tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-348451742024-03-13T17:54:35.652+00:00James HobbsIt's mainly about drawingJames Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.comBlogger292125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-26413064757079504812022-02-07T17:18:00.000+00:002022-02-07T17:18:37.410+00:00Five books to inspire you to draw<p>I was happy to be invited to select five inspirational books about drawing for Shepherd, the website that's like roaming around your favourite bookshop.<a href="https://shepherd.com/best-books/to-inspire-you-to-draw" target="_blank"> Follow this link to the Shepherd site</a> to find the reasons why I chose each one. It's a rich field to choose from and it was hard to select just five: these are the ones that rang my bell the loudest as I chose. In no particular order:<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHDTsSJc5PzNjaHvE5cgU7Rc_5Wg85XRyoFcpX4JjwMwXfpExwU86blCwm0DGtw2PRz2O3BOU8Nx3d8pjg58iOqta2bKPhCyPqFmDKENQCrku73CmqxTuww6aJxU11XUw9FvkKj7Hz8Bmhm5p6XVLdR0ABX-txGH_BVEWS6cE3VnlH9hrnzmU=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="110" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHDTsSJc5PzNjaHvE5cgU7Rc_5Wg85XRyoFcpX4JjwMwXfpExwU86blCwm0DGtw2PRz2O3BOU8Nx3d8pjg58iOqta2bKPhCyPqFmDKENQCrku73CmqxTuww6aJxU11XUw9FvkKj7Hz8Bmhm5p6XVLdR0ABX-txGH_BVEWS6cE3VnlH9hrnzmU=w110-h110" width="110" /></a></div>Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, edited by Julian Bell, Julia Balchin and Claudia Tobin (Thames & Hudson)<br /><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg3xI_eJDAy85RprZILDoieQGuCrRauDh4nhv32YqTZk_U99AgkkS-P_x3GJu7KcC4Pnfk_5MJ0qKWrXj4VDyaSt4H_RCR2MluZMQNaG5bcroRxcZpt4gSpOBtcgFjsdVSk4sDeiBnZfAX7Ei7_3jku4AkJ8-PVQGWC9V7n3pBZC01bccOG7zQ=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="109" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg3xI_eJDAy85RprZILDoieQGuCrRauDh4nhv32YqTZk_U99AgkkS-P_x3GJu7KcC4Pnfk_5MJ0qKWrXj4VDyaSt4H_RCR2MluZMQNaG5bcroRxcZpt4gSpOBtcgFjsdVSk4sDeiBnZfAX7Ei7_3jku4AkJ8-PVQGWC9V7n3pBZC01bccOG7zQ=w109-h109" width="109" /></a></div>Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, edited by Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher (Atlantic Monthly Press)<br /><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVmr8GwLK-3x5qkrLS4XYbui7VjPkXrJF_vQlE--1Iape21IDjUEC4_ulk2mK-zhdfk_4_rm_DW-aO4oipQ5ckPhg2CU_0L4G_8RClNfYqCNz3pjvBcUJ3bNG8syXoD-4xI9WOkQA88wPIpb7e-O_a-q7b9LNFZolTVVCFP6BeEF1Kq5V9-ls=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="110" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVmr8GwLK-3x5qkrLS4XYbui7VjPkXrJF_vQlE--1Iape21IDjUEC4_ulk2mK-zhdfk_4_rm_DW-aO4oipQ5ckPhg2CU_0L4G_8RClNfYqCNz3pjvBcUJ3bNG8syXoD-4xI9WOkQA88wPIpb7e-O_a-q7b9LNFZolTVVCFP6BeEF1Kq5V9-ls=w110-h110" width="110" /></a></div>The Art of Urban Sketching: Drawing on Location Around the World, by Gabriel Campanario (Quarry Books)<p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMEqoLAJsJvTXZeJ4SUq6fl_83L0dPK2_NScoV-_q7WX0OlI3H0eS1EeFA86Pv9-5r7CpIEfg0KWIpnJcmZra7OHXDNPmTNCLm-c3zqwRt0u0i4Je3GghTePWcYECf5qOZyMBhtn1Q_jkGZU5U97ytnjfaoBp2VPCQ2antFXukyZKeuKTMTZ8=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="109" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMEqoLAJsJvTXZeJ4SUq6fl_83L0dPK2_NScoV-_q7WX0OlI3H0eS1EeFA86Pv9-5r7CpIEfg0KWIpnJcmZra7OHXDNPmTNCLm-c3zqwRt0u0i4Je3GghTePWcYECf5qOZyMBhtn1Q_jkGZU5U97ytnjfaoBp2VPCQ2antFXukyZKeuKTMTZ8=w109-h109" width="109" /></a></div>Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to Now, by Isabel Seligman (Thames & Hudson)<br /><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglKVFsT1eFkdt45WxCYLEwZQGKzurGzc531N4mhKDsHIgVGgYTWIXRoevKXqmA2a909PtnfKajuf7BQTT1hYIHfUl9QEpX2s2oYdl73W7ggsOjxQRpi3Sc7opRvvpCKAbQavW8v39xLfiMpz2OQn9SOaWzB3j_e3BUXAEjh6HnEx2YiR1OEJ0=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="107" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglKVFsT1eFkdt45WxCYLEwZQGKzurGzc531N4mhKDsHIgVGgYTWIXRoevKXqmA2a909PtnfKajuf7BQTT1hYIHfUl9QEpX2s2oYdl73W7ggsOjxQRpi3Sc7opRvvpCKAbQavW8v39xLfiMpz2OQn9SOaWzB3j_e3BUXAEjh6HnEx2YiR1OEJ0=w107-h107" width="107" /></a></div>Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing, by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern (Black Dog Publishing)<p></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://shepherd.com/best-books/to-inspire-you-to-draw">Visit the Shepherd website to find more.</a></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-33191902360744701072022-01-29T10:02:00.001+00:002022-01-29T10:02:48.822+00:00Coming soon...<p> ...a new website.</p><p>Fine more of my work on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a> for now.<br /></p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-83465748465720661812021-08-17T16:52:00.000+01:002021-08-17T16:52:05.358+01:00Numbering the sketchbooks<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsIZO2aNGpH6zh6_sdrTKcexbs0B6ZAAk7qxpaTjQNpS0tWQeGI3qHNRIHdUIM1ZiqEdfTEoUvCdny-apiywDHBE4G8DNw3i7oDNytHlU_TGjqvv_ZizVE17gqN7egjDN5WosRRg/s992/IMG_5961.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="992" data-original-width="992" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsIZO2aNGpH6zh6_sdrTKcexbs0B6ZAAk7qxpaTjQNpS0tWQeGI3qHNRIHdUIM1ZiqEdfTEoUvCdny-apiywDHBE4G8DNw3i7oDNytHlU_TGjqvv_ZizVE17gqN7egjDN5WosRRg/w400-h400/IMG_5961.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>All of my sketchbooks – and there are hundreds of them now – have remained unlabelled until very recently. They were, mostly anyway, dated and their contents were listed on the opening pages, but there was nothing on their covers to identify them. Some of those from the 1980s to the 2000s have no dates in them and very little written in them, but there may still be enough to date them, such as a drawn infant daughter, or a specific location that can be pinpointed to a particular time. Date and location, date and location, I say to myself now: easily done at the time, less so later on, sometimes impossible decades later on.</p><p>Part of the reason for not labelling them was not being sure what was the best method. I didn't want to use one system and then change to another. I have opted for a simple dated system: year and month that the sketchbook was started. Perhaps a simple numeric system would be enough, but the system I've opted for allows new sketchbooks to slot in easily if necessary. And each page can be numbered and added to the catalogue number so it can easily be identified and found: say, 2020.03.32.</p><p>In my imagination I can see spreadsheets of each book with every image listed so I know exactly where and when everything was done in an easily searched format, but really, life is too short for that. There is a balance to be found between organisation and creativity. I think time is better spent drawing and writing. </p><p><a href="http://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart">@jameshobbsart</a></p><p> </p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-24500344885425244252021-06-30T08:47:00.000+01:002021-06-30T08:47:45.484+01:00Adjaye's Sunken House and an almond tree<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq2fSCJgDhBt6Z3zxbPy3RmO7hUzJPwSA0olHoKcDzQK1lnU0YxmJBUtdZYZPshKFm1P7vPrVI208pGSP04E1xtPTU8NGhhYVqsorXSG1H9UOoDWwAiM018-frSZNKRnzg4Ug6jg/s1209/jameshobbs.sunkenhouse.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="861" data-original-width="1209" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq2fSCJgDhBt6Z3zxbPy3RmO7hUzJPwSA0olHoKcDzQK1lnU0YxmJBUtdZYZPshKFm1P7vPrVI208pGSP04E1xtPTU8NGhhYVqsorXSG1H9UOoDWwAiM018-frSZNKRnzg4Ug6jg/w400-h285/jameshobbs.sunkenhouse.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />We recently followed a street tree walk around our local streets from Paul Wood's enlightening book London's Street Trees. It was a bit of an epiphany to realise what an urban arboretum we have been walking under all these years: the route took in strawberry trees, tulip trees, dawn redwoods, Persian ironwoods, juneberries, wild service and Japanese pagoda trees, among others. The borough of Hackney alone has alone planted more than 1,000 street trees since 2018.<p></p><p>This almond tree (you won't recognise it from my drawing) grows on the pavement outside <a href="https://www.adjaye.com/work/sunken-house/">David Adjaye's Sunken House</a>. Adjaye's designs include the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the Mole House, just around the corner from the Sunken House, which was once owned by the Hackney Mole Man, who spent years tunnelling under the house with unfortunate consequences. <a href="http://www.urbansketchers.org/2015/01/hidden-depths-mole-mans-house.html" target="_blank">I wrote about it on the Urban Sketchers blog</a> a few years ago when the house was still a ruin.</p><p>There's more of my work on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/">Instagram</a>. </p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-76973071899056732592021-04-08T09:28:00.000+01:002021-04-08T09:30:37.651+01:00Interviewed in Drawing Attention<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2P1rxR10JGO28jtE7dQrID7tj1FEkWox7d-l607midtzCi62Q5KqLht87CEQzJ7zPtu5_545fXK1U8EJoSZ9dHGI_rBOjkrK2MKJW-cIeJb93sLfobmf-p7fc9VzyywihWzI3KA/s2048/IMG_5036.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2P1rxR10JGO28jtE7dQrID7tj1FEkWox7d-l607midtzCi62Q5KqLht87CEQzJ7zPtu5_545fXK1U8EJoSZ9dHGI_rBOjkrK2MKJW-cIeJb93sLfobmf-p7fc9VzyywihWzI3KA/w320-h240/IMG_5036.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>There's a short interview with me in the April 2021 edition of Drawing Attention. <a href="https://issuu.com/drawingattention/docs/da_april_2021/48">This is the link to it.</a> <p></p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-89774349393418172602021-03-22T22:32:00.000+00:002021-03-22T22:32:40.460+00:00Zoom sessions with ENO Breathe<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8HGeLTLDyAVQLSr7OXwcAd5PIB3w-kjOe3bPrbP_X3bpJZP1bUKsivW5hYJjLaEQD4xdYqzSEj3Bx8zQgbD703XythgdygLHrq8UP8q9mP3LaPqTJgAbVuioKFyUQiMDEp11ETA/s1220/jameshobbs_enobreathe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="875" data-original-width="1220" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8HGeLTLDyAVQLSr7OXwcAd5PIB3w-kjOe3bPrbP_X3bpJZP1bUKsivW5hYJjLaEQD4xdYqzSEj3Bx8zQgbD703XythgdygLHrq8UP8q9mP3LaPqTJgAbVuioKFyUQiMDEp11ETA/w400-h288/jameshobbs_enobreathe.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>This is the view of the final Zoom session of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX1z_LneMAo">ENO Breathe</a> programme I've been attending; it's a six-week course for people recovering from the effects of post-Covid breathlessness lead by singing experts from the English National Opera and Imperial College Healthcare Trust. It may not have turned me into an opera singer – it will take longer than six weeks to do <i>that</i> – but it has been great for the breathing and relaxation. Those opera singers certainly know how to breathe. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-62851276978322992652021-01-14T16:15:00.001+00:002021-01-14T16:18:42.946+00:00Landscapes in lockdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRuGi4RbRWuDSzM494ulNev2OVI6L_NRoSvT3Vj0ggCHdrEKqvdI1P4u-rn9K1xGsmgaLyW5zxZj0kM6k-tPvUzx1OQXL9nDcVLimUgELLAZXqBj1Od76EqzxWi2WnaCxlDpdoQ/s1730/jameshobbs.landscapes0620.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1221" data-original-width="1730" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRuGi4RbRWuDSzM494ulNev2OVI6L_NRoSvT3Vj0ggCHdrEKqvdI1P4u-rn9K1xGsmgaLyW5zxZj0kM6k-tPvUzx1OQXL9nDcVLimUgELLAZXqBj1Od76EqzxWi2WnaCxlDpdoQ/w400-h283/jameshobbs.landscapes0620.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Most of my drawings are about where I’ve been, what's caught my attention, what’s been going on. In these grim days of the UK’s third lockdown, things inevitably change and opportunities shrink, which needn’t be a bad thing. As well as the view out of the front windows and the view out the back, there are also the places where the imagination leads. </p><p>Here are a few of the ink drawings - all postcard sized - that I have been working on over the recent months. Some refer to sketchbook drawings done on a trip to our farming family in Cornwall, and perhaps others have echoes of the Devon countryside where I grew up, but there’s no specific place about them and they’re all done from the imagination. </p><p>The process of making them has been a kind of escapist release. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEn6Vr0-96vuA_47md2VV2AUT5zxMNyoY_IKdyJb8MK-kr9QuYG_uFOX2r4j-3ml_LWLTrxg6ii6U3CVuQ3xODRrS56h4ItoILa3NV8YL35PDY1PPkQ3cPrxy5cM68DiLFxEv7zw/s574/jameshobbs_landscapes4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="574" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEn6Vr0-96vuA_47md2VV2AUT5zxMNyoY_IKdyJb8MK-kr9QuYG_uFOX2r4j-3ml_LWLTrxg6ii6U3CVuQ3xODRrS56h4ItoILa3NV8YL35PDY1PPkQ3cPrxy5cM68DiLFxEv7zw/w400-h280/jameshobbs_landscapes4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b></p><p><b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhXOYEGw9S4bh6nv8w2ba3zRn1ToSXqdCECMhnn0W6LElWC0CtcdUc01hdRGeqeUmOCh9f1WC8bMLaevCLm5MWqcifEP0hcsiW03ke3dV0VzAZDru35NufXcvtNDSWaDHZ1S7AA/s1554/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L14.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="1554" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhXOYEGw9S4bh6nv8w2ba3zRn1ToSXqdCECMhnn0W6LElWC0CtcdUc01hdRGeqeUmOCh9f1WC8bMLaevCLm5MWqcifEP0hcsiW03ke3dV0VzAZDru35NufXcvtNDSWaDHZ1S7AA/w400-h280/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L14.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p>At Tavistock, having loaded the van with food from Gateways and filled it with petrol, climbing the roads towards the moors became ever slower, and it was no surprise to find myself (and the ever present cortege) crawling into dense clouds. Once past the cattle grids it is a relief to be driving along hedgeless roads, except for the tendency of sheep and ponies to wander onto the road. On summer evenings especially they huddle together on the tarmac, which retains its warmth into the night.</p><p>It is cold and miserable turning in to Princetown (top image), the tors occasionally glimpsed through the mists. It is weather that suits the town well enough – it is remote and exposed with a sense of rising as well as falling damp. Down a walled road I get a first view of the prison for which Princetown is best known. </p><p><b>["Mad" Frankie Fraser, the Acid Bath Murderer John Haigh, and Axeman John Mitchell were among its inmates. The prison is due to be closed in 2023 and – just possibly – turned into a hotel.]</b></p><p>There are yellow lines to stop parking by the prison's walls, but a coach has pulled in anyway by the gates, its occupants lurching over to one side to show a wall of faces against its windows. There isn't really so much of the prison to see except these great excluding walls and a barrier rising and falling for cars to enter a line of successive gates. But what there is transfixes. It is like looking at a dead body washed up on a shore; you don't really want to look but you know you must. These blank walls have added significance for being all there is to show for lives spent inside.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWBEsUB8xc1JPzpXDh2fhA_lDCX9IqHogcMgvgzs0J7CLjytptv5D3zxo-oMWbO1Bw2oX51MttM2FhfMf90b4Sfw9QRK-9vmBEsZIoPrT0QKJ95Stp8MumSkhAq5Uv3FvVU4tJkQ/s1578/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L4.