Rhyming A Street

March 25, 2019March 24, 20192 Comments

This is A Street, in Davis. Not “a street”, etc and so on. It’s a corner of Davis I have sketched before, etc and so on. But now, it looks different, etc and so on. I don’t constantly repeat myself, exactly, I prefer to say that I ‘rhyme’. I drew this on a rainy lunchtime, from the shelter of the Social Sciences Building opposite. This was previously Davis Textbooks, on the corner of 3rd St and A St, then it was empty, and now it has been completely refurbsihed and is going to be ‘iTea’ which I think is some sort of chain of boba tea outlets. At least I think it’s a chain, I saw one other, in ChinaTown in San Francisco, the other day. Wait, what, ‘boba tea’? Have I got that right? If so they have missed a trick. A mash-up between Boba Fett and Mr T would be the coolest thing ever. “I don’t hate Solo, but I pity the fool. No man gonna come between me and my bounty.” You can imagine the rest, all of the Boba Fett / A Team stuff, and putting the mohawk on the helmet and those wookiee braids mixed with feathery earrings, you can imagine the whole look yourself, it’s just generally a good idea. But this is getting away from the point, which I tend to do in these blog posts, etc and so on. They have cleaned the place up a lot, and given those bricks a nice lick of green paint. By the way that car, not the blue one but the other one, it looks odd, the front wheel is a bit too far back and it’s very close to the car in front. This is because at the moment when I got to drawing those bits, another car parked in front of me on this side of the street, obscuring my view, so I just drew the top of the car and improvised the rest. Look, a tree in the foreground, my signature. But what is this? A bike? I hate drawing bikes, I said so in the Davis Enterprise last week. Well, there were actually two bikes there, but I chickened out on drawing the second because as you know, the thing I hate more than drawing bikes is drawing two bikes.

This is what this corner of Davis looked like just a few months ago. Work going on in the street, the old Davis Textbooks sign was still up, the space was empty and someone had done a huge graffiti ‘Class of 18’ sign over the front. You have to admit that looked kinda cool.

In Spring 2014 it was still ‘Davis Textbooks’, though I don’t recall if it was actually in business. I only ever went inside there once, when my friend Tel from England (who himself sells textbooks online, now based in Japan) wanted to have a look. We used to work for a university textbook shop in Hendon. I liked this corner because of all the signs and poles and urban furniture all about. It’s the entrance to UC Davis, but looking down 3rd Street. Lots of bikes whizz past here. Hey look that same car is there, from the first picture. Its wheel is in the right place.

Back when I drew it in January 2008, in the days right before impending parenthood encouraged me to draw in landscape format, I only drew the street corner, with all the newspaper boxes that used to be there. It was a gloriously vanilla January day, with lemony sky and a kind of tarte flambee feel to the world, I have no idea where that is going. I painted the sky yellow before adding the blue is what I am trying to say, it was a thing I did then for some reason, I must have forgotten that is how to make the sky green.

So, another change to another spot in Davis. I’m glad I have been drawing it, and here again is the point of drawing Davis, capturing moments in time as well as space.

and as in uffish thought he stood

March 24, 20192 Comments

This gnarly, knobbly looking thing is behind the Music Annex at UC Davis, next to the back alley that runs alongside the Arboretum. It looks a bit like an ancient sea creature that has broken through the deck of a ship, only to be cast under an ancient spell and turned to wood (lignified?). I needed to sketch at lunchtime, so I sketched this. Trees are beautiful, aren’t they. The uglier, the more beautiful. I used to like climbing trees as a kid, but I’d never climb very far, just to maybe the first branch, and I’d feel like a tree-dwelling champion. I was a big fan of the Ewoks when I was a kid, and always wanted to live in a tree-top village. I never had a tree-house, though I did have a climbing-frame in my back garden with a little metal swing at the top, it was less like a tree-house and more like a birdcage, but I loved it. I wish I had had a tree-house though. I didn’t have a tree though, so there was that. What would be cool would be to have not a tree-house but one of those houses which is just a door in a tree-trunk, and you open it to reveal a spiral stair-case going down, down, down into a subterranean world. I was a big fan of Mr.Happy when I was a kid. Jamie and the Magic Torch as well. Hang on that wasn’t a door in a tree, I’m not sure why I thought of that. Anyway the problem with that would be lack of sunlight, and it’s not really a tree-house any more and just a cave, and I don’t want to live in a cave. Unless it’s accessible by fire-pole. I was a big fan of Batman when I was a kid. I think every house needs a fire-pole, really. Coming back to this tree though, you have to wonder how much of it has been shaped by its proximity to the Music Annex. Trees are alive, they can experience and feel, and perhaps the presence of all that music has made it feel more alive and expressionist than trees next to, say, the Mathematical Sciences Building. (By the way I can vouch that those trees are generally very good with numbers). Or maybe all that music has warped its personality in the same way that listening to hours and hours of sad pop songs can make you eternally miserable, like the guy in High Fidelity? Maybe this tree is a music snob, and only listens to tree music you haven’t heard of. Or maybe, just maybe this tree is angry and frustrated, knowing that so many instruments being played right there, right on his roots-step, are made of wood, his dead friends, his dead relatives. All those woodwind instruments like the oboe and the clarinet, all those violins, cellos, even pianos, guitars, ukeleles, xylophones, they play such bitter notes when you are a tree. Or maybe they see it differently, maybe trees are proud that their kind can produce such beautiful sounds. Or maybe, and this is more likely I’ll admit, maybe it’s just a tree and it couldn’t give a monkey’s.

