. But it is January and all I do think about is going somewhere very far away with my sketchbook and no hurry or schedule, especially when there’s a lot on your mind you just want to plough it into a book that you’re filling, that’s where I put all my ‘stuff’, my sketchbooks.

shipwrecked and pizza

December 27, 2023December 27, 20232 Comments

There is a new tiki bar in Davis. Well it’s been open a few months now, but we’ve not yet been. My wife is a big fan of tiki bars, we recently went to an interesting exhibition in Napa of all the classic tiki bars of northern California, and I got her a Skipper Bob tiki mug for Christmas; we saw that at the museum, from a famous old place in San Francisco that’s no longer there. This new place in Davis is called ‘Shipwrecked’ and is pirate themed, so it’s right up my alley. In the window display there are even big Lego pirates, again its like they’re aiming it at me specifically. If one of the pirates wears a Tottenham shirt I’ll know for sure. But alas we’ve not had a chance to go there yet. Still, just before Christmas I was down at G Street and I decided I needed to sketch the bar from the outside, so I could sketch those Lego pirates. I really wanted to make sure I got the whole scene. This is in the old location of Woodstock’s Pizza; Woodstocks’ (which I’ve drawn before) has not moved far, it’s now at the end of the block on G Street, in the former location of that Thai place, KetMoRee. Shipwrecked is actually in one half of the old Woodstock’s, and as you might be able to tell the other half is still empty, and still has half of the old sign above it. Now I know you’re thinking, “oh right, that’s the real reason you sketched it, because it says ‘Cocks Pizza’, very funny, what are you twelve”, but as I’ve said many times, my job as an urban sketcher is to record places as they change, and compare the changes over many years, because in a few months it may look different again. Sketch the place you live, watch it evolve over time, document your town’s progress. It’s got absolutely nothing at all with the fact it says ‘Cocks Pizza’ above it, that’s just a coincidence. Funny thing though, ‘Woodstock’s’ doesn’t actually have two ‘C’s in it. The font of that first ‘C’ is different to the other letters. Someone actually made the effort of finding another ‘C’, going up there and placing it in front the the word ‘ocks’. And to that I must say, I’ve never been prouder of Davis. I’m being serious there, that is first class. It’s the human ingenuity at work, if that had been left as ‘Ocks Pizza’ people would have maybe sniggered, haha it’d be funny if that said ‘Cocks Pizza’ but not done anything about it, other than take a picture and draw a C on before posting to Facegram or whatever and pretending someone else did it. On campus there is this food place called ‘Cooks’ and I sometimes wish someone would do the right thing and turn that into ‘Cocks’, but you can’t can you, we live in a respectable society, intelligent responsible grown-ups don’t think of such things. But here, someone had to go and find the ‘C’ in a shop or online, get up on a ladder, install it correctly and safely. I’m all for it. So being the good urban sketcher, recorder of the changing town, I had to document it, not because I have a childish sense of humour. But maybe, maybe Cocks Pizza is a real place and this will be opening up in that empty store? I mean in Sacramento there is a place called ‘Willies Burgers’, after all, and we’ve all heard of ‘Dick’s Sporting Goods’. I’ve even been to Nob Hill in San Francisco. There is a ‘Big Dicks Pizzeria’ in Nevada too, but that’s about as far as my Googling of places with ‘dicks’, ‘cocks and ‘willies’ went. Anyway as the last two-page spread of this sketchbook I thought this was a good scene to draw, and I’m really looking forward to going to the tiki bar and seeing all the fun pirate stuff. I’m glad the old Woodstock’s building wasn’t demolished though, as I’m not sure what they would erect in its place.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks.