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1053" data-original-width="1578" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWBEsUB8xc1JPzpXDh2fhA_lDCX9IqHogcMgvgzs0J7CLjytptv5D3zxo-oMWbO1Bw2oX51MttM2FhfMf90b4Sfw9QRK-9vmBEsZIoPrT0QKJ95Stp8MumSkhAq5Uv3FvVU4tJkQ/w400-h268/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Dartmoor Prison, Devon, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The town would not be here without the prison. Built for US and French prisoners of war in the 19th century, the prison and the town itself have struggled to survive. To hold out against elemental forces that threaten to dissolve the very fabric of everything except the tors is almost enough. If Princetown was abandoned tomorrow, you would half expect all remnants of human habitation to be washed into the rivers and streams within months, devouring its past.</p><p>Prisoner officers come out in small groups to go to their sad-looking houses up the road. They are disgruntled and reluctant to talk. I have heard on the news that they are voting on taking industrial action today. A few months ago there were prisoners sitting on the roofs of prisons up and down the country, a phenomenon Dartmoor did not entirely escape, a lone figure being picked up by a photographer with a zoom lens from across the moors.</p><p>The prison is the town. Either you are trying to make a living in the prison or from the tourism it generates. Otherwise you are a tourist or one of the prisoners that are seen occasionally working out in the fields. The tourist office is empty enough, the man behind the counter startled by my entry. There are photographs of the moor's sunnier days, of streams that tinkle just to look at them, when the terrain is a release rather than a confinement. There is a map on the wall showing the old mining railways that used to run across the moors here.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrA-Hnw2Mghl427Ln03qxbJ4c709bvdTTQKrSpJKH4NZFmgZm4Mg1cP68WR8A2XgAVwfSIY-9o48_R5WHsJrw_OVFpyB0LDpr7ew7JmNUi7wMLLdwDRuUFz67JI3Uzrgz1HxgpIg/s1447/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L19.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1062" data-original-width="1447" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrA-Hnw2Mghl427Ln03qxbJ4c709bvdTTQKrSpJKH4NZFmgZm4Mg1cP68WR8A2XgAVwfSIY-9o48_R5WHsJrw_OVFpyB0LDpr7ew7JmNUi7wMLLdwDRuUFz67JI3Uzrgz1HxgpIg/w400-h294/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L19.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Dartmoor Prison, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />They are gentle walks now through a landscape it is easy to imagine as being unspoiled, but which are really scarred with the quarrying that has gone on over the years. Following one former line just out of the town, I found rabbits hopping around heaps of granite rubble and sheep as surprised as the man in the tourist office. It is hard to get lost with the TV mast perched over the town acting as a marker, but even this appears to move against the drifting clouds.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ_nog_4cyxva4dxPieMiFIk39f1gHCloJL-bqkvxp_SmtUf3jVh46DW7adW2tG7pEt3LoYAOVgPz-aR6RJ2Ps93AlH_HPmRD2f3zc2rOFZul7xeL_X2bN-RLcQ_hQDC__uCQsFA/s1463/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L25.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="882" data-original-width="1463" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ_nog_4cyxva4dxPieMiFIk39f1gHCloJL-bqkvxp_SmtUf3jVh46DW7adW2tG7pEt3LoYAOVgPz-aR6RJ2Ps93AlH_HPmRD2f3zc2rOFZul7xeL_X2bN-RLcQ_hQDC__uCQsFA/w400-h241/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L25.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, abandoned granite blocks for London Bridge, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Among the rubble, further around, are the shapes of twelve carved blocks prepared for the building of London Bridge in the 1890s, crooked but far from overgrown. Now they still sit by the rotting wooden sleepers that once held the track. It is the railway that has departed instead. A number went when London Bridge was sold and shipped off to Arizona and some repairs were necessary. It is just down to these dozen now, a bizarre but cheerful reminder of some madder world.</p><p>A woman by the road at Two Bridges is pointing out a farm where I could camp when a car speeds by with its hooter on, scattering a group of ponies that stood at the edge of the road. "No offence," she says, "but it is the youngsters that come out of the pubs at night and don't give a second thought – until they see the dent in the bonnet the next morning."</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_AzVU7FJd_7r08zB9jxFFB3z0MxMHiHyTEWLPJLWZvozxoKC-KSz7n8mesgx4S1stT3636vfLAnN0aO6gGOi2Fi-ok963gEzIFIERkuglYRzq32rxGh4HrKo9aEkcL0PN-bKPw/s1410/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L22.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1054" data-original-width="1410" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_AzVU7FJd_7r08zB9jxFFB3z0MxMHiHyTEWLPJLWZvozxoKC-KSz7n8mesgx4S1stT3636vfLAnN0aO6gGOi2Fi-ok963gEzIFIERkuglYRzq32rxGh4HrKo9aEkcL0PN-bKPw/w400-h299/jameshobbs_dartmoor3L22.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Dartmoor, Devon, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The farm she directs me to is down a track that leads to a small stone bridge among low trees. Pulled in on one side are a couple of long caravans, a lorry and an estate car. They look to be here to stay. A child stares at me through a window as I pass. The farmhouse is further on, the door open showing a messy, deserted kitchen. Two upturned buckets are on the floor and a pile of socks are on the table. I knock and shout, but nobody comes.</p><p>Walking back trough the yard they catch sight of me from one of the outhouses where they are watching a rejected calf being fed by another cow. A group of blond-haired children look on too with the young farmers and then we pretend to help by sealing off escape routes as the calf and cow are coaxed back into a field. They seem to know which way to go without our help.</p><p>Soon the farmers are telling me what tough land it is to farm, of how it takes social security and family credit to keep them solvent. They have a thousand acres, a huge size, "but it takes that much to keep it profitable up here," she says.</p><p>He is young and bearded, and she is a throwback to some sixties pop festival. I ask them if they dislike farming so much why they don't just sell up and go. "Firstly this isn't ours to sell – we're just Prince Charles' tenants – and secondly we are trying to get out," he says. "We work 90 hours a week and still rely on handouts – of course we're trying to move."</p><p>So I pay him the 50p they charge for a night camped by the river. On the water's edge are two tents owned by a nurse, his partner and a boy from a special needs school in Wales who skips around the field in a wide arc. They are as vague as he is energetic. In the evening we all go into a pub in Princetown in their Land Rover where I rattle around in the back with their two dogs.</p><p>I get on with camping by the river and use it as a base for a few days. I have neighbours who drop in from time to time for a chat. The children from the caravans, Holly, Megan and Luke, bring me a bunch of flowers. There are no toilets or showers, but it is cheap. Occasionally, fleetingly, it even stops raining.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkenyJkulpd57gpKknOXeTTgAIrBjXVDqjX_oshMPLBuz-zQPHiB9M3IT7Bw6FNkgXpd6O8XDEXW_2ZdTUyBwJjfijRYDO6NnUnKh5dDBbSUPJCmtc8low2SSfdQz9ag-HrL__QQ/s1536/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L16.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1062" data-original-width="1536" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkenyJkulpd57gpKknOXeTTgAIrBjXVDqjX_oshMPLBuz-zQPHiB9M3IT7Bw6FNkgXpd6O8XDEXW_2ZdTUyBwJjfijRYDO6NnUnKh5dDBbSUPJCmtc8low2SSfdQz9ag-HrL__QQ/w400-h276/jameshobbs_dartmoor4L16.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>After a visit to <a href="https://www.widecombe-in-the-moor.com" target="_blank">Widecombe-in-the-Moor</a> I drop in at the Warren House Inn, a quiet place in the middle of nowhere. When Morton was here this pub had a fire that had burned for 100 years. It burns on as pathetically as when he was here. Two logs are perched on a thick bed of ash, only the odd spiralling fleck giving away that it is alight at all. The landlord admits it is almost impossible to let it go out.</p><p>"Sometimes we go out for the day, down to Plymouth or somewhere, and come back and it will be there looking dead and all you have to do is drop a couple of logs on and it's away again. No problem."</p><p>He'd never heard about In Search of England and so he reads about Morton's visit leaning on the bar while I sip my low alcohol cider. The old stuffed fox is gone (the landlord had disposed of one not so long ago) and there are the murmurs of conversation over the clinking of eating and drinking. That this pub is here at all is again thanks to the tinners who once worked nearby. Now it attracts hikers, salesmen and watchers of the useless fire.</p><p>Back at the campsite I cook in the van with the rain still falling, listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Viv0AEsAmg" target="_blank">Brazil beat Scotland in the World Cup</a> on the radio. I leave the moor in the morning, nearly getting stuck in the muddy field and driving up the road to cheers and waves from the children. I stop in Princetown to do some shopping and take a last look at the prison going in and out of focus through the mist.</p><p>The van will not start when the moment comes for me to make my own Dartmoor escape. A man appears from nowhere with a can of WD40, which he sprays liberally around the electrics, and I am gone.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>James Hobbs, 1990</b></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnk8wgA72YhSZGp6rz_TBkHAIDPvI6mAffdIUJOJvtYd59NQWcnwG2dWk02LL1Nb5yg1rqVuuxCTqnq1rNJI6-vRp2unqeABYIxg4V_m4wHAeQ8_chpGL5cxnrlXhZ6k7bNju3MA/s1591/jameshobbs_clovelly4L28.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1126" data-original-width="1591" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnk8wgA72YhSZGp6rz_TBkHAIDPvI6mAffdIUJOJvtYd59NQWcnwG2dWk02LL1Nb5yg1rqVuuxCTqnq1rNJI6-vRp2unqeABYIxg4V_m4wHAeQ8_chpGL5cxnrlXhZ6k7bNju3MA/w400-h283/jameshobbs_clovelly4L28.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Clovelly, Devon, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>[Further posts about this trip will follow here soon. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html">This is a link to details about my journey</a>, which started 30 years ago in spring 1990. I'll be posting images from the trip on Instagram.] </b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-18436377468662155222020-10-21T15:19:00.003+01:002021-01-06T21:26:40.002+00:00Rock bottom at Land's End<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH1ZN8bbIsGUXvC2dBG8NakMvSchyphenhyphenaGFoioFxOTYP0iiAUSlrhPPeJ4YBI7rhwK-9vnIa_UNqUbS9coOfRhOpr24cdIfFs3DZstXB5LbrxFT0AL-2wYtUIm44nHMNE_f7z3YmMOA/s1071/jameshobbs.nearhelston.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="687" data-original-width="1071" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH1ZN8bbIsGUXvC2dBG8NakMvSchyphenhyphenaGFoioFxOTYP0iiAUSlrhPPeJ4YBI7rhwK-9vnIa_UNqUbS9coOfRhOpr24cdIfFs3DZstXB5LbrxFT0AL-2wYtUIm44nHMNE_f7z3YmMOA/w400-h256/jameshobbs.nearhelston.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><i><p><i><br /></i></p>This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i><p></p><p><i><b>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </b></i></p><p>There is no mistaking that England does come to a conclusion at Land's End. I pull in at a lay-by on the top of a hill and, in the breeze, look around me. There is a 270-degree view of the sea from here, from St Michael's Mount around to Cape Cornwall. Tonight it is deceptively soft and gentle, belying the enduring strength of the last bleak stretch of granite pointing into the teeth of the Atlantic. Suddenly there is nowhere left to go.</p><p>But just as civilisation loses interest and the A30 winds down from the dual carriageway just a few miles up the road, here you realise less means more. Here you can sense the age old battle that has gone on between land and sea; land pockmarked with signs of prehistoric man and riddled with forgotten mines, and a sea with a past record in wrecking that demands an awesome respect.</p><p>Standing on the hill as darkness falls, I have never been as aware of this battle. It is a heroic panorama. It is no wonder that the Cornish think of themselves as ruggedly independent from the rest of the country. They are surrounded with water; even their border with Devon follows the line of the River Tamar until it is a trickle near the north coast.</p><p>I knock on the door of a nearby house to ask for water. A little boy answers, and he is then joined by one of a jumble of young people inside. There is a look of envy when I explain what I'm doing and where I'm going. In the yard outside nature is gradually reclaiming a converted ambulance and a VW Beetle, a reminder of past travels. Maybe this is how it all ends; mechanical breakdown and a slow rehabilitation into four walls. I settle with them, drinking a can of beer while they regale me with stories of benders, alternative sites and the dying breed of sympathetic field owners.</p><p>If they were going to settle down, Cornwall is to them a better place than most. One of the men shows me the shed where they earn their livings from weaving baskets. He has country craftsman written all over him. As he shows me around he says: "You know what they say about Cornwall? It's like a Christmas stocking. All the nuts fall to the bottom."</p><p>***</p><p>I freewheel down to the coast in the morning, to the tip that I remember from my childhood as nothing more than a car park and a tea house. At least, that is how I like to remember it. </p><p>Until a few years ago Land's End was little more than a few buildings on a cliff with a car park, not very beautiful I'm told, but where people came to pace the cliffs until they were almost bare of grass and buy postcards and tea. As such it was a fitting scene of things petering out before rather more spectacular elemental forces took over.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAJowMSf9Ff5xciMBJpmcCFxoNZNJ6ZYNtFTclrZx5ui3iZ3bQGBuyiodf84tOZ9vO7x3tOPlKplrmEFsKuw7y3EY8p04MaasHlUwjliPSdaMCriMQgRomYpYMdTZaMB98OmoHQw/s1097/jameshobbs_landsend1.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="1097" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAJowMSf9Ff5xciMBJpmcCFxoNZNJ6ZYNtFTclrZx5ui3iZ3bQGBuyiodf84tOZ9vO7x3tOPlKplrmEFsKuw7y3EY8p04MaasHlUwjliPSdaMCriMQgRomYpYMdTZaMB98OmoHQw/w400-h286/jameshobbs_landsend1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Land's End, Cornwall, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>But this is now changed. The public, it seems, need to entertained in family-sized packages and with this in mind Land's End was bought by the entrepreneur Peter de Savary. It became the relaunch of Land's End. It is, in a region of so many firsts and lasts, the First & Last Theme Park, where, we are told, "the Atlantic Ocean confronts England's romantic last outpost".</p><p>It is the romance of freshly made doughnuts, self-service restaurants and information desks, a sprawling amalgam of white buildings to detain you and your wallet on your way to the cliffs that are presented almost as a sideshow. And so, if it all becomes too much and you jump into your car and just drive and drive to escape it all, this is what you will find.