back at three mile

March 22, 2019March 24, 2019Leave a comment

I’ve sketched this place before, it’s Three Mile Brewing in downtown Davis, a small brewery that does some very nice beers. Such as ‘Burnt Reynolds’. There always seems to be dogs in here. There was another one unseen in this sketch, as well as the one that is there. Last time I sketched in here there was a dog in the sketch. Am I now a dog sketcher? I have drawn a few dogs over the years, but I don’t really go for drawing animals much. So, Three Mile Brewing in Davis is named for the old three mile no-alcohol exclusion zone from campus that existed years ago (until 1979!). I like the colour scheme in this room, and it was handy that man wore that jacket providing a balance between the Burnt Reynolds beer and that wall on the left.

Napper Valley

March 21, 2019March 20, 20197 Comments

A lovely sunny Monday lunchtime. This is the UC Davis Quad. You will notice on the right there are blue hammocks set up with people taking naps inside. This is very much encouraged in Davis (also in nearby Napper Valley). Taking a nap is good for you. What do you call it when someone is pretending to be asleep? Fake Snooze. I haven’t tried the hammocks myself, they are usually all occupied. Ironically they didn’t have these when people were camping on the Quad years ago in the ‘Occupy’ protests. Back then, UC Davis was put on the map of infamy by the ‘Pepper Spray Incident’. Did you hear about the peanut who was pepper-sprayed? He was a salted. Peanut. Ha ha, ha ha. It’s very peaceful here now, though we still have protests and a number of marches, as you would expect. This for example was March 18. Sorry I appear to have been possessed by the spirit of Tommy Cooper.

Déanaimis Tarraingt Dáibhís

March 20, 20191 Comment

Last Sunday – St.Patrick’s Day – was the day of our most recent “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl. It was a shortish sketchcrawl, three hours downtown, ending up with a get-together to look at each other’s sketches. This time I included a ‘scavenger hunt’, which was optional, but I gave it a go. It was Ireland-themed, nine things, specific (“an animal sculpture”) or vague (“snakes!”). The weather was lovely, warm and sunny, and lots of people were out. I drew a group of cyclists (a couple of whom I chatted with), focusing on the one of course wearing green.

The animal sculpture was easy, as right there on First Street are two enormous animals, a giant dog made of records and a cat gateway thing, outside the Natsoulas Gallery. It’s not a specifically Irish thing, sculpting animals, but not all the list had to be. The dog is called “Roy” and is a tribute to the artist Roy De Forest, by John Natsoulas and others. Becuase I wanted to show some of the detail, the various coloured vinyl records that make it up, I sketched up close, covering the ‘something musical’ point. I used to have some coloured vinyl records, when I was a kid I would sometimes buy them because I liked the colour, not because the music was any good, and I’m guessing those who donated these probably felt the same. Speaking of not-good music, that awful violin player was downtown again, his screeching echoing down E street. I wasn’t drawing him, no way. Sketching the records was a little bit of a challenge as I don’t like drawing circles (it’s why I hate drawing bikes), but also the sun was beating down, so I added the colour once I got into some shade.

