Biro, flipped drawing.

A5 sketchbook, bic biro.

Invertible pen drawing.

Olafur Arnaulds, live

Not my photo (we were not allowed).

Live at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. It was excellent, the sound quality and light show have really come on over the years. It’s refreshing to come out at the end without tinnitus!

Sometimes, I keep a journal.

The summer trip to Corsica for the GR20 was a highlight of the year for me. In fact, I declared it the best thing I have ever done. I kept a journal while there and it included drawings. Here are some.

Polly, is that you?

On an evening visit to Port de’Antrax, we took the kids for an end of holiday drinky. It was nice but I wasn’t expecting what came next.

We plodded back towards the carpark and a voice said “is he an art teacher?”. Polly from QMHS was there with her bloke and son. It was such a thrill to have such an unlikely unlikely encounter. Yes I was her art teacher from about 10 years ago. She was from a small group of cool kids that stuck in your memory.

End of year concert.

Ethan plays Chopin

Look, no score!

A4 Sketchbook/ February

A4 Sketchbook pages. These are both from photos of stone carvings.

Sketchbook A4

Acrylic paint.

Colour Vision

An online colour vision test.

I did quite well at this getting 84% correct which is better than 71% of everyone who took the test.

Lenstore

Linseed Door

7°C, rain.

Got a cold so stayed in and worked on the house. This is the door to a cupboard which was panelled over, probably in the late 1970s. The panel cake off easily but the paint flaked and revealed its thickness. There were atm east 4 layers, the lower layers were even thicker and softened reluctantly under the heat gun. The yellow is rather shocking (probably 1980s) but the two colours beneath are interesting.

Those two lower paint coats needed more heat to soften and smelled different.

Now the door is finished and re-hung, the room smells of linseed oil. Is that the medium for old paints? I feel rather nostalgic about that smell, it reminds me of art college

Two hours.

I used to keep a measure of my accumulated bike rides by adding up the weekly then annual milage. In a good year, I could total 6,000 miles. As the years go by, this figure has steadily declined to around 5,000. However, I recall doing a survey about a decade ago and worked out that I did about 10 hours a week exercise. Over his last year, it’s somewhere around 9 hours per week. In other words, it has not really gone down much, I’m just slower now.

As for today, what a cold biting wind there is. It’s cold for it’s direction – south East. Two hours was enough and even my legs felt stiff despite me urging them on.