</p><p>A woman hangs out of a displaced gazebo, wodge of tickets and glossy leaflets at the ready.</p><p>"Just you dear? Four pounds please." <b><i>[Only £6 in 2020! See <a href="https://landsend-landmark.co.uk">https://landsend-landmark.co.uk</a>]</i></b></p><p>Maybe it is a place you enjoy most with children and it makes me feel as if I am kicking down sandcastles to say it detracts from what Land's End is all about, because this really could have been built on the top of any cliff in Cornwall. As with Stonehenge, the way it is presented shows that its significance is just not understood, the emphasis being on packing them in and keeping the cash tills ringing.</p><p>The sea is still flecked with surf, even on this increasingly becalmed day, a deception that is unlikely to lure any craft onto the rocks, not least because none are visible. There is nothing serene about it. Waves crash in slow motion over rocks around the Longships Lighthouse about a mile away, hanging unreally in the air. The granite cliff is uneven and ragged, not the most spectacular but the most under siege. At Sennen Cove, about a mile around the coast to the north, it is sheltered enough to be a different day, the sting taken out of it.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXLnbu8i9PczKYzO7qXC3flZurb158osvxeF-zkbCYYKA_RAHxeC9gsW36x9dNpF_yXZMp5_rbKQtR2n0R8s_wBdr0d2xPwksmf9Uyq2OwxN9iTgCwdjad1kgeCwaG6avLNvFAow/s1088/jameshobbs.landsend3.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="1088" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXLnbu8i9PczKYzO7qXC3flZurb158osvxeF-zkbCYYKA_RAHxeC9gsW36x9dNpF_yXZMp5_rbKQtR2n0R8s_wBdr0d2xPwksmf9Uyq2OwxN9iTgCwdjad1kgeCwaG6avLNvFAow/w400-h253/jameshobbs.landsend3.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Land's End signpost, Cornwall, 1990<br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>One of the most recognised features of Land's End is the signpost that points to cities around the world, the usual point of arrival and departure for those travelling to and from John O'Groats. As I arrived there was somebody just setting out, being photographed before the signpost holding up a copy of the Guardian like a kidnap victim. He is struggling with his rucksack and sponsorship forms for Multiple Sclerosis Charities before setting out to hitch-hike north and then back down again. Land's End's resident photographer gives him a note to deliver to her counterpart at John O'Groats, and he was away on the 870 miles up and 870 miles back.</p><p>"See you in about ten days," he said glumly. I could have offered him a lift – I will be near Scotland (in a couple of months).</p><p>"We had four here in one day last week," a grey haired lady in the gift shop was telling me. "One came in so late there was hardly a soul here to see them, and the signpost had been taken down, the poor lovey."</p><p>There is a selection of photographs in the hotel of some of those who've undertaken this trip, from cycling nudists to wheelchair racers, although it is such a common event now there is nothing extraordinary about it.</p><p>There is the hardy air of visitors who have ventured out in the wind and rain swathed in fluorescent waterproofing only to be caught out by fresh sunny weather. We watched it rolling towards us over the sea from behind the Wolf Lighthouse, like a curtain pulled back. Standing on the cliffs today is like a seat in the stalls watching effortlessly spectacular sea and weather. With the wind coming directly from the west, it is a supply of fresh air that has done little more than brush over the Isles of Scilly on the trip over the Atlantic.</p><p>The skies are busy with helicopters and small planes heading for the Isles of Scilly, which are just a thin line on the horizon. On the clearest days you can make out the sandy beaches. Their reputation for early flowers and leisurely holidays rather goes against the diet of shipwrecks and smuggling we've been fed in the centre.</p><p>But with all this crashing and blowing going on, salt on the lips and warmth of the sun, just why a "multi sensory experience unique in Europe" has had to be created in a great cavernous studio is hard to understand. While we queue to go in, and a girl from Wolverhampton tells her friend, a little too loudly, how her mother had been injured by a sheep in Australia, there is a announcement for those of a nervous disposition that they may be letting themselves in for a rough ride.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHppi4rU4D875hu_0umEtZnKt42NMY4RO1PZnoaRtKktfjs2xOBZQ2yvj_xzjFiolyYygOa_3PnnNY0zlToPzTMB1b9KtwsAoITeuV4LwMsDs2Tqray2qPQ0xXSpx8gsSrfvOdVA/s1097/jameshobbs_landsend2.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="729" data-original-width="1097" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHppi4rU4D875hu_0umEtZnKt42NMY4RO1PZnoaRtKktfjs2xOBZQ2yvj_xzjFiolyYygOa_3PnnNY0zlToPzTMB1b9KtwsAoITeuV4LwMsDs2Tqray2qPQ0xXSpx8gsSrfvOdVA/w400-h266/jameshobbs_landsend2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Land's End, Cornwall, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>Leaning on barrels in a dark open space we are flashed back in history, even unto Neptune himself, to imagined sunken villages now thoroughly submerged and largely forgotten and I gradually came around to the realising, as I suppose I was intended to do, just what a fearful thing that sea stuff can be.</p><p>Torn into the modern day, the moment for the nervously disposed arrives in the shape of a simulated rescue by a Sea King helicopter. Lights flashed and spun above us while over the deafening sounds of its whirring engines, orders are barked to us over a megaphone.</p><p>I look up, longing for the sight of a rope to descend that can take me away. </p><p><i>James Hobbs, 1990</i></p><p><i>[Further posts about this journey will follow here soon. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">This is a link to details about my journey</a>, which started 30 years ago this spring.] </i></p><p><b><i>Read on: <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2021/01/caught-in-rain-on-dartmoor.html">Caught in the rain on Dartmoor</a></i></b></p><div><br /></div>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-20043654921265053552020-10-14T08:46:00.000+01:002020-10-14T08:46:54.027+01:00Donating plasma at Westfield shopping centre<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGy42maUGfVTQVG2tFvlme3eIpI3bD3bH-hxmKr6m-VvbmCQISeBNQM0JGdNxMSMLZ6KiIvk9SjW1mQ0EMBvxFb-yzyxO3LE2y-8ElVqwjHQ-k5txVq9WxZK3aaTvE4b6rumXWzg/s1233/jameshobbs_plasmacentre.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="868" data-original-width="1233" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGy42maUGfVTQVG2tFvlme3eIpI3bD3bH-hxmKr6m-VvbmCQISeBNQM0JGdNxMSMLZ6KiIvk9SjW1mQ0EMBvxFb-yzyxO3LE2y-8ElVqwjHQ-k5txVq9WxZK3aaTvE4b6rumXWzg/w400-h281/jameshobbs_plasmacentre.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>I recently donated convalescent plasma at the Westfield shopping centre at Stratford, east London, which was a surprisingly uplifting experience. The space used to be a Mothercare store but is now an amazing, busy, cheerful place of mostly men attached to machines that circulate the blood back into the donor once the plasma is removed. Plasma can be frozen in readiness to help those in intensive care during the next surge in Covid cases. <div><div><br /></div><div>If you've had the virus and are eligible to donate, I'd urge you to consider it.<p></p></div></div><div>It's not the greatest drawing: I was perhaps a bit lightheaded and my drawing arm had had tubes sticking out of it shortly before, but it felt like a time and place to be captured.</div><div><br /></div>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0Stratford, London, UK51.5471806 -0.00813044.1495124666748424 -70.3206304 90 70.3043696tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-20325947824613208912020-08-21T16:35:00.004+01:002020-10-21T15:21:37.851+01:00Through the lanes of Cornwall<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE0XAqcAIsHO11xWO8vQu03NB9Er9oC4y13j9uq-lsBMRtTXw9S6WrvkU3pHZuai09BoEEugkM5mwFyR7gmEBgpRTGT7Lgg2jolU1IfzXLA3qL29Ey2hVBtUghnsIN-AcVYuRMXA/s765/jameshobbs_probus_3S38.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="765" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE0XAqcAIsHO11xWO8vQu03NB9Er9oC4y13j9uq-lsBMRtTXw9S6WrvkU3pHZuai09BoEEugkM5mwFyR7gmEBgpRTGT7Lgg2jolU1IfzXLA3qL29Ey2hVBtUghnsIN-AcVYuRMXA/w410-h317/jameshobbs_probus_3S38.jpeg" width="410" /></a></div><p></p><p><i>This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html">Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here.</a></i></p><p><b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b></p><p>I camped in a green lane last night, a narrow unsurfaced track that connected two even narrower roads. Up at a farm they tell me it will be quietness itself up there and that the only problem will be which gateway to park in, which view to have when the side door is swung open. I try each gateway for size, and pick on one that looks over the wheatfields to the tall tower of Probus church (above), its bells carrying on the wind this practice night.</p><p>Within minutes a motorcycle shoots by. In those few seconds we exchange startled glances, me with a kettle in my hand, him from beneath a blue peaked helmet before he's gone over the hill. By the time I have cooked another minor classic from my two saucepans and been for a walk around the fields he comes back and pulls up shaking his head.</p><p>“I’ll be sending a report about this to County Hall, yes I will. Built a shed right across the track further along they have, so you can hardly get by at all. Would you believe it?” There is more head shaking.</p><p>This is how he would spend his summer evenings, he tells me, going up and down the lanes on his bike. There is, he goes on, a danger that green lanes such as this are to have their status changed to footpath or bridleway, which would prevent entry to motor vehicles, such as his bike, few as they are that want to use them. His journey was a kind of modern beating of the bounds.</p><p>Just why this was so important to him he had trouble in explaining and I had trouble in understanding. In fact it was as if he'd never asked himself the question before.</p><p>“Now this shed is the sort of thing that will get these lanes closed to folks like me.”</p><p>“But," I dare to ask, “you say you only use it to make sure that you can still use it and that's the only time it really gets used by motor vehicles.”</p><p>He gives me a hurt kind of expression, but rallies.</p><p>“Ah,” he says, “but you have used it too.”</p><p>And with that, mercifully, he heads off.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKCYQqgW9pp7kXLxdrMAE3wqrg0JYFdO47OLBZcyU0QEglPvj4JqgRO89VXUZy688TaAKizCZCB2QcKZ3oyXIjYeH3V5NiSfp7vyoaR1eqhxwhiI1phn9e90o52djF86QbedMaRg/s788/jameshobbs.bohortha_4S03.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="548" data-original-width="788" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKCYQqgW9pp7kXLxdrMAE3wqrg0JYFdO47OLBZcyU0QEglPvj4JqgRO89VXUZy688TaAKizCZCB2QcKZ3oyXIjYeH3V5NiSfp7vyoaR1eqhxwhiI1phn9e90o52djF86QbedMaRg/w410-h285/jameshobbs.bohortha_4S03.jpeg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Bohortha, Cornwall, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />Roseland is a peninsula off a peninsula, a splinter of land off the south Cornish coast. Winding down the roads this morning, my pace having collected the usual trail of traffic behind me, I'll admit to being particularly keen to reach St Anthony-in-Roseland. Whereas Morton's enthusiasm for this little village had sprung from the magic of its name, mine was a matter more of seeing just how well the perfect idyll he had described had survived, how it had coped over the last 60 years, because in many ways it had the most to lose. There was an inkling that perhaps the sleepy, thatched village would have been adorned with bungalows, mini-markets and satellite dishes.</p><p>For a start, it is no easy place to find. There are no signs welcoming careful drivers to St Anthony's or brown signs to heritage centres. I had driven to Roseland's extremity, where the lighthouse sits, without uncovering it. My map omits all references and sitting looking across the tanker-strewn estuary to Falmouth I began to entertain the idea that the village he had described was nowhere to be found but in Morton’s own head. </p><p>It is a landscape of hidden places, of glimpses of water in unlikely directions, of houses that disappear immediately the moment you pass. I start working my way back, turning up side lanes until I find what I think I am looking for: St Anthony is at the end of a no-through-road signposted Bohortha. If the village has a secret, it's going the right way about keeping it.</p><p>There is a bend in the lane lined with a few cottages before the road peters out into two grass tracks. It is all wonderfully unexceptional, so much so I need convincing it is the village Morton wrote about. For the first time I have to get out In Search of England to try to piece together whether I am in the right place; there is a little surviving thatch weighed down by tarpaulins and ropes, a farmhouse and the old school, already closed by the 1920s when Morton came.</p><p>A woman comes down the road wearing a floppy camouflage hat and carrying a basketful of strawberries. She introduces herself as Betty, and at just the mention of Morton, I know I have arrived.</p><p>“We do have a few people around asking after him. He stayed up at the farm around the corner there, where he sat and listened to the wireless. But his chauffeur stayed at Pink Cottage,” and she points to the house we are standing right outside. </p><p>Chauffeur? This is certainly news to me. Having scoured his book countless times, I have found no evidence to point towards a chauffeur whizzing him around the lanes, and I don't like the sound of it too much. While I have been rattling up and down the coast using hedges for a toilet, he was sauntering from, perhaps, hotel to hotel in the back seat of a car trying to act the part of an intrepid explorer. He waxes so lyrically about the virginal simplicity of his room at the farmhouse, it does suggest it is something of a unusual change for him. But a driver? I can hardly believe how he could have kept it from his readers if it had been the case. <b><i>[We know now from Michael Bartholomew’s book In Search of HV Morton that Morton was hiding much more heinous truths.]</i></b></p><p>The cottage is thatchless with dull paint and frosted glass in the front door, a holiday home. <b><i>[It now seems to be <a href="https://www.stmawesholidays.co.uk/property/pink-cottage">available to rent</a>.] </i></b>There is an old water-pump in the garden. A vicar in Bath owns it, Betty tells me. A thick airport novel is inside on the window sill. It is a cottage with a glazed expression waiting for visitors.</p><p>This is the closest I have been to Morton since I left and I wonder if there is anyone who would remember him, unlikely as that may be.</p><p>“My father would have met him,” Betty tells me, promisingly. She pauses. “But he died 30 years ago.”</p><p>For all the signs of a fairly timeless way of life, there have been changes here. Like when the defences for the war were built out on the Point, and when mains electricity arrived in 1945. Mains water waited until 1963. But there's no public telephone and no shop, and Betty didn't know anyone with satellite television. Instead there is the silence and wind of an island, its remoteness interrupted by a white milestone outside a house.