Below is fellow Davis sketcher Alison, who has been sketching Davis much longer than me and who I knew from the very earliest sketchcrawls. She found a great display of Irish books in the window of Logos Books on 2nd Street, so I sketched her sketching those (the bookshop was my ‘something to do with literature or poetry’), and then I drew one of the books myself, a children’s Irish legend book about St. Brigid’s Cloak. I don’t know enough of the Irish legends myself, despite my Irish family I never learned any of that stuff as a kid (my mum just played Wolfe Tones, Brendan Shine and Daniel O’Donnell a lot), in fact it was my son who told me the story of the Red Hand of Ulster back when he was a preschooler (gory storytime!), though I did like reading about the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann, Balor and the Evil Eye, that stuff. And I loved hearing the story of the Rock of Cashel and Devil’s Bit Mountain when I went there as a kid (Cashel is full of Scully gravestones actually, that always excited me). And I know about St. Patrick of course. There’s a whole wealth of story and mythology I need to read about.

“A green object in the street” for me was a street sign. It could have been anything, a tree, a bin, a bike, a bush. I also asked for something more than a hundred years old, and that required a bit of Davis knowledge. I said not to draw my jokes which are all about a hundred years old (including that one). I drew part of the Dresbach-Hunt-Boyer mansion, which dates from the 1870s.

Now ‘snakes’ was always going to be interpretative, as I don’t expect to see a lot of snakes slithering around. We do of course have snakes in Davis but they like to hide, and don’t often go downtown, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, for obvious reasons. I knew there was a green metal snake sculpture behind the Pence, however it is no longer there, so I ended up drawing some metal pipes, and calling it “snakes”, and there you go.

And the last one “DRINK!” is a reference to Father Jack’s favourite word. I had about twenty minutes before the end, so I popped into De Vere’s Irish pub (which was packed), remarkably found a seat at the bar with a great view of the Guinness toucan that had been perched up above the taps. I drew that and had a (quite marked-up) pint of Smithwicks in a plastic glass. I don’t really like drinking Guinness much myself, it’s alright but not really my tipple. And then it was time for the final meet-up with the rest of the group. we had a very good crowd this time around, and I can’t wait for the next one in April! We’ll announce when exactly that is very soon. I have some soccer game rearrangements that are still being figured out, but I’m really in sketching mode this year – I’m already months ahead of my 2018 sketch-count.

I never learned much Irish, except a few choice phrases, so the blog title today is a little bit of Google Translate finagling. I quite like bad translation though, there’s a certain comedic innocence to it. We used to play on that in our multi-lingual theatrical performances back at university. I did have a book when I was a teenager, ‘Teach Yourself Irish’, but it was a ridiculously dry edition and put the language out of reach. I could see how it connected to other European languages, but the orthography-to-pronunciation difference was too great for me to hear it in my head, so I just learned a few words and phrases, mostly ones other people had taught me (so I could say them). None of my family ever knew any Irish phrases other than Erin Go Bragh, Cead Mile Failte and Pogue Mahone, the last one being spelled the way the band did, not the spelling I was taught later by Irish people. None of the Irish people I knew as a kid (who were pretty much my nan’s generation) spoke any Irish words, so even as the historic language of my ancestors I never felt much of a connection to it. If they learned it, it was something they might have had to do at school decades before and forgot instantly, same as I remember very little about Chemistry class except a dislike of Bunsen Burners. I do remember when I was about 12 though being somewhere in rural Kerry, and suddenly everything was in Gaelic, the radio stations, the street signs, actually that was it, the only other things around were sheep and fog. It wasn’t until I was much older that I met someone who spoke it natively, as in at home, and whenever she used it to with us it was usually in song and not to be translated (she was clear about that). So, with the Irish language, it’s another thing that I might get around to learning a bit of now we live in the YouTube era, but might not be that high on the priority list living out in California. Anyway I hope all my Irish friends had a fun St. Patrick’s Day! I certainly did.

Hey, if you want to see other people’s sketches from the day (or post your own from the sketchcrawl, if you came along) you can go to the Let’s Draw Davis group page on the dreaded Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/383785982124525/

To find out when future sketchcrawls will be, our main FB page will show those: https://www.facebook.com/LetsDrawDavis/

Pink and Psychic

March 19, 2019March 19, 20194 Comments

Well that is a bright bubblegum pink. It gave me an opportunity to use that bright pink pen I always carry. This is the Davis Psychic on E Street, Davis. I like seeing these bold colours as I walk or cycle past and have meant to sketch this building again for ages. The last time was a decade ago, when it was a different (but still bright) colour. I don’t go in for all the psychic stuff myself, but some people enjoy it and get a lot from it. I know people who do tarot cards and what not, not my cup of tea but fair play to them. I’m surprised they don’t have palm trees out the front. this was a Saturday afternoon, I needed to get out of the house for a bit because the weather was lovely, so I cycled downtown. I haven’t drawn the entirety of Davis yet but it’s starting to feel like it. There are a few old buildings (and not so old) on this street that have interesting shapes. I like it when the sun hits wooden walls in certain ways.

