Angels and Demons

One of my little hobbies is 'catching' insects. Not in the nasty way, but on my camera. It's the challenge of getting close enough to get a decent snap - I don't have a butterfly net, but I do have a fairly good macro lens. Last night on my evening walk I spotted this gorgeous White Plume moth nestling in the low grass. Amazingly it stayed put while I lay on my back on the dirt track, scriggled about and got my camera up and under it, about two inches away.

The other evening we saw these two Small Tortoiseshell butterflies courting, eventually settling down on for some more intimate action. The blurring is an indication of how fast they were moving. This time I took the shot from about a metre away, but my zoom did the trick.

I admit to being quietly proud of this one; a Common Blue damselfly (I think) perched on hawthorn blossom. Again I used my zoom but I was close enough not to lose quality. I was holding my camera rather precariously over the river though.

Finally, not quite as pretty, but handsome in his own way - a Staghorn beetle we found crawling across the lane. He did not like being poked onto a leaf at all and he will never know how close he came to being squashed; a minute later two huge tractors with broad, heavy, beetle flattening wheels came roaring along the lane and not even his thick armour would have saved him.

Angels and demons come in many shapes and guises - but I think it's a little unfair to be so unkind about Mr Beetle, as he's just a bit of a rough diamond.

(Edit - my apologies to Mr Beetle who is probably a Mrs, due to her smaller pinchers and many thanks to wonderful wildlife painter Mike Woodcock for pointing that out and correctly identifying the Blue Damselfly as being a Banded Demoiselle).

Bee Movie & honey

Sometimes bees can be a bit dim - rather like us. This poor girl was exhausted, but she would not drink sugar syrup from a saucer as the other bee did. It was an overcast evening a couple of weeks ago and most flowers were closing down for the night. I popped her on a little geranium where she flopped feebly about, poking her proboscis into the stamens which weren't giving her what she wanted. Finally she seemed to give up and folded her legs under her, as if waiting to die.

Feeling desperate, I brushed some syrup onto the flower she was perched on and gently nudged it towards her...

In protest, she waved her legs about and then began to clean some of the syrup from her feet. The penny dropped and she began eagerly licking the syrup from the petals before taking off. As if this was not enough, while I was filming, there was a knock at the door, which I ignored. You can just about hear it at the end and the chimney jackdaws cackling with indignation. And if you listen very carefully with the volume up you can just hear the nice Mozart I was playing.

The knock at the door was a dear friend and her daughter, popping over from another village to say hello. One of the few people I am always happy to see, even if the cottage did look as if a bomb had hit it. My fellow bee loving friend has recently acquired her first hive, so it was a lovely coincidence that she dropped in at that very moment, just as excited as I was at another bee-life saved. We hurried through to the back yard, where the 'patient' was nuzzling around in the thyme blossom and then watched as she bumbled off, over the fence, hopefully to return home.

Another sweet surprise - one of Andy's young work colleagues has also started keeping bees - and spun his first batch of honey last week. It took him longer than he imagined as he had a bumper crop. He started at 8pm and didn't get to bed until 4am - how kind he was to pass on a jar to me; it is quite delicious and if he's not careful I will be sending him a bottle or three of my homebrew...poor lad won't know what day of the week it is.

Stout from scratch

To make home brewed stout; take one 1930's recipe book and the following ingredients -

Scratch your head and ponder what *Spanish* is. Ask your Northern other half who informs you that it is liquorice (which apparently is what they call it 'up there'). Wonder where to get *black malt* and decide to replace it with chocolate malt. Realise that 'in those days' they had bigger pans but manage to cobble it together with a variety jugs and pots. Weigh the chocolate malt.


Weigh the Fuggles hops.

Weigh the dark brown sugar.

Using your biggest pan, boil up some water, add the hops and malt. The kitchen becomes infused with the intense aroma of strong, black coffee.