</p><p>“London 272 miles.”</p><p>It had been put there by the owners of the house as a joke for their visiting friends, but now it is little more than a rude intrusion. London seems further away than that.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpJQUge3cz4Zfv3kqK1_60YdS2d54X5wrq6VSn6PY412Pm0xuxNKochYG_pcfXVhyakrE-hBzA9Qew-90NhMKd6nrch2C0oROu_f90HF61eBRjn61SvjsWfjk53NEP9XOll3t5g/s822/jameshobbs.roseland2_3S44.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="822" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmpJQUge3cz4Zfv3kqK1_60YdS2d54X5wrq6VSn6PY412Pm0xuxNKochYG_pcfXVhyakrE-hBzA9Qew-90NhMKd6nrch2C0oROu_f90HF61eBRjn61SvjsWfjk53NEP9XOll3t5g/w410-h236/jameshobbs.roseland2_3S44.jpeg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Place Creek, Roseland, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />There is a church, but it is away across the fields behind the manor. The route leads over a hill, the grass thick and green with smells of dampness and scents of hedgerow flowers. The path splits and follows on under overhanging branches of trees along the edge of a cornfield.</p><p>The tower of the church only becomes visible through the trees when you are nearly on it, but it is wrapped in red campion, white leeks, rhododendron and roses. At least, this is what I am assured they are by a woman gradually sniffing and poking her way around the paths. On either side are steep banks of trees that threaten to swamp the scene with even more foliage than there is already. </p><p>Birds swoop low over my head as I enter the dark church. You make an involuntary effort at ducking in these circumstances, but by the time you do they are well past anyway. The interior has not, I find when my eyes grow accustomed to the dimness, fared well under a regime of neglect. Plaster has fallen from the ceiling, the altar is stripped bare and paint is blistering and bubbling from the walls. Only the windows and memorials to those from the manor next door give the impression that any care has been taken at all. A stack of dishevelled, damp hymn books suggest that the Occasional Services notice is something of an overstatement. </p><p>A man passing outside can help me with this. It started as a question as to when the next service might be and ended in the story of a village. Soon he was slumped next to me on a bench telling a long tale of animosity between the manor, who had kept the church in repair since 1650, and the local diocese.</p><p>“The manor had spent £7,000 on lead for the roof and £4,000 on the windows and then the vicar, strange man, refused to come out for a wedding and the next thing, before you know it, one thing has led to another... Normally I would be the one to come and give the graveyard a strim, but now I only feel embarrassed about it and I don't like to have to explain why it's in the state it is. You can almost see it being demolished... You're not a journalist are you?”</p><p>The most polished and quaint of rural scenes are all too easily taken to be a reflection of the tranquillity and equanimity of life in the country, so to find the relative worldliness of this situation is like catching the village with its trousers down.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge3WiDRBtW2obxjX22mViZHE9WT_vqRWOV_GE89Lsk-nJ0-qC_kgmjHt6x7qSCny39aUWayah3NGJNWGvIDuBpbEpoVjwBnBGOsyu5OznHaAMXlVum49Mrs7d3Q8WZTe65Vq08WA/s1162/jameshobbs_roseland_2L22.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="1162" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge3WiDRBtW2obxjX22mViZHE9WT_vqRWOV_GE89Lsk-nJ0-qC_kgmjHt6x7qSCny39aUWayah3NGJNWGvIDuBpbEpoVjwBnBGOsyu5OznHaAMXlVum49Mrs7d3Q8WZTe65Vq08WA/w410-h302/jameshobbs_roseland_2L22.jpeg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, St Just-in-Roseland, Cornwall, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />It is a Sunday morning at St Just-in-Roseland at five minutes to eight and the church bell is ringing. I have slept in a corner of its car park and heard the clock striking each hour through the night. As the cars begin to surround me, I get dressed and watch the churchgoers on the walk through the gardens, following the trail of umbrellas. </p><p>The care and attention that has been given to this church is a mirror image to to that I had seen bestowed upon St Anthony's yesterday. Heading through the tropical vegetation (a memorial to the eccentricities of successive clergymen who have devoted themselves to it), weaving between palm trees and ponds, I can imagine us for a moment as a group of expatriates making our way through some outpost of the Empire. Someone shouts, “But Dorothy, how frightful!” without a trace of a Cornish burr. Watching the little crocodile of elderly congregation disappearing towards the tower set against a creek, I half expected them to be gradually picked off by sniper fire from the rear.</p><p>Trekking back to their cars afterwards, the creek is revealing acres of mud through the ebbing tide. There are fallen trees from the winter's storms and a £10,000 appeal for them to be cleared by floating them down the river. Later an American contingent arrive with their camcorders. They avoid the sight of an oil rig moored in the estuary around the corner, a bizarre vision in the circumstances.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGBxwi6QND4MK34-hx_GwJ0Vz1R_0Aupp8cVpi4ie0Hp2_7GA3oEVe7krYg315vk6deK0NxUGELWogVjoEvNFAjNohFmBTlFhFY2YvYAhDPan4efYUpj_-LwvOYbTsEREQtwAqw/s1118/jameshobbs.oilrig_2L23.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="1118" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGBxwi6QND4MK34-hx_GwJ0Vz1R_0Aupp8cVpi4ie0Hp2_7GA3oEVe7krYg315vk6deK0NxUGELWogVjoEvNFAjNohFmBTlFhFY2YvYAhDPan4efYUpj_-LwvOYbTsEREQtwAqw/w410-h292/jameshobbs.oilrig_2L23.jpeg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Oil rig, Cornwall, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />A woman is working in her garden overlooking it, but I have trouble in making myself heard in the wind.</p><p>“Excuse me,” I try again, “could you tell me about the oil rig?” She continues to struggle with a support for a flopping plant, shoving and hammering with no sign of a reaction.</p><p>“Hello!” I shout this time. Still nothing. She is evidently as deaf as the post she is now beating into the ground with an axehead, so I leave her to it. I can only assume the oil rig is not a permanent feature.</p><p><i>James Hobbs, 1990</i></p><p><i>Read on: <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/10/rock-bottom-at-lands-end.html">Rock bottom at Land's End </a></i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-77146775795463531902020-08-06T06:38:00.001+01:002020-08-21T16:40:51.366+01:00Over the Tamar to Cornwall<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUTXgxllko6AuCWlV_zVbeVi032WcPqFZgHz8IEZ75BWc7q0aHkJ2L2dWLEbHg6qGJ2wo2JIs4DKhAo-5itIQhR5a951UrZUYd0pskJa8AtV4iwZN9hkTgt9btqyDs8_3d5Lfmdg/s1116/jameshobbs.exeter_2L11.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="1116" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUTXgxllko6AuCWlV_zVbeVi032WcPqFZgHz8IEZ75BWc7q0aHkJ2L2dWLEbHg6qGJ2wo2JIs4DKhAo-5itIQhR5a951UrZUYd0pskJa8AtV4iwZN9hkTgt9btqyDs8_3d5Lfmdg/w410-h175/jameshobbs.exeter_2L11.jpg" width="469" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here.</a></i></div><div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b></div></div><div><br /></div><div>On the road to Exeter (above), where the slopes become hills and there is no mistaking that Devon is somewhere different, there is news coming through on the radio of a collision off the south coast between a trawler and the oil tanker Rose Bay. The report tells how the trawler crew were more interested in watching the Cup Final on a TV below deck than what they were likely to run into as they floated along<b> <i>[Manchester United and Crystal Palace drew 3-3 after extra time]</i></b><i>. </i>The result is an oil slick that is bobbing away at sea, but which may yet meet the very coast I am heading for. All eyes are on the weather forecast and the wind directions.</div><div><br /></div><div>A strip of road passes along the edge of the River Avon near Bigbury Bay, a quiet, narrow lane that is little higher than the level of the receding water. I have pulled in under the craggy little cliff next to it watching the tide drop as I cook. There are signs of a high tide mark along the road, a line of assorted twigs, but the rider of a horse that passes assures me I should be safe to park here tonight. She says the tides are not so high at the moment, so I shouldn't wake up to water lapping around my bed. Anyway, it will be even quieter later, she goes on, as the road gets completely flooded fat high tide further along, which will effectively cut me off.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB_dRxEuHhkYGO754374MBVDTRcLcDGVu4qQ39MPn9whbVzIZdRlvYtg9PMMMAhEfkCWvquv46fKD-y-C1z1V4h1WQDFV4GdcodFyLYUnVjUPg8QMBZWwt1VdaQ7Lc-0RTn5kYUQ/s1109/jameshobbs.exeter_2L13.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1109" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB_dRxEuHhkYGO754374MBVDTRcLcDGVu4qQ39MPn9whbVzIZdRlvYtg9PMMMAhEfkCWvquv46fKD-y-C1z1V4h1WQDFV4GdcodFyLYUnVjUPg8QMBZWwt1VdaQ7Lc-0RTn5kYUQ/w410-h252/jameshobbs.exeter_2L13.jpeg" width="469" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Devon gateway, 1990</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>This estuary would have been one of the most affected had the oil spillage been much worse. Sensitive wildlife areas are still threatened even though booms are being positioned across the mouths of rivers to keep what there is out. In the same way, roads to this stretch of coast have been closed too, to keep out people coming to gawp at the mess there is. “Road closed – no access to beach” signs block the routes to the blackened shoreline.</div><div><br /></div><div>The warnings for people to stay away have worked. The roads are largely deserted. When I later find my way down to the beach at Bigbury, there are only a few cars in the car park and a couple of people walking across from the pub on the island. There are tyre marks in the sand and I can persuade myself that in the wind I can smell disinfectant. But of the sludgy oil and blackened wildlife that are pictured in the local paper, there is no sign.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>[About 1,100 tonnes of crude oil were spilt in the Rose Bay collision, polluting about 12 miles of the Devon coast. I'm not sure how I missed the damage: it was reported in <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1990/may/16/oil-pollution-devon-coast" target="_blank">Hansard</a> that Challaborough beach, close to where I camped for the night, was damaged by oil up to 18 inches deep.]</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>***</div><div><br /></div><div><div>True enough, I am not flooded out in the night. The road is still wet, but I have lost no sleep. I eat my breakfast cereal watching swans and a heron on the river, untouched by oil from the Rose Bay, and then head further west.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plymouth is studded with plaques and memorials to prove its great pride in its history. They pop up everywhere. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Hoe, a vast green brow along the front that looks over the Sound. There is Smeaton's Tower which used to be the lighthouse perched out on Eddystone Rock, and a statue of the Sir Francis Drake, the English explorer <b><i>[and slave trader].</i></b> Today he seems to be waiting at a bus stop, having to be content with the view of the back end of a line of vintage buses that are being clambered and drooled over by enthusiasts.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>[Drake's statue has, for now, survived the toppling that those of other figures with links to slavery and Britain's brutal colonial past have undergone in the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in the US.]</i></b></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf4exR8oShdehMBK6h_8MlG4TqXBsXRTrgCA8ibpHJAIx6X1DU4CdvSkdta4KQzZ21u75qzIoPrJN1BgG5E6NrQMxAoly_H2Sxn9cUA5s-4vZawLpKNWsZHJYHtD22xXWdFD94xw/s821/jameshobbs_plymouth_3S18.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="596" data-original-width="821" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf4exR8oShdehMBK6h_8MlG4TqXBsXRTrgCA8ibpHJAIx6X1DU4CdvSkdta4KQzZ21u75qzIoPrJN1BgG5E6NrQMxAoly_H2Sxn9cUA5s-4vZawLpKNWsZHJYHtD22xXWdFD94xw/w410-h298/jameshobbs_plymouth_3S18.jpeg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Drake's statue, Plymouth Hoe, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>As if this wasn't enough the Army Display Team are on hand too, standing over young boys holding rifles and explaining the finer points of the camouflaged tanks and jeeps. The last time I had seen this such a vehicle was on the sea front at Bournemouth keeping an eye on the Leeds supporters. The idea of this event is probably to get the kids before they get you. It is mostly young families looking around, some with pushchairs, as nonchalantly as if it was a village fete, kids pulling dads towards different stands.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Fire a service rifle. Five shots for 20p," reads a sign. A few youths shoot down a small gap at the back of a camouflaged lorry.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is not surprising to find this here because Plymouth's name has been made by war and by the sea, and to look out from the Hoe, it is easy to see why. It is a marvellous harbour view, a stage that makes each arrival and departure an event. There is everything from dinghies to cross channel ferries passing through it even now. </div><div><br /></div><div>But what it also does is tame the idea of what it is to cross oceans. It is like a gentle introduction, seductive, impossible to ignore, its two headlands a gateway that asked to be passed through. There is a terrace down to the water's edge and bare rocks, cafes, deckchairs and two floating white islands offshore where swimmers are sitting and resting. The Rose Bay cannot be far from their minds.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is another outbreak of plaques at the Barbican, the old fortified area of Plymouth whose narrow streets show that it, at least, survived the bombing raids. It was from here the Pilgrim Fathers left on the Mayflower. Number 9, the house where it is claimed at least some of them stayed the night before they set sail is no longer the coal merchant of Morton's time, but a shop selling junk art to the American tourists, who are in no short supply. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it is not really a tourist atmosphere here; it is a place to see and be seen on this afternoon, bump into friends, watch people pass from the benches. The narrowness and irregularity of the Barbican stands out – after the massive destruction of the second world war Plymouth's centre was rebuilt with sweeping dual carriageways and straight, yawning thoroughfares. For a while it was as if Chicago had come to Devon as a grid system of roads was laid out and 14 storey buildings were called skyscrapers. Built for the age of the car, many of the shopping streets are closed to them now, filled instead with fountains, trees and playgrounds. Charles Church remains roofless as a memorial to those lost in the war, its shell embalmed in the middle of a roundabout. Plymouth is still getting used to being its new self.