In the spirit of “I’ve drawn this whole town before”, here it is as it looked ten years ago, when I sketched this building in mid 2009. You can see there how it was yellow and purple. They’ve always liked to stand out! I wonder what colour they will be when I draw it again in 2029?
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a new look third street

March 16, 20192 Comments

Third Street in Davis has been undergoing a facelift. The section between B and A (crossing University Ave) has been closed off for a while so that the whole street can have a big facelift. It just reopened a week or two ago, and while all the details are not quite ready, it’s looking pretty good. The newly paved street is bright, providing a much nicer look than old grey tarmac (they call that ‘blacktop’ over here). There are also more benchs, so I sat down to draw this. It took me a couple of lunchtimes, and I still had to do a lot of the colour when I got home in the evening. You can click on the one above to see more detail, or look at the one below for the middle bit. Now here’s an interesting thing – there should be another window next to that red front door, but my faraway spot and not great eyesight, also the tree being in the way, meant I missed it. I shouldn’t have, I’ve drawn this house before. That’s ok though, just imagine it there yourself.

3rd & University March 2019 sm cropped

As I said, I have drawn this building, and this stretch of street, several times over the years and so we go to a regular feature of this show, the “flashback corner”. Follow me on a journey back through memory lane…

2016… A front on view of that building, and you can see that the railings downstairs are wooden and white. Street looks different but that little tree is still blossoming pinkly. More ground foliage, less sidewalk. And oh look, correct number of windows.

2014… See how the bollards are still there, plus shoes all along the telegraph line. Pink blossom still there but that building is now white with a green trim. The telegraph poles are still there, they have now gone. I liked drawing them, for perspective’s sake but also I liked the details of the wood and the ripped paper fliers. That house next door is a sort of yellow (it’s blueish now). See how the bottom front windows are hard to see behind the tree from out here.

2011… I drew the one below because I really wanted to draw that pole up close. I actually sold this sketch at the Pence Gallery in my 2011 show. This was a summertime sketch. Just one pair of shoes up high. Again, window hidden.

2007… First time I sketched this building, if not the the junction. It was a very white-wooden house then, home of the Davis Copy Shop.

That’s as far back as my sketchbook goes. If I draw it again, I’ll be sure to get the number of windows right…

I sketched you in a bar down in old Soho

March 14, 20197 Comments

And so to the last night in England. It was an emotional trip, quick and busy, spent time with family, and friends, and places that I love. The last night there was just mine, all mine. I got back to Burnt Oak and watched old Alan Partridge shows on Netflix while packing my bag, never an easy task after even a short trip, what with all the various books (so many books) and new football shirts (more than one) and Cadbury’s cake bars and packs of Bisto gravy and Topic bars and whatever else I had to get. there was a lot I didn’t pick up. I didn’t get any Daddy’s Sauce, which I adore and am currently out of. For those who don’t know, Daddy’s is a brown sauce very similar to HP but less spicy and just tastes like home. I ate a Pot Noodle for dinner. I have not had a Pot Noodle for quite a long time. They seem a little less satisfying than I remember. I loved them when I was 14. I didn’t intend on ti being for dinner this time, but I left it a bit late to get much else when I finally finished packing my bag and venture back out into London one last time. I had a very early start the next morning and didn’t want to do any last-minute packing. So, I was along in London. I thought I might get some food and sketch an old pub. I wasn’t sure where I would go. London is vast and full of possibilities. I got off the train at Camden Town thinking, I could grab a curry at Masala Zone and then go up to sketch the Steele’s at Chalk Farm. But then at the last second I decided to jump back on the same tube because my head said, “you always go to Camden! Do that another time. London is yours!” So in the spirit of revisiting my youth, I got out at Tottenham Court Road instead. That was always my destination station whenever I would go into London as a teenager. It was right next to the Virgin Megastore – now long gone. It was also right next to the Hellfire Club, where as a 19-20 year old I would jump up and down to loud music with a group of international friends – also now long gone. In fact the station is completely different to the one from the 90s, having undergone a total transformation and rebuild in the past few years. All the old shortcuts are gone, and it’s a large, modern and open station now, not the cramped yellowing ticket hall of the past. I ended up not eating dinner, because I could not find somewhere that I fancied, and I wandered about Soho remembering all the old shortcuts that are thankfully still there. I passed by the Old Coffee House, a pub I have enjoyed a few fun evenings in with friends, one that I have tried to sketch before but at a time without pub-sketching confidence, and I saw through the window that there was a nice seat at the corner of the bar with a perfect panorama sketching view. That seat was mine. I would eat Dry Roasted Peanuts for dinner, hunger be damned.