Add *one pennyworth of black Spanish* - bought from a traditional sweet shop. Briefly wonder what *one pennyworth* looks like and hazard that it is probably an ounce. Read the recipe and find no mention whatsoever of when to add the BS but bung it in anyway.

Pour the bitter melange of chocolaty boiling glop onto the dark brown sugar in a brewing bucket and top up with cold water to three and a half gallons. Add ale yeast and leave overnight. Return to find it is doing very little so chuck in a tablespoon of baker's yeast which does the trick.



Three days later, strain and keg up, adding half a pound more sugar and making a phenomenal amount of mess in the kitchen in the process, not having a funnel or large enough jelly bag. After a few more days, tentatively tap off a glass and be very surprised when it actually comes out looking like a 'real' glass of stout, tasting deliciously of coffee and dark chocolate. Even better chilled.

Alcohol content unknown. Read the inscription in the recipe book and whole heartily agree;

Not getting away

This has to be the dullest set of photos I have posted in my entire five years of blogging. In another world, this would be a post about a few pleasant days in the Lake District...but the fates were against us. Two hours after booking a pod at a nice camp site in Boot, Eskdale, a gunman went on a shooting rampage in that area of Cumbria (as many people reading this will know; it seems to have been covered globally). He eventually shot himself in the very village we were headed for. Devastating for the poor families and communities and our little problems pale into insignificance by comparison.

Ignoring this very bad omen, we packed our rucksacks anyway. Our landlord finally sorted out a new washing machine (after several years of our old one flooding the kitchen) and wanted to fit it while we were away - he rang to let us know just as we were getting ready to leave and everything came to a halt while we cleared our tiny kitchen so that the plumber could get in. We set off. The weather forecast was set to rain and storm all week. It rained on us, off and on, for nearly four hours of biking against a cold wind.

Past Birmingham the bike began grinding. We stopped a couple of times while Andy WD40'd the back wheel. It got worse. We drove slowly and - I think - illegally along the hard shoulder of the motorway, turning off into a souless hotel on the edge of Warrington. We weren't going anywhere except home. The AA insisted on sending out a repair van - just in case. It took him an hour to arrive and then as we expected, he had to ring a recovery van. Which would take two hours to arrive.

We waited in that grim car park - no shops or pub in sight - until 5.15. I took a nap on the tarmac, being blessed with the ability to sleep pretty much anywhere. When the AA recovery did arrive, he cheerfully announced that he'd only be able to take us some way home, as he was coming to the end of his shift. But he was a nice man and as soon as we arrived at his stop point, another AA truck pulled in and we switched over. By now it was about 8.00pm and we had had enough.

We finally got home at ten. At least there was a keg of home brew ready; we needed it. I am trying to look on the bright side of it all and have been playing Polyanna's 'Glad Game'.

1) I'm glad we weren't victims of a mad gunman.

2) I'm glad we didn't actually crash the bike on the motorway.

3) I'm glad we managed to get through it with a fair amount of humour and Dunkirk spirit.

4) I'm glad we at least returned to our dear little scruffy, falling down cottage in the Cotswolds, not some ghastly graffiti strewn tower block on the edge of a city.

5) I'm actually sincerely glad that the holiday DID fall through, as there have been a few problems with my present job which needed sorting out and would have been worse to deal with next week.

6) So despite being dragged reluctantly back to my studio, I'm glad to have had the extra days to work, even though I am still desperately tired.

7) I'm very glad have a spiffy new washing machine which could probably fly us to the Moon if we asked it nicely.

BUT

I am not glad that I didn't have the chance to send postcards of the scenic Lake District to many of my friends who haven't heard from me for sometime. I had a long list...



However we have our first courgette and first cherry tomato growing in the poly tunnel and the bike is not only mended but didn't cost too much to fix. The sun has returned and things are looking up. Next time we will take more notice of bad omens.