that ‘draw everything in davis’ guy

September 30, 2023September 28, 2023Leave a comment

This was the first two-page panorama in this particular Stillman and Birn sketchbook. It’s a scene I have drawn before, the little building called ‘University House’, one of the oldest on campus, with the rear of Voorhies to the right there. I stood in the shade, it was the week before classes, so relatively quiet on campus but tour groups were starting to lead large groups of new students around. While sketching this, a passing man asked me, “hey aren’t you that Instagram guy?” I was not sure if I was. I do post to Instagram (it was UC Davis that originally asked me to set up an account, actually) but not all my sketches, as I sometimes forget. Plus whenever I post, I hear my wife’s phone go off with a loud alert, and feel a bit self-conscious. “My supervisor told me about you,” the man said. I suppose I was that Instagram guy by now, as the man said he follows me and liked my drawings. That was nice, so I said thank you, and hoped that I was in fact that Instagram guy and not some other Instagram guy. I’m not sure I want to be known as that Instagram guy (I’m usually that fire hydrant guy, which to be fair I am), but it’s better than that Twitter guy (I’ve posted there more often – sorry, it’s called ‘X’ now isn’t it, FFS billionaires, seriously). I wouldn’t want to be that Facebook guy either, that sounds like it would be someone infamous. I most definitely would not want to be called that Truth Social guy (no chance of that), but I think that particular title is permanently taken. I wish people called me that MySpace guy, that would be pretty retro. Or that GeoCities guy. My first website when I was at university in the late 90s was GeoCities, but I replaced it with an Angelfire website. What’s next, Threads I guess. Threads. It sounded like a good idea, but it was named after the scariest film of all time, the film that gave me more nightmares in the mid-80s than Chris Waddle’s haircut, and still does. I’m still here, still on my old blog, plugging away on WordPress, still sketching in my sketchbooks, that Sketchbook guy. No I don’t want to be called that, actually, I prefer Pete. I’m not a fan of when people style themselves things like that ‘the sketcher guy’ or something, it feels like putting a beach towel down on a sunbed. Now I’m worried that there is another sketcher out there in Davis called ‘that Instagram guy’ and I’ve just claimed credit for whatever it is they do. I thought about back in Lisbon in 2011, at the urban sketching symposium, I was talking to my friend Florian (most amazing sketcher, who sadly died in 2016) about football stickers or something, when an American woman interrupted and said to me “Oh it’s you, my friend really wants to meet you!” Florian and I looked at each other while I had to stand there waiting for a few minutes until her friend came over. Finally the friend, another American lady, came over and the first lady said, “this is Paul, you wanted to meet him.” The second just looked at me and said “no, that’s not him,” and they both walked off without explanation or apology. I think she thought I was Paul Heaston, who wasn’t at that symposium. Florian and I (both red-headed urban sketchers like Paul) just looked at each other a bit nonplussed. I thought about that John Lennon bit from A Hard Day’s Night. “She looks more like him than I do.”

summer running

August 30, 2023August 30, 2023Leave a comment

Summer is already drawing to a close on the UC Davis campus. Oh sure, we have several weeks yet until Fall classes begin, but I’m ramping up my anxiety levels before the quiet times of summer end, trying to get those summer projects out of the way before the busy work begins. This panorama sketch was drawn a month ago in July; in a month’s time this same scene will be fill of people and bikes. That’s not to say summer is completely empty, we do have a lot of summer sessions classes on campus, so there is activity. Many staff are working remotely, though I am in every day except for the occasional day. This summer I have been working on my fitness, and have been up running in the mornings on most days. In fact August I have run a total of 56 miles already, preparing for the 5k Labor Day Run next Monday, I’m feeling well up for it now. And then I woke up early this morning to see that the AQI was up in the 150-180 Unhealthy level, due to red flag weather and smoke being blown in from fires way to the north. It’s really the first bad smoky sky of the summer for us, it’s that time of year again, and I’m really hoping it does not last. I’m really looking forward to this race, but I also don’t want to derail my running progress. Three years ago when we had that terrible smoke that lasted weeks, months, I had been up to then on my best ever running streak, even though all races were cancelled due to the Pandemic, the global situation made me focus on getting out and running harder than ever, and I was clocking in excellent times I can barely believe now – and then the sky filled with smoke and the air quality monitors said it was far too unhealthy to run, or do soccer practice (I was coaching at the time), so that stopped and I never quite got back to that level (though in late 2021 I did clock my best 5k time in the Davis Turkey Trot). This past month I’ve felt myself building back towards it well, and I’m hoping that by November’s Turkey Trot I can have a go at beating that 2021 score, or even the mythical pace of 2020. I do love running, and was really looking forward to getting out there today, but my lungs man, they’re quite important.

This view here is of the Silo, seen from outside Haring Hall, stood in the shade of a tree. The TLC is back there too, lovely building that is. A few red buses at the Silo terminus. Only a couple of people, very small but they are in there (for all you “but why don’t you draw people?” folks). I’ve not done quite as much outdoor sketching this summer in Davis, it’s been hot, and I’ve not been feeling up to it as much, but I’ve done a bit which I still need to scan.