You’ll need to click on the sketch at the top of this post to see it in closer detail (it’ll take you to the Flickr site). As I sketched, I tried a couple of different beers, supplied by a local brewer, Brodies. The first was the Piccadilly Pale Ale, the second and third were the Old Street Pale Ale. I did all the ink at the bar, but added the watercolour paint on the plane next morning (my Stillman & Birn ‘Alpha’ sketchbook being exactly the same width as my Virgin Atlantic economy seat). The bar staff were friendly, and the pub was chilled out. Oh except for the bar fight which broke out behind me. I have discovered that I can apparently sketch undisturbed while a bar fight happens around me, looking up occasionally before getting back to work. Now don’t imagine a long Wild-West style mass brawl, it was more of a few seconds of pushing before a quick “break it up, boys”. There was a group of lads out on a jolly, very drunk and celebrating some birthday or other. I say ‘very drunk’ but it was varying degrees of drunkenness, ranging from ‘friendly and convivial’ to ‘barely able to speak or stand’, with a range of performative drunkenness in between. Two of them for example were enacting a bullfight in the bar, another was sat down loudly singing to a couple of ladies (he was one of the louder ones, but actually he had a very good singing voice), and then one lad who would drunkenly go and sit with random people who would grin and nod a lot back before he sat down with the wrong group of people, one of whom got angry at something or other and they started scuffling, a glass broke, the drunken guy was whisked away and I turned to see one offended young man displaying the classic pose of “hold me back, hold me back”. I didn’t see much more because I was zen-posed with my sketchbook, working to a tight schedule, I had a plane to catch in the morning. The kerfuffles were quickly dealt with by the, I must say, very capable and calming pub staff, who’ve seen it all before I am sure. There was none of that macho make-it-all-worse strutting. The large partying group departed, the broken glass cleaned up, the “hold me back” guy went calmly back to his fresh pint, and the evening went on. I’ve always quite enjoyed this pub, in a little corner of Soho near Carnaby Street, and have been here many times with friends, going back to the 1990s, so I was glad to finally get a sketch of the place. Drawing a pub with lots of details inevitably means you get some wrong, and in this case I drew one too many frames on the wall above the main bar area. You won’t notice, of course. I also drew one person twice. He was standing at the bar waiting for a drink, and then afterwards he had his jacket off and was sat with a woman enjoying conversation. His hair somehow went from black to brown as well but I blame the lighting, not my urban sketching skills. The world is as you see it at that moment (and that of course can change by the third pint).

Seen through the window of a barbers in Soho. A popular night-time photo opportunity.

As it turns out it, I witnessed two bar fights that night. Typical London, you don’t see one for years and years and then two show up at once. On my way back to the station I popped into another old favourite, The Ship, for a quick pint of London Pride. As I was leaving, it seemed a ruck had broken out just outside between two people who had been in the pub, which was being broken apart by excited pub staff, and people were being directed away from it (so that they could stop and watch, as of course you would do). One rutting stag showed us the true meaning of “hold me back, hold me back”, and did some of the best “hold me back” moves I have ever seen, getting absolutely no fighting done whatsoever, while the main belligerent was drunkenly trying to pick up those metal poles that hold up barriers and swing it around like a broadsword. Maybe someone had asked if he wanted to go clubbing and his Google Translate had mis-google-translated. Security staff did that thing where they multiply, and both men were held back, and the audience started ambling off, as did I, because I had a plane to catch. An entertaining last night in London.

