Matthew is a fun guy

I was waiting in the Bristol Guild cafe with a pot-of-tea-for-one (it was Assam, since you ask) and beguiling the minutes by staring out across the potted plants on the flat roof and sketching the fire escape, just a useful exercise in drawing perspective,which failed miserably, as it happens. It also felt a bit precious, but then that's the Guild for you. Arty. There were two other people wearing berets, and the group of elderly folk across the way threw Anthony Gormley's name into the conversation. Quite loudly. I'm not sure where that particular conversation was meandering, but one of them, a chap with a beard as well as the beret, was one of life's Eddicators. A lot of geology was mentioned; I poised my Lamy Safari fountain pen in readiness to capture the spirit of the thing, but lost the thread soon after he said "the Tibetan plateau is a similar structure." The woman opposite him at the table, to whom these words were addressed, looked duly impressed, though.

And then Charlie came along and we talked. And then we went off in our different directions. Last time I'd met Charlie for coffee, I'd ended up being run over by a car, so this time I was being vigilant. As I ascended Park Street, I saw a man holding a basket, in the sort of way you would hold a basket if you wanted people to see what was in it, but weren't entirely sure that you wanted them to look after all.
So of course I had to look. And then I carried on. And then I stopped and went back.
"You're wondering what they are," he said.
"They're Jews' Ears," I said.
"I'm impressed," he said.
He was touting them around Bristol's restaurants, but it being lunchtime, they were a bit busy so he was biding his time.
We agreed that Jews' Ears aren't the most pretty of fungi, but at least they are available in January. That's macrobiotics for you.
I asked his name, so that I would have a name to go with the photo.
"Matthew"
"I'm Dru"
"Not the famous Dru of Oxford?"
I had to think about this for a few moments.
"I don't think so..."
There's a famous Dru of Oxford? Crikey.


(postscript) I've been criticised for describing the fungus as Jew's Ears. As I don't own the term, I have taken the crit on board, and shall in future make a point of describing the fungus in question as Jelly Ears. Perhaps in time the Latin name will be changed from its present Auricularia Auricula-Judae to something else. I can only say that I was aware of the historical resonances of the name; Judas is supposed to have hanged himself from an elder tree, and it is upon elders that Jelly Ears like to grow. And further, elder is a tree associated with witchcraft. So associating it with Judas, and naming the fungus after him, is both anti-pagan propaganda and anti-Semitism. I consciously used the old name because it is an historical curiosity, in the same way that I look at Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Chaucer's Jewish characters, compared with whom Shakespeare's Shylock seems almost benign; as examples of institutional racism that need to be looked at full-on. But you can hardly be expected to know that, in a casual description like the blog entry above.

kitchen disasters and other disasters

It's been a bad week in the kitchen, though it has provided me with some quotable quotes. Like when I sort-of-apologised to Katie for putting too much lemon juice in the coleslaw, and she consoled me with the reassurance that "If it's any help, I wouldn't have liked it however you served it."

And then I put a loaf in the oven and got engrossed with a drawing, and three hours later Katie noticed the smoke, and...

..and then I dropped the pan of cabbage (fried up with garam masala, since you ask) as I was preparing to dole it out onto the plates. Katie had not tried very hard to hide her dismay, earlier, when she realised that cabbage was on the menu. "Ha! Served just as you like it," I said, surveying the steaming mess on the floor.

I'd been shamefully procrastinating over giving money to the Disasters Emergency Committee for the Haiti earthquake appeal. Then I heard on the radio that the sum of donations in the UK was £38 million. Which is a bit less than 50p per person, by my rough and ready reckoning. Which I thought was very shameful. So I got onto the DEC website and did something about it. And so can you, dear reader, if you have not done already. Follow the useful link above!

going to the zoo

I think I've finished this picture, and I'm both quite pleased with it and aware that I could do better, which is probably a good result.

On 2nd February there's an event at Bristol Zoo, where Geraldine Taylor will be reading from The Coffee Thrush and talking about bird song and adventures in wildlife; there will also be some poetry from Nick Winn, the Peregrine Poet, whose poems have also graced the sides of buses in the Bristol area. And I'll be doing a sort of son et lumiere thing with my illustrations.

wild places

At last I've got into gear and am painting pictures, and I'm pleased with the way this one is going. It's a fox catching hailstones in its mouth. It was something that Geraldine Taylor spotted on the Zoo Banks, on the Downs. Assuming I don't mess the picture up, it'll be in the Bristol Review of Books and in Geraldine's new work-in-progress book.