The Athens of the North

August 4, 2023August 3, 20233 Comments

I often (by which I mean never) wonder, do Greeks call their capital the ‘Edinburgh of the South’? Climbing up Calton Hill though, you can see why ~~Edinburghers~~ ~~Edinburgians~~ ~~Edinbr~~ people from Edinburgh call their city the ‘Athens of the North’. There aren’t Greek restaurants everywhere. It does feel like Edinburgh’s forefathers did try to build a city on those hills that represented lofty ideals and thoughts, and if you go up this big hill you can see the city from a grander perspective. The castle hill is in the background there, built atop a practically impenetrable ancient volcano, you can see the grand sweep of Princes Street with the tall clocktower of the Balmoral Hotel and the gothic spire of the Walter Scott Monument, and in the foreground is that structure with the columns, the Dugald Stewart Monument, named for a philosopher who was one of the leading figures of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. Behind me there is an Observatory, as well as the very Parthenon-like National Monument of Scotland (sir-not-appearing-in-this-sketchbook). This is the Acropolis of Edinburgh (unless you consider that to be Castle Hill, I don’t know). It also overlooks the city as it spans down towards the Firth of Forth, and you can see among other things the Forth Rail Bridge, and Hibernian FC’s stadium Easter Road. I would come up here most days while I was in Edinburgh in 1999 to look out over the city, often at sunset. I was excited to come up here to attempt a drawing or two. The first time we came up, I sketched very quickly in paint, but the next day after we had explored New Town and then gone to do our own things for the afternoon, I climbed back up, and drew the scene above. I had time on my hands, so I just looked out and drew as many details as I could. It took over an hour and a half, and while I did consider painting the whole thing too, in the end I just caught the sky and those distant hills, and left the rest be. It took a while (I was either standing or leaning on a big rock the whole time) and many people came by to take photos as the view got more ‘golden’ – I didn’t want to stay until sunset (June in Scotland? Sunset is very late there) but as the afternoon moved into early evening the light was glowing. When I was done with this, I got a sketch of Arthurs’ Seat, below.

Arthur’s Seat is a huge rocky volcanic outcrop that dominates the Edinburgh landscape. People climb up it, though it wasn’t on my agenda for the trip, my feet were tired enough. I wanted to draw it in this amazing light though. In the foreground, the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill, put up to commemorate Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, and yes it does look like a naval telescope. Arthurs Seat conjurs up stories of King Arthur and the ancient Britons, and Merlin going mad in the Caledonian Forest. Also of Tim the Conjuror and deadly rabbit that could only be defeated by the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

By the way, I have learned that people from Edinburgh are called ‘Dunediners’, though it’s not a patronym that you hear very often in Britain (unlike ‘Glaswegian’, ‘Liverpudlian’ or ‘Mancunian’ for example). It derives from Dun-Edin, the Gaelic name for the city, and also where the city in New Zealand, Dunedin, gets its name from. It does sound a bit like the ‘Dúnedain’ which were Aragorn’s people in the Lord of the Rings. Still you live and you learn. I didn’t really get to meet that many Dunediners, so I didn’t get a chance to embarrass myself with figuring out the pronunciation, since most people I met in Edinburgh were either English or from somewhere else like Spain or Italy. I would like to go back some day and explore a bit more of the city (maybe what Stewart Lee calls “the 90% of Edinburgh that they hide behind that big rock”) and speak to more Dunediners, because growing up most of the Scots I knew were Glaswegians, and they didn’t generally say nice things about Edinburgh. I very much enjoyed our few days here though, and got quite a few sketches in while I was there, and that top one in this post is definitely my favourite.

piccadilly to tower hill

July 31, 2023July 31, 2023Leave a comment

I didn’t do a lot of London sketching on the first few days of our trip, just what I could get in quick moments. The one above was drawn while waiting for my wife, I was outside Waterstones in Piccadilly (in the building which used to be Simpson, Piccadilly, the old department store which was the inspiration for the TV show Are You Being Served). Looking towards Piccadilly Circus. It was the sky that interested me.

We walked into Mayfair and up towards Savile Row. It’s incredible, I’ve never actually been up Savile Row. I explored London for years but for some reason Mayfair a lot less so, though I would give open-top bus tours round a lot of the fancy squares and high-end streets, twenty-odd years ago. I had it in my head that Savile Row was further up, on the other side of Oxford Street somewhere, but of course it’s just a block off Regent Street. I do love that even in London I can be surprised and find places I’d not really been to before. The only place on Savile Row I was interested in seeing of course was #3, now an Abercrombie and Fitch, but that was once the HQ of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, and where they played that concert on the roof in January 1969. Watch ‘Get Back’, it’s my favourite thing ever (right up there with Star Wars and The Dark Crystal). There’s a blue plaque to commemorate the historic event, and so I put that in my sketchbook.