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBhFXK4icj0MaKEfvv5B28NnajVdfJ-7uj6ceKgf8w2HuDevBIY1vft4zMTt1dw-vodSEUFbqEdmPOz3Rs384ZIylMGl4OXwuNNXiNxFcV-3NYg4HMSkWpp5IMkkHiRT7Ouiai_A/s1121/jameshobbs.plymouth_2L20.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="791" data-original-width="1121" height="331" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBhFXK4icj0MaKEfvv5B28NnajVdfJ-7uj6ceKgf8w2HuDevBIY1vft4zMTt1dw-vodSEUFbqEdmPOz3Rs384ZIylMGl4OXwuNNXiNxFcV-3NYg4HMSkWpp5IMkkHiRT7Ouiai_A/w410-h290/jameshobbs.plymouth_2L20.jpeg" width="469" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Devonport Dockyard, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>The city's dockyard at Devonport, started under William of Orange, struggles to survive in these post Cold War days. This is good news and bad news to Plymouth's workers of course, but for now it survives in competition with Scottish dockyards, fighting to have nuclear submarines in its waters. In search of an entrance to the waterfront, I have turned down a road to be stopped by a policeman.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Sorry sir, no public access here, but if it's cranes you're looking to draw, may I suggest Cornwall Beach. Right at the lights, left at the mini-roundabout, down a cobbled street..." His suggestion is perfect. The road, lined with blocks of flats, slopes down to the water and a couple of pubs, but is dominated by the view of the bow of a ship. There is about 10 feet of shingle and a few rowing boats. Music is in the air and children are playing in the street.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigZau1gzh-brytBWuL7kBe4VyQi2XOCx7YmP_nKNJnnJFmO_qOpmyrs-D6SIevbmlIR97xd2pZX8oFinHYiUREn2P8izsbhUZMraksKBax57gB4SfgaTIXr6TqIZqFvHDtxgm2Zg/s815/jameshobbs.plymouth_3S31.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="586" data-original-width="815" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigZau1gzh-brytBWuL7kBe4VyQi2XOCx7YmP_nKNJnnJFmO_qOpmyrs-D6SIevbmlIR97xd2pZX8oFinHYiUREn2P8izsbhUZMraksKBax57gB4SfgaTIXr6TqIZqFvHDtxgm2Zg/w410-h294/jameshobbs.plymouth_3S31.jpeg" width="469" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Cornwall Street, Plymouth, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>"I did a drawing of a balloon at school today," a little girl says, and runs to get it, but comes back with her younger brother instead. They sit and chat with me as I draw, oblivious to warnings about talking to strangers. When I tell them I am going to Cornwall, she tells me they have never been, and yet there it is just across the River Tamar from us.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Sound narrows at Devil's Point and opens again into the deep landlocked harbour that is marked with cranes and docks. For all the prosperity it has brought Plymouth it is rough and stark, an area used to dealing with the demands of sailors finally making it ashore after voyages, used to the freight thundering in and out and the tourists on their way to France and Spain on the ferries.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibNvMDOsAz__Eq5SHrT8UvoJ7KWzXqRtHUl0I28wyi732qMrsWiRTnK8dAoX4LTwGRjce-Ui6uuoJQCjkNTGp83J8YWWm8bXa9-aTwxDdaAtLx1HjiIyFnlS78s6t2DydCyOox9g/s1113/jameshobbs.plymouth_2L18.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="807" data-original-width="1113" height="339" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibNvMDOsAz__Eq5SHrT8UvoJ7KWzXqRtHUl0I28wyi732qMrsWiRTnK8dAoX4LTwGRjce-Ui6uuoJQCjkNTGp83J8YWWm8bXa9-aTwxDdaAtLx1HjiIyFnlS78s6t2DydCyOox9g/w410-h297/jameshobbs.plymouth_2L18.jpeg" width="469" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Hobbs, Tamar bridges, 1990</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>For those that have charged down the A38, skirting the south of Dartmoor on their way to Cornwall, there is the Tamar Bridge to mark the event. It stands beside Isambard Kingdom Brunel's suspension bridge built 100 years previously, and together they make an interesting pair. While a woman feeds herself and her dog with ice-cream by the next car, I watch the trains cross the bridge, and disappear from view until they cross a more distant viaduct.</div><div><br /></div><div>But rather than take the bridge, I stick to Morton's route and take the Tor Ferry. I queue for longer than the trip takes. Immediately things do change and something does take over. The roads are quiet and the sea is calm as I make along the coast, but it is a step that signifies that the land is running out, narrowing, and soon we will be left at the tip of Land's End.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>James Hobbs, 1990</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>[Further posts about this journey will follow here soon.] </i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Read on: <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/08/through-lanes-of-cornwall.html">Through the lanes of Cornwall</a></i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-13356552663148059562020-07-17T14:45:00.001+01:002020-08-06T06:40:49.358+01:00Weymouth, Portland and a cow<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmD20Vabtq2SFe-cJSagjBw7MYgDai4CRAh3grQiATKxxQXfHYZhSaSYOM9b5vyv4uHaQOdjzT2133IyJMuyrICMgPoK-YC_4O-UvbsDpPMF8bmzrS9CYvaJ90w5B6nwGFqFutZw/s1103/jameshobbs.weymouth.L204.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="1103" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmD20Vabtq2SFe-cJSagjBw7MYgDai4CRAh3grQiATKxxQXfHYZhSaSYOM9b5vyv4uHaQOdjzT2133IyJMuyrICMgPoK-YC_4O-UvbsDpPMF8bmzrS9CYvaJ90w5B6nwGFqFutZw/w400-h261/jameshobbs.weymouth.L204.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div><div><i>This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here</a>.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Having parked overnight on the site of an old silage clamp, I realise, browsing over the map eating my Weetabix, that I'm only a mile or two up the road from Stinsford, which is where Thomas Hardy is buried. Morton didn't go here but I see no reason why that should put me off.</div><div><br /></div><div>As I listen to the 6am news on the radio, I pass all the signs marking the route to Hardy’s Cottage, his birthplace <i><b>[owned by the National Trust]</b></i>, which won't be open for hours, and make straight for the churchyard. He is – mostly – buried in Westminster Abbey: only his heart remains here. The grave is hard to miss, coffin shaped and beneath a yew tree, but there is more than one Thomas Hardy here, along with a Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis. Even death has its attractions. This is a churchyard to be seen dead in.</div><div><br /></div><div>I stop off at Dorchester to collect some mail, stock up with a few tins of food and UHT milk, which doesn't go off too quickly in the fridge-free van. I pass down through “Hardye Arcade”, a dreary little line of shops, on my way to the post office. Poor old Hardy. What makes me even more aware of what part of the country I'm heading for is the way that I am called “m’dear” by the woman who sells me a newspaper.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a regal air to Weymouth's seafront, a gently bending terrace of Georgian buildings along the esplanade rubbing shoulders with gift shops and restaurants. The scene is overlooked by a slightly frivolous statue of George III, like a brightly painted outsize Airfix model in his full regalia. This the king who bravely tried out the modern bathing machine of 1789. His ghost still haunts the town in a sense, his name popping up wherever you go, like continually following footsteps in the sand. It’s surprising he doesn't appear more in the gift shops in one form or other, as in him, for once, there is something that sets Weymouth apart from other seaside towns. Instead they sell the typical racks of pink fluffy animals, personalised teacups, and plastic novelties in willie or knocker shapes. <b><i>[Alan Bennett’s play, The Madness of George III, which led to the film of a similar name, was published in 1991, the year after my van trip.]</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>The sea front is taken over by a cavalcade of motorcycles that cruise down and back, serious bikers in serious leather jackets on their way to nowhere in particular. Anita Lee, “daughter of the famous Gypsy Lee”, is in her caravan by the beach waiting for custom, but she would have done well to have listened to the weather forecast; it has started raining and she could have stayed at home. She is visible through the door of her van killing time by leafing through the pages of the Sun. </div><div><br /></div><div>Down one of the little streets behind, Mr Sanny is on his synthesiser, entertaining a pub full of lunchtime drinkers with Abide With Me as a heated argument breaks out between two drinkers. The loudest shout of all is a “You keep out of this!” although whether it is aimed at Mr Sanny, who stoically continues, it is hard to say.</div><div><br /></div><div>Weymouth feels as if it is on an edge, utterly English, but ferries leave its terminal for Cherbourg and the Channel Islands and there is a little Frenchness about its river harbour. There is a gentle pomposity to the town, which I just can't help liking.</div><div><br /></div><div>***</div><div><br /></div><div>Portland is not the beautiful place I had somehow expected it to be. Dangling from the umbilical cord of Chesil Beach, it is almost, but not quite, an island. It his an industrial landscape, ugly to approach and not at all remote as I had imagined. There is the naval base and quarries that have supplied materials for buildings around the world, but quite what Portland has received in return is hard to spot. The houses are low and terraced in a treeless terrain. Footpaths riddle the stone-walled fields, purposefully signposted at the outset but ending on more than one occasion in sheer cliffs left by quarrying. It is as if fields have dropped down out of sight one by one.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Ij5O39AESdifyNC5z5HRXOfCTg2hY9tsyg5PEofDni2f2wlKsx85I48i1NqW_YIpYXIWRoA0-rNRtXM5Ab1HeJDttpmSm3t_GoQP5u_O-wsJp-My03D8Fl977nyle0UTHII7TQ/s1099/jameshobbs.portland.L203.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="1099" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Ij5O39AESdifyNC5z5HRXOfCTg2hY9tsyg5PEofDni2f2wlKsx85I48i1NqW_YIpYXIWRoA0-rNRtXM5Ab1HeJDttpmSm3t_GoQP5u_O-wsJp-My03D8Fl977nyle0UTHII7TQ/w400-h254/jameshobbs.portland.L203.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><font size="2">James Hobbs, Portland, 1990</font></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>The quarry cranes are motionless today, in suspended animation, interspersed with rubble and numbered blocks of stone. The exposed country roads are dusty, wrapping around rubbish in the gutters like larva to fossilise it. It is so dry it makes me thirsty just to be here.</div><div><br /></div><div>At Portland Bill I open a tin of beans and listen to the FA Cup Final on the radio. There is the spectacle of the meeting of the tides to watch, the collision of waters known as the Race that results in fierce currents that the fishing boats of Weymouth have to battle their way through. This is how Weymouth and Portland seem - two pieces of a jig-saw that do not fit but are hammered together until they do so. It is an odd marriage of industry and holidays, cosy south coast warmth and exposed barren nudity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hounded back through Weymouth by supermarket trolley pushing youths in fancy dress demanding money for the ITV Telethon charity appeal, I find myself looking to camp at the bottom of a hill with the chalk figure of George III riding a horse cut into it. There is a farmhouse, which, considering it is at the bottom of a lane lined with thatched cottages, is a disappointing bungalow on a corner. The woman who answers the door directs me to a field down a track where I can park for the night. She gives the van a funny sort of look over my shoulder that I'm accustomed to now. A dull, homey smell comes from the doorway.</div><div><br /></div><div>The field is ringed with a high fence, perhaps a relic of the farmer's failed plans to diversify into taking campers, now long past by the state of the crumbling toilet block that remains in the middle. I do not have the place entirely to myself; I am sharing with a cow, its calf and scattered assortments of farm machinery abandoned to the weeds. I spend the evening in the pub up the road making half a pint of bitter, which took 60 of the 83 pence in my pocket, stretch across the night.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV2YTjt-ebvqahL9R4A-OwPn_Bki6OaonxAkaxMOPxiksHMKmgDKUgO7-DZ5BQYTNrcMVYdtcjqwpAJgIOLRjb9ulmuZOYC2ca9enlIrFbrpVfeVx_ldMaa_XbpbGGNwxmO03yyw/s907/jameshobbs.portlandcow.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="578" data-original-width="907" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV2YTjt-ebvqahL9R4A-OwPn_Bki6OaonxAkaxMOPxiksHMKmgDKUgO7-DZ5BQYTNrcMVYdtcjqwpAJgIOLRjb9ulmuZOYC2ca9enlIrFbrpVfeVx_ldMaa_XbpbGGNwxmO03yyw/w400-h255/jameshobbs.portlandcow.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><font size="2">The offending cow</font></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>Later, I lock myself into the field with the cow and calf by tying the gate shut with the binder twine left for the purpose. It is six in the morning when I am awoken with a jump as the van lurches from side to side. My friend the cow has discovered that it is the ideal height for relieving an irritating itch on her back.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>James Hobbs, 1990</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Read on: <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/08/over-tamar-to-cornwall.html" target="_blank">Over the Tamar to Cornwall</a></i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-4390699018701574942020-06-25T14:21:00.001+01:002020-07-17T14:49:05.807+01:00Leeds go mad in Dorset<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here.</a></i> </div>
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<i><b>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </b> </i></div>
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It's May Day Bank Holiday weekend in Bournemouth, 25C and queues of cars are edging open-windowed or roofless towards the seafront where the beach is already packed. It is the fulfilment of all those winter yearnings for a tan. The most unlikely looking windows are being used to sell refreshments from, but the busiest and loudest is a pub near the pier from which comes chanting and a sort of singing.</div>
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I had parked under the shade of trees at Branscombe further up the coast, once, and not so very long ago, a separate town but now congealing like the rest of the south coast into one long line of development. It is easy to see on a day like this how Bournemouth could have become so popular in the last 200 years: long sandy beaches, pine trees, and green, south-facing cliffs. The traditional and familiar attractions of days out at the seaside seem to be alive and well: there are the smells of fish and chips and sun lotion, a Punch and Judy tent, waterskiers, acres of pale bodies, family arguments and amusement arcades, all these, but with sun too.</div>
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But sun and alcohol are not mixing too well at the pub by the pier (top image). Today is the last day of the football season and the visitors, Leeds United, are expecting to get promotion into the first division <b>[the Premier League was launched in the 1992-93 season]</b> at the expense of Bournemouth Town, and to this end they have set about trashing the place. </div>