There's been a lot of nature around the place lately. I walked along the Severn estuary on Sunday, exploring the bit where the railway tunnel and the new bridge intersect.



This is a shaft that was dug to tunnel outwards from, and is now used to pump water out of the tunnel. The one on the Welsh side is more impressive, because it pumps out the Great Spring, which was discovered in dramatic circumstances during the construction of the tunnel, and which has in its time supplied an ordnance factory, a paper mill, and, now, the brewery that makes Becks and Stella beer.

Anyway, the recent snows have been thoroughly washed away by the rain, and the sun shone brightly, and the birds agreed with me that it felt like spring, and were singing in a chirpy sort of way all over the place. A couple of blue tits were bobbing round in circles, occasionally performing sudden vertical climbs. Similarly, a grey squirrel in next door's garden was performing high-speed circles punctuated by great leaps into the air. Lord knows what that was about; perhaps it was art.

And the magpies in the plane tree at the front of the house have been repairing the nest where they reared their single chick last year, before it was killed by the local fox. Gratifyingly, the car parked below the nest was spattered with twigs and magpie crap. It is this car's owner who cleared the snow before driving away last week, throwing the snow onto the footpath where I had cleared the snow. Karma!

look out there's a monster coming

It's Katie's birthday, and she's officially a teenager! Thirteen years old today.

We're still talking, though. So far, so good.

fox in the snow

The morning after the night the snow came, I looked out of the front window at about five o' clock and saw a smooth blanket of snow. The only mark on it was the single line of fox prints winding down the street, a Morse code message saying "I'm hungry!"

It changed halfway down the street from dots to dashes; the fox had broken into a run at that point. And suddenly there it was, leaping at something under the car below. I hurried for my camera, but it had gone by the time I returned. Then it reappeared briefly, hurrying round a house against the east wind, defiantly bristling with life in the sub-zero morning.

I've been putting food out for the birds since the cold weather came in; scraps, and crusts soaked in old vegetable oil. I don't have access to the garden, so it has to be hurled down from the kitchen window. Sometimes it goes onto the roof of the garden shed.

The neighbour over the way there has several bird feeders in a tree in the garden, which is ideal for the small birds as they are relatively safe from the swooping of sparrowhawks; her garden is especially popular with goldfinches, and an increasingly large flock of them is for ever flitting down from the neighbouring ash tree to bicker over the feeders.

The food I throw down is sometimes foraged by blackbirds, but usually it is the crows, pigeons and squirrels who get it. I would rather feed creatures with whom I have more sympathy, but I guess bad guys need to feed too, and these particular bad guys can't really help being bad.

Anyway, after the snow came I saw that the fox had been up on the shed roof too. I was quite impressed, I must say.

After a few days I noted that our garden had far more fox prints in it than the neighbours' gardens, and felt unreasonably smug and virtuous. One evening we watched the fox hunting around the gardens and sitting under a tree crunching something that sounded a bit disgusting. But then yesterday morning there was fresh snow and no sign of tracks, and I wondered whether the fox had succumbed to the hostile weather, or whether it had simply done its garden patrol before the snow had fallen.

The answer was there this morning. Last night I'd mixed up the unsuccessful chocolate cake, and the rather long-in-the-tooth oatcake batter, fried up with the oil from a jar of aubergines, and bunged it down into the garden. And there, this morning, was a fresh trail across the garden. Fox lives on!

a big snowman

John Terry, whose book of poems, Building Wings, came out recently, sent me this poem he wrote a few years ago after seeing my previous photo of Katie on a snowball. So here it is

A True Story

When I was five my dad showed me
how a snowball rolled in snow gets bigger.
So I rolled my snowball in the snow
until it was too big for me to move.

Then I called my friends to help
and we rolled our snowball in the snow
until it was too big for us to move.

Then my dad came out to help
and he rolled our snowball in the snow
until it was too big for him to move.

Then we called my uncle to help
and we all rolled our snowball in the snow
until it was too big for anyone to move.

It was so big
we made it into a snowman,
with a carroty nose and potato eyes,
a tattered scarf, and a broom to lean on.

He was so big
that when the snow melted
he took a whole week to run away,
and even then,
left the broom and scarf behind.

But I do know he took his carroty nose
and potato eyes with him.
Because when I looked,
they'd gone.