We were on our way to take a London Walk, over by St.Paul’s. It was the walk called “Old London”, and was a two-hour-plus stroll through ancient streets in the City, ending up at Tower Hill. It was a hot day, but our guide was excellent and she took us along streets I hadn’t explored in years, or didn’t even know about (and I have given walking tours in this part of London myself years ago). See https://www.walks.com/ for details on all their walks, given by accredited blue-badge guides, they are great and know a lot more than me. I was remembering some of the old stuff I used to know, but was fascinated by the stories. I did one sketch of St. Vedast-Alias-Foster, one of the many Christopher Wren churches, while we waited.

When it was over my wife got the tube back home while I stayed out a bit longer to do some sketching before dinner. I decided to draw the Tower, with that big sundial thing in the foreground. I was pretty tired though, my heart wasn’t really in it, so I left it as it was and got on the District Line. We were off to Scotland next day.

watling centre

July 30, 2023July 30, 2023Leave a comment

As with most of my trips back to the UK, there’s usually a sketch from Burnt Oak at the start of it. I wake up early and get out for morning walk with my sketchbook, eager to draw something that isn’t the UC Davis Bike Barn or something. I didn’t walk very far on this one morning, just up to the corner of Orange Hill and Deansbrook, a couple of minutes form my mum’s house. I’m getting very conscious that I won’t be doing this forever. There will be a day when I don’t come back to Burnt Oak much, like everyone else who left, and maybe I won’t even come back to London as much; I’m always torn with the idea of letting London go, but I just can’t, can I. It’s still my favourite city, annoy me though it does. It is definitely feeling too crowded, and while that may be just because I’m coming from less-crowded Davis in a state designed for bigger cars and wider roads (I don’t even drive, I ride a bike), there seems to be so many more cars parked along all these narrow roads, crammed three or four fold onto small driveways built for one or two. I’m not a fan of this new ‘ULEZ’ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) expansion that is happening – although London evidently needs to improve its air quality – it forces a lot of people who do need their car to buy a newer car they can’t really afford. Mostly though I just think it’s a rubbish name, they really could have come up with something better, I mean if it didn’t sound like a 2nd-person-plural French verb ending it might catch on more with the crowd who don’t like the sound of that sort of thing. But as I see all the cars squeezing themselves around the streets in these old neighbourhoods, I think to myself something needs to be done to reduce or discourage the number of cars. This street in particular, Orange Hill Road, it seems there is usually traffic backed all the way up from Watling Avenue almost to Deansbrook, but when there isn’t, cars will sometimes bomb down here like it’s 200cc MarioKart. I was up early, but even at this hour there was a lot of traffic. This is the Watling Centre. I stood next to the bus stop across the street to draw; as this is Britain, people started queuing up behind me in a polite line, I had to gesture for them to go ahead of me. I’m still disappointed that TFL removed the very useful 305 bus route that came up here, joining our part of Burnt Oak with Edgware. So, the Watling Centre, this is where my mum and dad had their wedding party back in 1991. They obviously met a long time before that, otherwise I’d be a lot younger. I remember that party, we had a lot of family and friends there, friends we loved, family we liked, and also family we didn’t like, that’s how it goes, but it was a good party. There was a lot of dancing to Irish songs, small kids running around. My schoolfriend Terry came, I still have a photo of him in his blue cardigan. I remember eating an entire chocolate mousse cake, because when I was 15 I could eat everything in London and still be like a gangly skinny rake with unbrushable red hair. My uncle Eddie wheeled a shopping trolley with all the remaining booze in it back to our house, and then told me stories all night about my dad in the old days. Fun times. It’s funny, I know I have been to many other events here but I don’t remember them all now. I think this is where I briefly went to karate class, which despite being taught by a family friend, I only went to twice, with my neighbour across the street. There was another kid from my form class at school who showed up, and he was the sort of kid to take the piss the entire time and then continue at school next day, so I stopped going. In earlier years, I would go to the field next to this building with other local kids and look for conkers, because we all knew this was the best place in Burnt Oak to get good conkers. Anyway that’s enough “I ‘member when…” mawkish memories and city-planning moans. I have a few more London sketches to post, then it’s Scotland all the way. We had a great time up there, but I may have drunk too much Irn Bru.