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Apart from the drinkers, who are watched by groups of police, there is a larger and yet more ugly gathering further on by the beach. It could be 1,500, it could be 2,000, but they are a mass of young men that seem to have come from just a handful of moulds. Short haired, T-shirted, wearing shorts or jeans, holding cans of alcohol that are crushed and discarded on the pavement as quickly as they are emptied, they are seething, singing, chanting, kicking footballs high into the air so that three or four of them keep popping up as they gather for the march up to the ground for the game.</div>
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I cannot take my eyes off this sight. It is almost like an old circus sideshow where those with hideous deformities are paraded for the public. This crowd is ugliness itself, unlike anything I have seen before, a bundle of fascism and bigotry I gather from the songs they are singing. It is frighteningly magnetic to watch. As a group they are all of a single mind, and not a very broad one. </div>
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<b>[This weekend of violence by Leeds fans in Bournemouth grabbed the headlines in a way I didn’t really recognise at the time. I didn't even draw the fans, for instance. There were more than 100 arrests and 12 police were seriously injured over the weekend I was in Bournemouth. <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1990/may/08/football-violence-bournemouth" target="_blank">There were even questions in Parliament about the violence that unfolded.</a>]</b> </div>
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The <a href="https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/" target="_blank">Bournemouth Evening Echo</a> has not missed out. “Thugs on Rampage” runs the headline above stories from the night before. Beach huts have been set alight. In the town centre windows are boarded up, some in anticipation, others evidently repairing what has gone before. Mounted police roam the pedestrianised centre while fans wearing “Bournemouth Invasion” shirts pose for souvenir photographs next to them.</div>
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Just to get into a supermarket is not easy, the way in barred by a policeman. I first have to convince him that it is food I want to buy rather than anything alcoholic. There are more police inside roaming around the aisles. They call everyone “lad”, trying to defuse the tension with a forced good humour.</div>
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For no apparent reason, the crowd by the beach takes it upon itself that it is time to leave for the walk to the ground, and, as one, it makes off leaving the debris that until then it has been impossible to see. The shouts and singing seem to hang in the air long after they have all leaked away up the road.</div>
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What surprises me is just how prepared people are to accept that this is the way things must be, to go on regardless as if this ugly violence is entirely normal. Half naked women push their way through the fringes of the fans to join the queue for ice creams, going barefoot through the empty beer cans littered around as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Police stand around to almost heighten the crowd's sense of importance, a sign of the fans’ power to disrupt, acting as escorts to a roving lawless zone. A camouflaged military vehicle I associate with the streets of Belfast looks on. I am amazed that a kick around between two teams of eleven can be worth all this.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Bournemouth sea front, 1990</span></td></tr>
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The more usual beach noises return as kick off approaches. Some of those without tickets turn on radios to listen to the commentary so that they overlap across the sands, never out of earshot. The air is freed from sirens for a while but it is replaced by racist chants from groups draped in Union Jacks who troop up and down the beach looking for topless sunbathers.</div>
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We hear the game won by the Leeds team down on the beach, looking out to the still sea that few people actually bring themselves to swim in. The sight of a large offshore structure for drilling oil must be as responsible for this as anything. I plan to get well out of town for the night before the ground empties and the Leeds celebrations begin. I am well up a very deserted country lane before the late kick-off results come over the radio.</div>
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Two days later and the wind and rain are back, the deserted beaches marked by tractor tyres where the sand has been raked and cleaned. The flashing orange lights of council cleaning lorries have taken over from the blue ones of Saturday’s police cars. A few people are about. There is a children’s roundabout in the shape of a teapot around which seated toddlers turn in teacups at the end of which they head with their carers, like me, to the domed cafe on the pier. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">James Hobbs, Happyland Amusements, Bournemouth, 1990</span></td></tr>
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It is more likely to be like this when you visit Bournemouth, you and a few others wondering where everybody else is. An elderly lady strolls in the gardens to the relaxing cry of seagulls, leaning on her only slightly younger companion, enjoying the flowerbeds and pointing her walking stick at shrubs. I pass just in time to hear her lean towards her friend and say: “You know Mrs Thatcher looked a picture in the paper today...” Bournemouth is back to its old self. </div>
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<i>James Hobbs, 1990 </i></div>
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<i>[Further posts about this journey will follow here soon. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">This is a link to details about my journey, which started 30 years ago</a>.] </i></div>
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Read on: <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/07/weymouth-portland-and-cow.html" target="_blank">Weymouth, Portland and a cow</a></div><div><br /></div>
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James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-28093956918438039562020-06-18T11:13:00.001+01:002020-06-29T15:24:47.023+01:00From Romsey Abbey to Southampton docks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here.</a></i><br />
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<b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b><br />
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Knocking at an old farmhouse near Romsey, I’m told by a correct, middle-aged woman that I can park overnight in the track to their house but that her husband will be back soon and will want to meet me. The temptation is to say that I only want to camp overnight rather than marry their daughter, but by the time I’ve put the roof up he has swung around the corner in his Range Rover and stopped by the back of the van.<br />
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Touring vans have not had the best of publicity around the south of England recently and, apart from the running battles with travellers around Stonehenge at summer solstice time, there are farmers who have resorted to court injunctions to move on unwelcome convoys, and outbursts to local papers on the subject of the damage they were left with. A solitary van is often seen as the thin end of the wedge by landowners – let one in and more will follow – which is probably why the husband is now bearing down on me as if I had pitched camp in the middle of his croquet lawn.<br />
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I get out to meet him halfway, surprise him by shaking his hand and try to persuade him I am not someone he ought to be moving on. I summon all my efforts into coming across as respectable as I can be, and he calms before too many blood vessels are burst. I know I have made a reasonable impression when he comes out to see me again later while I’m washing up to invite me in to the house for coffee and a glass of port. “We don’t like to think of you up here on your own,” he says.<br />
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Soon I am sitting in a huge wheel-backed chair with a cat on my lap, glass of port in hand, listening to their worries about their daughter’s boyfriend, who has just arrived to take her off to a party to the sounds of much wheel spinning in the drive.<br />
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This is still commuter heartland. He is a solicitor dividing his time between London, Bristol and New York. She fusses around him, a woman apparently given to Good Works. The kitchen’s working surfaces are as clean as an operating table. There are three cars lined up in the drive.<br />
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We chat about Romsey (top image) and Lord Mountbatten of Burma, who lived in Broadlands on the edge of the town until he was blown up by IRA terrorists on his yacht in 1979. You can’t be in Romsey for too long before his name crops up. He was obviously very popular here and could be found occasionally drinking in the town’s pubs and getting up to the sort of thing that goes down well with the locals.<br />
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“The whole town went into mourning when he died,” the husband said, leaning against the Aga, “and there were these great public shows of grief. So much so that the shopkeepers all had black window displays as a sign of respect.” They laugh at the thought of something that occurs to them both at the same time. “Even the lingerie shop got involved – they filled their windows with black underwear.” <br />
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Leaving early in the morning – the night only disturbed by the daughter arriving home in the early hours as I am unburdening myself of too many cups of filter coffee, momentarily flashing my shadow across the farmhouse wall – I head up into the town.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Market Square, Palmerston statue, Romsey, 1990</td></tr>
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In the market place it is a surprise to find that rather than Mountbatten it is a statue of Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, whose family had previously owned Broadlands, that gazes out over the square. On the corner of one building hangs a bracket that was used to hang Cromwellians in 1642. The building now houses the local Conservative club, in which there is a lot of activity.<br />
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<b><i>[The statue of Palmerston – who favoured the abolition of slavery – seems safe from toppling during this time of scrutiny of the UK's historic and current racism.]</i></b><br />
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Romsey Abbey is a thing of beauty and certainly a bargain at £100, the price paid by the town when it was sold at the Dissolution, even at index-linked prices. Inside there is time to see the Anglo-Saxon rood screen and the rather gruesome tress of hair found in a Saxon coffin, but, talking to a helper in the Abbey it isn’t long before she too gets around to Mountbatten. He is still a great unifying force in the town. There is a large stone to his memory inside.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Romsey Abbey, 1990</td></tr>
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She directs me down to a bridge on the way out of town where you can get a good view of Broadlands, the large porticoed house where he lived. It will be open to the public later in the day, but for now I have to make do with the view photographers with long lenses had when Charles and Diana spent their honeymoon here in 1981.<br />
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When I reached the bridge there was every reason to suppose she’d been pulling my leg, because no large mansion was visible. An elderly man walking his dog stopped to help me.<br />
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“Come down this way and you’ll see it – I’ve spent hours here myself painting it,” and he leads me further down. His surprise is apparent when he too can see nothing of it through the bluish morning haze into the sun. It is as if it has disappeared.<br />
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“You know,” he says, “it used to be there.” <br />
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*****<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Southampton docks, 1990</td></tr>
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Southampton is almost like Istanbul from the docks, if less busy. People are on their way down to the ferry to cross the water to Hythe from which chimneys puncture the sky like minarets. “Come Dancing” a battered sign announces from the next pier, a warm welcome from a tangled mess of girders and barbed wire. There is peeling paint and high fences, no unauthorised entry. It would be an eyesore in many places but here it can almost be overlooked. Cranes are everywhere and there is the great container port further up. There is little traffic today apart from a tug and a vast tanker.<br />
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The ferry is about to leave, and confusing its destination of Hythe with Ryde on the Isle of Wight, I quickly get a ticket and jump on board. Instead of the Isle of Wight I get a quick trip across Southampton Water and back. It is less momentous than other voyages that have started out from here. For 500 years it was one of the country’s leading ports, with massive city defences facing out to sea. Ships left from here for the Napoleonic wars, the Mayflower in 1620 before stopping off at Plymouth, and going into passenger transport in a yet bigger way at the beginning of this century, the White Star and Cunard Lines ran from here.<br />
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So a short trip on a ferry is a token gesture even if I did get back almost before I’d left. On board there are bicycles stacked, and work suits and ties have been discarded for shorts and trainers for the ride home to the far bank. Its passengers sit with the resignation that comes from commuting, but there is the sun, a cool breeze and even the occasional shower of spray, a class above your average ride home on the underground. Most sit inside to shelter from it, locked into books or personal stereos. I am reminded of a ferry ride up the Bosporus when shortly after leaving Istanbul a young man moved among the packed benches taking off his artificial limbs one by one waving them above his head in an attempt to collect money. I wonder here if they would even raise their eyes from their books. <br />
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Everyone gets out at Hythe’s long pier except me, and nobody boards except the ticket collector’s granddaughter, who he chases around the deck. We, meanwhile, chase the real Isle of Wight ferry as it returns to Southampton. Ocean Village is a part of the waterfront with a typically 1980s look, a new development packaged as a place to be seen flaunting boom-time spoils. It’s like a scene from the Boat Show, except here it goes on all year. There are shops and bars to go along the jetties, a scene of conspicuous consumption that was built as a playground for those riding high on a succession of tax cuts.<br />