Ancient History

After another week of beating down the backbone of a deadline, I found myself idly flipping through an old sketch book, from my college days. I seem to remember Andy gave me this little old book, when it was blank- we both liked working in vintage accounts books. He stamped the boat logo on the front, from a handcut stamp. We had started living together in the second year of our design/illustration BA and were fired up creatively.This is now ancient history, 1992 - 1993.

I crammed this little book (8 inches wide and four inches tall) with all the things which interested me - things found in the street, receipts and tickets, packaging, stickers - every graphically or typographically curious thing I discovered was stapled into this - and other books. The teapot illustation below is a photocopy of an illustration by Natasha. She was in our year and a friend, also an illustrator. Now she bakes the most amazing cakes - which are often illustrated, in edible inks, with her gorgeous work. I must have pinched or begged this copy from her - little did we know then how life would pan out, or that one Christmas she would send me some of her sublime gingerbread men.

But I also filled it with tiny sketches in dip pen and watercolour - my *chalky* paints in my student box being the despair of one of my tutors.

Here, lovingly preserved at the top of the page, is a little shopping list which Andy must have written one day - 'Dog, New knee, Haircut'. I am sure he got the haircut, but his knee still plays up.

These are pre-scribbles and colour studies for a lino-cut I did one summer, when we were allowed to play in the print room. There are inspirational magazine cut outs and a tiny scrap of quilting fabric - all valuable planning I learned, which I still use today.

...and here is one of the finished three colour prints, a bit rough and ready and slightly off registration.

I seem to have had a *thing* with imaginary fishes -

- though I also studied photos of real ones, to capture the essence of *fish* in my head. One of the regular things people say is 'oh I wish I could draw things straight out of my head'. But everything I draw has some basis, originally, in studies from life.

Andy hijacked my book and stamped his territory with one of his scary woodcuts. Not a very happy one. Hormones.

Mind you, I wasn't much better sometimes...

I also used my book for tedious lecture notes and here, a silk petal sprayed with a 'Tresor' sample. It used to be my favourite perfume, though I didn't have any, it was way beyond our student budgets. I popped into shops to have a little spray when we were in town. A few years later Andy bought me my own bottle, which I still have now. I didn't know then that perfume went 'off' and wish I hadn't been so frugal with it, but had just used it and enjoyed it.

I am still inspired by many of the things captured in this memory book - much of it is seeped into my imagination and it leaks out when I create. Although a lot of my themes were abandoned over the years, as I developed as an illustrator and curbed my whimsy to become more commercial, things have swung full circle and now I am able to indulge myself again with my latest jobs - and this time I get paid!

In the final year I was mixing textiles, embroidery and letterpress into my work. A bit radical in those days, as it was just on the cusp of the digital age and scanners were new, voodoo machines which only a few could use - or afford. Reproducing collaged artwork was usually too expensive to contemplate for book illustration Here is an old receipt from King's Fabrics. which seems remarkably cheap compared to today's fabric prices.

I found that I loved making detailed thumbnails for projects - and still do. I do so much planning in my tiny scribbles that things are usually sorted out there and then, so that the blow up is just a formality, as I 'know' where everything goes in my head.

How I enjoyed dip-penning imaginary figures - usually on their own, or at the most, two. Often by a sickle moon. No change there then.

There are one or two James Reeve poems in there, with my feeble attempts to illustrate them. Many of his books were, of course, illustrated by my all time hero, Edward Ardizzone.

A book of four first class stamps for a pound! Watercolour paper samples and fake tattoos.

I was also constantly drawing little houses, I think I drew these from a television programme - I still constantly draw little houses. I don't think I will stop, even when I finally have my very own.

This will be a dull page, unless you are the one or two people who were at this college with me - my old Polytechnic library card, fixed in my book after we graduated.

The lump of card seen poking out of the sides is a fat cat from a fruit box - an excellent source of graphic images, fruit crates and stickers. Remind me to show you my fruit sticker collection some day...

No, not that one-

- the other one is far larger - in my BIG sketchbook!

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