Exit from Exeter

March 12, 2019March 12, 20191 Comment

“Exit from Exeter”. That is really not a very relevant title. I just really wanted to use the word ‘Exit’ in the same title as ‘Exeter’. I scratched ‘Exiting Exeter’ because it could be misread as ‘Exciting Exeter’, and who am I to judge? I was only there for about 50 minutes, and I never left Platform 1. I wasn’t really in Exeter long enough to be really Exiting. ‘Departing from Devon’? I had taken the train from Barnstaple, and changed here at Exeter St. David’s for the train back to London. There was an Exeter rugby match happening that day, so there were several fans on board the train across Devon. I knew that I could get some sketching time in at the station while I waited, so I picked a spot and drew. It’s pretty standard classic English railway station stuff. I like travelling by train, and my journey went well. I actually did the colouring-in while on the train, reserving a table seat ahead of time. I would like to spend a bit more time in Exeter if I came back here again, maybe just a couple of hours to draw the cathedral, which I hear is quite nice. I do like drawing cathedrals. I have a dream to travel the whole of England, drawing all the cathedrals, and then go to France and do the same. I wanted to get back to London though, to pack my bag for the flight back to California. I was in Paddington by the late afternoon. Stepping onto the Paddington platform, I was struck by how cathedral-like it was. Maybe I should draw the railway stations of Britain. I’m sounding like a trainspotter. I already look like one.

Back in Barnstaple

March 11, 2019March 11, 20191 Comment

I went to Barnstaple with family to see family, an almost six hour drive to the West Country. I like Barnstaple, all of the shops are close together, and if you need a pair of socks urgently you can just walk to a shop a few minutes away and get some for a quid (unlike in Davis). Yes it was the same shop I bought four Topics for a quid. By the way Americans if you don’t know what a quid is, it’s a pound, the UK currency, not the unit of weight. I say ‘quid’ a lot. In America I say ‘bucks’ a lot. By the way it’s never ‘quids’, you don’t say “seven quids”. Oh except in the phrase “quids in”, which means…ok let’s get on with the drawings. I was up early, having beaten my brother at MarioKart the night before in the hotel room (just wanted to point that out), and I like to wander about having a little walk. The sketch above is Barnstaple Parish Church. The church dates back to Saxon times over a thousand years ago (England is well old, folks), though none of that building survives. The present church is much newer, having been built just recently, in 1318 (the spire is even newer, having only been put up in 1389, which was pretty much just the other day). Some more building was added in the 1600s such as the Dodderidge Library in 1667 (it’s hard for a Londoner to see a building dating from 1667 and not assume it is just replacing one destroyed in the Great Fire of London, but it didn’t quite reach this far, hundreds of miles west). The spire of the church has a twist – it was a ghost all along. No, not that sort of twist. It was struck by lightning in 1810, but the twist is that it wasn’t the lightning that twisted it at all, but centuries of sunlight on the lead and wooden frame. Apparently George Gilbert Scott (the grandfather of Giles who built Tate Modern, Waterloo Bridge and designed the red phonebox) was asked to renovate the church, but he refused to fix the twist, because he said that “if you know Bruce Willis is a ghost all along it ruins the tension of this otherwise unwatchable film”. By the way if you ever travel back in time to 1810 and get stuck, at least you know you can generate the 1.21 gigawatts of power to get home by hooking up a cable to the Barnstaple Parish Church spire.

When I first came to Barnstaple last year to visit my uncle Billy who lives here, I saw this really interesting looking butcher’s shop in Joy Street. I determined that I would sketch it when I came back, so I did. I could never be a butcher. I would just be doing ‘meat’ puns all the time, like “nice to meat you!” and “it’s bacon hot today!” and “gammon have a go if you think you’re hard enough”. See, I’d be really bad at it. Master Butchers are very skilled at what they do. They really know their meats. They know all the meats. Beef, Lamb, Pork Pies, all the meats. It would take me ages to learn all the meats. Across the street from here is an art shop called the Blue Gallery, so I popped in to have a look around. Lots of nice art supplies. They also had a copy of Matthew Brehm’s perspective drawing book, I have quite a few sketches in that one. These were the only sketches I did in Barnstaple this time, but my ones from last year are in this post: https://petescully.com/2018/05/19/barnstaple-devon/ . Devon’s nice. I came to Devon when I was in my teens a few times, and always thought I would come back more as I grew older, but never got around to it. It’s a big county, with lots of places to discover. Devon is old country. When you are out on the windswept moors time is almost irrelevant. Unless you are sentenced to Dartmoor prison, when time becomes a thing you do. I always liked the ghost stories from the moors, like the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor. Seriously, the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor. That is an actual ghost story, look it up. It sounds like a Dr. Strange incantation. “By the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor!”