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But the tax cuts could never go on forever and it is as if the party is moving on to somewhere else now. Things are evidently not so easy. Among the trendy cocktail bars near Canute’s Pavilion are the empty shells of shops and ‘To Let’ notices that have been left by the receding economic tide.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs0P8OM5QG4wquzjwuXg7-d2tMBye1PI9t6-X0LabL3O3d28_ThHIgFT8PTcYnv8V3f7WQKpTKDrsb57kNfafFjOmC0j6fRZGYXMH0o2fMLspQOyvWy0qrDPGZeqZ2OLgBIVSSIw/s1600/jameshobbs.southampton.1L23.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="685" data-original-width="1155" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs0P8OM5QG4wquzjwuXg7-d2tMBye1PI9t6-X0LabL3O3d28_ThHIgFT8PTcYnv8V3f7WQKpTKDrsb57kNfafFjOmC0j6fRZGYXMH0o2fMLspQOyvWy0qrDPGZeqZ2OLgBIVSSIw/s400/jameshobbs.southampton.1L23.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Southampton docks, 1990</td></tr>
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Less conspicuous and more enduring is the sight of a couple come to sit in the sun by the old "Come Dancing" pier - eyes closed, faces looking up, ample white flesh on show where clothing has been peeled back to feel the warmth. Another tanker passes down Southampton Water. Children eat ice creams rocking forwards and back on their bicycles while a dog sniffs around them.<br />
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At the bank to get some money before I leave, the cash machine gobbles up my card and slides its cover abruptly over the keys. The bank is shut and I have this horrible feeling it could be weeks yet before a new bank card finally catches up with me.<br />
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<i>James Hobbs, 1990</i><br />
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<i><a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/06/leeds-go-mad-in-dorset.html">Read on: Football violence in Bournemouth</a></i><br />
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<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-83967731075619924082020-06-01T15:21:00.011+01:002021-01-13T11:19:59.342+00:00Covid-19 and me<div><i style="background-color: #fcff01;"><b>[This post was written in June 2020, when Covid was in its first mad rush. Some of what it contains is outdated now as the medical response has caught up and systems have been put in place, although as I write this (January 2021) things are perhaps worse than ever here in London. Long Covid is now recognised, and I am now well recovered, in the main. I'm tempted to delete this post as being outdated, but it captures where I was when I put it together, and reflects the nasty nightmarish hell that will hopefully be put behind us before too long.]</b></i></div><div><br /></div>I’m currently in the process of recovering from Covid-19, and beyond grateful to be able to write the first part of this sentence. I know others who have been through it too, and for each of us it seemed a bit different. While the grim coronavirus experience is still all-too-fresh in my mind, here are some of the things that helped me get through. If you’re unlucky enough to get Covid-19, you may find some parts of my experience useful, or you may not. I’m well aware that nothing is certain with Covid-19 and that what I write here will be contradicted by someone else’s experience. That is how this virus seems to work.<br />
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Firstly, I should say I’m a previously fit and healthy 60-year-old white man living in north London with his wife and two young-adult daughters. I cycle, I run, I’m a stranger to hospitals (apart from during my lightning appendix adventure in Switzerland a couple of years ago, but that’s another story). I work at a university in central London, and I draw and write.<br />
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None of this is advice. This is just what helped me. What worked for me may well not be right for you. And advice will, no doubt, develop as more is understood about Covid-19.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The view from my isolation bed, drawn on day 62</td></tr>
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<b>Day 1</b>: I’m not even entirely sure when it started, although 26 March 2020 is marked in my diary. I was working from home from mid March and not long after I didn’t feel quite right. I was tired and achey, but it coincided with the inevitable stress of getting geared up for working from home, and the emotional element of the world changing before our eyes in the most unreal, dreamlike way. We are lucky to have a foldout bed in the workspace at the top of the house where I could isolate myself.<br />
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My symptoms at the start? Aches, tiredness, a tightness of the chest, an occasional fluttering (odd to call it that, but that’s how it felt) in the top of my chest, occasional sharp spasms of pain in my limbs and abdomen that disappeared as soon as they arrived, and occasional raised heart rate. I never had either the dry cough or the fever (I woke one night in a sweat, but I still think that was a different duvet issue rather than a fever). This confused us. Official UK information said at that time that without those two symptoms it was unlikely you had Covid-19. Later, the loss of smell and taste was added to the list: I never had that as a symptom either. Did I just have regular flu? At some point, by which point I had already isolated myself, it became obvious it was Covid-19 that I had. The increasing breathing difficulties and fatigue seemed the most obvious signs.<br />
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<b>Days 2-8</b>: In bed, keeping as still as possible, tackling increasing waves of breathlessness, sleeping, and keeping anxiety at bay. The breathlessness could come while I was sitting or lying quietly. The worst part was not knowing if this was part of process of deterioration. Anxiety and breathing difficulties is not an enjoyable combination. Distraction techniques – TV, radio, podcasts (see below) – helped me through. Trips down the stairs to the first-floor bathroom were very slow, and fraught with worries about contamination. Door handles, light switches, flush handles, towels, toothpaste: we cleaned and segregated as we could. The way in which I am most lucky in this whole story is with the people I share my life with, who brought love and attention, food and drink to me, daily, hourly, and who thought straight when I couldn’t.<br />
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<b>Day 9</b>: I thought I was improving a little. I got up on day 9, made porridge, put out the recycling, all very gently. Whether this resulted in or merely coincided with my first relapse I’m not sure, but I was soon back in bed and feeling worse than during the first eight days.<br />
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<b>Days 10-67*</b>: This was the start of my worst time, physically and mentally. Cases and deaths in the UK were rising exponentially at this point, and the prime minister was taken into intensive care. There were the sounds of sirens outside, and the girls were leaving food at my door. My symptoms were still spells of shortness of breath, tight chestedness, fatigue. We rang the NHS 111 line during this time, and also our GP, who rang me daily for a while during my worst spell. A process of improvement and relapse in a slowly improving way has continued since about day 22. Days pass without breathlessness, and then return. From time to time I have to think to breathe, by which I mean it needs to become a conscious act. The fatigue is a constant over this time. (* I'm on day 67 as I write.)<br />
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<b>Here are some things that helped me through this time of Covid-19 and recovery.</b><br />
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<b>Drinking water, lots:</b> I heard people were recommended three litres a day, but I could only manage two litres. Sipping slowly eased, momentarily, the feeling of tightness in the throat. The mouth dries out quickly if you’re breathing through your mouth as you lie and rest.<br />
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<b>Breathing exercises, clearing lungs, mental health</b>: I found some information through links sent to me via different NHS sources. The Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust <a href="https://covidpatientsupport.lthtr.nhs.uk/#/" target="_blank">have great info on dealing with Covid-19 recovery</a>. And this one on breathing exercises from doctors at Queen's Hospital, London, was sent via a family member early on in lockdown.<br />
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<b>Distractions</b>: TV and radio of the most gentle and escapist kind helped from time to time. This meant TV series (The Detectorists, This Country, Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing), reruns of old cricket Tests on Radio 5 Live, football repeats of old international matches, and Mindful Mixes on BBC Sounds. For a while I escaped via the Antiques Road Show and the quiz show Pointless: this has now, mercifully, passed, but they helped me through. Nothing is off limits if it helps you get through.<br />
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<b>Friends and relations</b>: It was lonely being at the top of the house, even though I had my family at hand. Respect to those who are going through this alone! Honestly, nobody knows what they are going through. Strength to you if you are reading this now! I was messaging friends and family, replying to their requests for updates, and we had a London family WhatsApp group to share information about each other. I have a good friend going through a very similar experience to mine at exactly the same time, which is useful, if unfortunate. We share things as we come across them.<br />
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<b>Support group</b>: I came across the <a href="https://www.wearebodypolitic.com/covid19" target="_blank">Body Politic Covid-19 support group</a> on day 36 via a reference in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/lingering-and-painful-long-and-unclear-road-to-coronavirus-recovery-long-lasting-symptoms" target="_blank">Guardian article</a>. It is a Slack group - you request to join and are sent a link to access it, and to introduce yourself, using the relevant channels. It was a such relief to find this group of people having similar experiences to me. Through this you can find links to useful research, articles, surveys and current thinking. I mostly interacted in the UK channel, where I found people related to things in a way similar to mine. Many of the group’s members are in the US, particularly in New York, where the medical jargon and systems are different to those in the UK. There are elements of the group, of course, that you may want to avoid. It’s a great place to ask questions and get useful advice, but there’s also the danger of finding new things to worry about. There are channels for #victories and #positivity, which can lift the soul and offer optimism. This forum was the place that helped me not feel alone. Hail its founders.<div><br />There are Facebook groups too, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/625349464716052/" target="_blank">such as this one</a>, if Facebook is your thing. You can find support and links to further reading on the <a href="https://www.longcovid.org">Long Covid website</a>.<br />
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<b>Diet</b>: I skipped inflammatory foods. It’s easy to search for what this means.<br />
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<b>Vitamin D and zinc</b>: These may not help fight off Covid-19, but I took them most days anyway. A good balanced diet seems most effective in terms of boosting immunity.<br />
<a href="https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/vitamin-supplements-covid">https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/vitamin-supplements-covid</a><br />
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<b>Manuka honey</b>: Does it do anything to help? Probably not, but a spoonful or two a day tasted great.<br />
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<b>Inhalations</b>: A bowl of boiling hot water, with a few drops of thyme essence, a towel over the head, and the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0890lj3" target="_blank">Max Richter Mindful Mix</a> on BBC Sounds. Deep breaths in the dark heat. This, more than anything, was my escape.<br />
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<b>Sitting out</b>: A chair in the sun on the doorstep on better days with the Guardian crossword. Friends and neighbours would stop to chat over the gate from a safe distance. This was great.<br />
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<b>Articles</b>: You’ll find links to up-to-date ones on the Body Politic support group’s #resources channel. The ones that were a particular support for me were:<br />
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We need to talk about what coronavirus recoveries look like, New York Times, 13 April 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/coronavirus-recovery.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/coronavirus-recovery.html</a><br />
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Lingering and painful: the long and unclear recovery to coronavirus recovery, The Guardian, 1 May 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/lingering-and-painful-long-and-unclear-road-to-coronavirus-recovery-long-lasting-symptoms">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/lingering-and-painful-long-and-unclear-road-to-coronavirus-recovery-long-lasting-symptoms</a><br />
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Paul Garner: for seven weeks I have been through a roller coaster of ill health…, BMJ blog, 5 May 2020<br />
<a href="https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/05/paul-garner-people-who-have-a-more-protracted-illness-need-help-to-understand-and-cope-with-the-constantly-shifting-bizarre-symptoms/">https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/05/paul-garner-people-who-have-a-more-protracted-illness-need-help-to-understand-and-cope-with-the-constantly-shifting-bizarre-symptoms/</a><br />
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(Also see below for links to more articles.)<br />
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<b>Hospitalisation</b>: I never went to hospital, mainly because I wasn’t ill enough. We rang 111 on day 18 when things were bad, but by speaking to me they could tell my breathing difficulties weren’t enough to admit me. Perhaps this was good news, but I really wanted some medical expertise at this point. They took our details so a doctor could ring back to speak to me: the return call never came. My second 111 call on day 51 was similarly unhelpful (I’ll spare you the tale of the wasted hours on that call). My local GP was more accessible and supportive…<br />
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<b>My local GP:</b> Our local surgery in Stoke Newington was great, and they readily admitted they were still learning how to handle Covid-19 at this early stage. They rang me daily for a while during my worst spell. I think it’s good to be in contact with your GP, and see what they can do for you in your situation. On day 30 I was checked for oxygen levels and heart rate in the carpark behind the surgery (I shuffled slowly up the pavement with N for this rather bizarre but appreciated back-door appointment), and on day 54 I finally had a face-to-face meeting with my GP. They examined me thoroughly for secondary infections and sent links to two useful resources with details of recovery support from our local hospital and Covid 19-related research:<br />
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Post Covid-19 Patient Information Pack from Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust:<br />
<a href="https://mcusercontent.com/30db5cb77411d59f467a2fecf/files/5fe19213-796d-4e9d-a04e-af9ab02c2acd/FYI_2_Post_COVID_19_information_pack.pdf">https://mcusercontent.com/30db5cb77411d59f467a2fecf/files/5fe19213-796d-4e9d-a04e-af9ab02c2acd/FYI_2_Post_COVID_19_information_pack.pdf</a><br />
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Oxford Covid -19 Evidence Service: regularly updated coronavirus evidence reviews, data analysis and writing:<br />
<a href="http://www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/">http://www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/</a><br />
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This one I have already mentioned with practical Covid-19 recovery advice was very timely and welcome too, from the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, so I'll repeat it here:<br />
<a href="https://covidpatientsupport.lthtr.nhs.uk/">https://covidpatientsupport.lthtr.nhs.uk</a></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Also, a late addition (August 2020), as the NHS catches up, this is its post-Covid recovery website for those who have had the virus:</i></div><div><a href="https://www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk">https://www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk<br /></a>
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<b>Medication</b>: It was paracetamol primarily. I became aware, through the support group, of other users taking medication (omeprazole) for silent reflux, which has similar symptoms to some related to Covid-19. I discussed this with my GP and started a four-week course of them on day 39, which helped. (It also helped bring an end to my spell of entertaining and much-admired belching.) Compared to the cornucopia of medication some people obviously have taken, mine is small fry.<br />
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<b>Crosswords, genealogy</b>: sitting in the sun on a sofa turned to face out the front window, keeping still and calm, these two were a good balance of gentle and stimulating.<br />
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<b>Things I didn’t do no.1: draw</b>. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. It was too much, and creativity dipped. I have a few bad unfinished drawings from this time. The first thing I was able to draw was my stubble.<br />
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<b>Things I didn’t do no.2: read</b>. I would fall asleep rather than read. American Marriage by Tayari Jones lay half read by my bed the whole time.<br />
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<b>Things I didn’t do no.3: exercise</b>. Over and over on the support group I would read about fit people recovering from the virus who resumed running 5km or even 10km at the first symptom-free day, and who then reported immediate relapses. I have taken short, gentle walks but no more.<br />
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<b>News and media</b>: I couldn’t bring myself to listen to news reports much - it fed anxiety, and I was aware that N and the girls would pick up on anything important and let me know. The UK government has handled this pandemic as dismally as could have been expected, and has eroded the public's confidence in their supposed abilities at every opportunity, but I didn't dwell long on this while I was most ill. As much as anything, I needed to keep positive, and updates on this and the exponential growth of Covid-19 deaths was not good for the mind.<br />
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<b>Social media</b>: I generally avoided it. I didn’t want to read about the wonderful creative opportunities that lockdown presented to us all, or badly researched medical stories too easily shared. I wanted useful practical information straight from the trusted expert source, although being so early on in the pandemic’s timeline even the most reliable sources were scrabbling around trying to get to grips with what we are dealing with. (That’s still true now, two months on as I write this.)<br />
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<b>Reporting symptoms</b>: Very early on I started reporting my symptoms on the world’s largest study of the virus, the <a href="https://covid.joinzoe.com/" target="_blank">Covid-19 Symptom Study app</a>. Its website is good for essential Covid-19 reading and research.<br />
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<b>Applauding the NHS and essential workers every Thursday at 8pm</b>: I recorded the second of these when things felt at their darkest for me. It was great to hear people whoop and holler in the buildings and streets around. N and the girls were in the windows below and or on the doorstep joining in, not that I could see them. (My film just misses the fireworks that lit up the sky over the buildings to the left.) It was a great moment of connection early on, pre-Cummings, at a point when we really thought we were all in it together.<br />
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If you get Covid-19, it seems most likely you’ll get it mildly and recover quickly, or perhaps not even know you have had it. We all know that age, race, sex and other health issues play their parts in how seriously we get it. I expected, naively, that I would get through Covid-19 quite quickly. It didn’t turn out like that. I am lucky that I have my family to support me through it all in ways I’ll never forget, that my employers and work colleagues are so understanding and supportive, and that, although it has stayed with me a long time, my own Covid-19 wasn’t serious enough to deliver me to intensive care. But of course you don’t know where you are heading when you’re going through it in the darkness, just as we don't know where it will lead us from here.<br />
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Most of all, stay well.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><u style="background-color: #fcff01;">Update on day 137 </u></b>(9 August 2020): I'm better, much better. I'm not 100%, but the dark days of March and April are a long way away. I'm walking further (25,000 steps along the cliffs one easy-breathing day) and cycling. No running yet. The waves of breathlessness continue, but are less often, and I'm confident I can manage them. On day 132 I had an appointment at a Post Covid clinic in central London. This included an antibody test, which was positive. </div><div><br /></div><div>From my experience I would say three of the most important things in my recovery have been (1) taking things slowly, resisting all temptation to push myself even when I thought I could, (2) keeping a good relationship and maintaining contact with my GP – eventually, after what seemed an age, the face-to-face medical attention came – and (3) having understanding and supportive family, friends and employers. I've been so so lucky in this way. </div><div><br /></div><div>
<b>More resources (I am adding to this rather random list as I come across things):</b><br />
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Covid-19 can last for several months, by Ed Yong, The Atlantic, June 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/">https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/</a><br />
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I've been ill for months but I still don't know if it is Covid-19, by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, 6 June 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/ive-been-ill-for-months-but-i-still-dont-know-if-it-is-covid-19">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/ive-been-ill-for-months-but-i-still-dont-know-if-it-is-covid-19</a><br />
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"It seems endless": four women struggling to recover from Covid-19, by Luke Harding, The Guardian, 7 June 2020<br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/it-feels-endless-four-women-struggling-to-recover-from-covid-19-coronavirus-symptoms">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/it-feels-endless-four-women-struggling-to-recover-from-covid-19-coronavirus-symptoms</a><br />
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How long does Covid-19 last?, Covid Symptom Study, 6 June 2020<br />
<a href="https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-term">https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-term</a><br />
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Post Covid hub, Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation, June 2020<div><a href="https://www.post-covid.org.uk/get-support/">https://www.post-covid.org.uk/get-support/<br /></a>They offer help for people with breathing difficulties after Covid-19, and their family members and carers. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Long Covid": the under-the-radar coronavirus cases exhausting thousands, by Natasha Hinde, Huffington Post, 2 July 2020</div><div><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-is-long-covid-and-how-many-people-are-suffering_uk_5efb3487c5b612083c52d91d">https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-is-long-covid-and-how-many-people-are-suffering_uk_5efb3487c5b612083c52d91d</a></div><div> </div><div>Patient safety concerns for Long Covid patients, Patient Safety Learning, 6 July 2020</div><div><a href="https://www.patientsafetylearning.org/blog/patient-safety-concerns-for-long-covid-patients?">https://www.patientsafetylearning.org/blog/patient-safety-concerns-for-long-covid-patients?</a></div><div>This article includes a long list of useful references on long Covid. </div><div><br /></div><div>What happens if Covid-19 symptoms don't go away?, by Lois Parshley, Vox, 14 July 2020</div><div><a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/14/21324201/covid-19-long-term-effects-symptoms-treatment">https://www.vox.com/2020/7/14/21324201/covid-19-long-term-effects-symptoms-treatment</a></div><div>An article focusing on accessing free care in the US that features Jake Suett, an intensive care unit doctor in the UK who has been dealing with long Covid. His name is worth searching. </div><div><br /></div><div>Brain fog, phantom smells and tinnitus: my experience as a Covid 'long-hauler', by Hannah Davis, The Guardian, 5 August 2020</div><div><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/05/brain-fog-phantom-smells-and-tinnitus-my-experience-as-a-covid-long-hauler">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/05/brain-fog-phantom-smells-and-tinnitus-my-experience-as-a-covid-long-hauler</a></div><div>The experience of a Brooklyn-based researcher and artist. This article has a US slant, but the symptoms and responses to them are common. </div><div><br /></div></div><div>This is the new (August 2020) NHS website for those recovering from Covid-19, covering its effects on the body and mind, eating, sleeping, grief and bereavement, and returning to work:</div><div><a href="https://www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk">https://www.yourcovidrecovery.nhs.uk</a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-308907033157882612020-05-27T12:20:00.002+01:002020-06-29T15:22:45.810+01:00Return to Winchester<div>
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<a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank"><i>Read an introduction to my drawing journey around England, which started 30 years ago.</i></a><br />
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<b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b><br />
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So I reach Winchester, which the guide books will tell you is a beautiful city stocked up with no end of history, how it used to be the capital city and one of the most important cities in Europe. But I haven't looked forward to it. I lived in Winchester for three years when I was at art school so I am well used to a dreary respectability that lurks beneath the surface. It is a city that spends the evening watching <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_and_June" target="_blank">Terry and June</a> repeats or is tucked up in bed by nine in the evening with the Daily Telegraph crossword.</div>
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<b><i>[In retrospect, I seem a bit tough on Winchester here. It’s probably moved on a bit since then.]</i></b></div>
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But I arrive on different terms today, to stay a couple of nights and see it from what I hope to be a better perspective. There is no denying it is a beautiful place once you escape the one-way system that loops around the centre with its share shops and wine bars. I leave the van by the park and walk in.</div>
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It is a gentle and restrained city but rather like someone who has outgrown their clothes; it is more like a town with the historical trappings of a city. The cathedral sits like a ship run aground, left high and dry as the city's importance as one time capital of England has ebbed about it.</div>
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Winchester is probably still recovering. Although there are Iron Age settlements nearby, it was developed by the Romans who laid out a grid system of streets and built its defensive wall. By the seventh century the Saxons had founded its first cathedral and St Swithun became its most famous bishop. King Alfred came here to live and made it his capital. And from then until the 12th century Winchester swung. Edward the Confessor was crowned here, William the Conqueror rebuilt the royal palace and the Domesday Book was written here. Thanks to records written at the time more is known about Winchester than any other city in the Middle Ages. It was stuffed full of traders from all over Europe, densely populated for its time, the second largest town in England.</div>
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You can get a sense that it hasn't all been downhill since from a walk down its High Street (top image). The shops are smart and expensive. Where there are gaps, shoppers can see through windows in the hoardings to where teams of archaeologists are sifting through remains before builders and concrete take over.</div>
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Winchester survived its loss of power and wealth to London, the Black Death (that left it with fields and orchards within the city walls), and the Civil War. Later the coming of the railway helped revitalise it: what had once been the nation's centre had become little more than a market town until the trains arrived. And it saves it still, in a sense. An hour from Waterloo on the train, it is the perfect retreat for people working in the City and wanting to escape to a home in peace and tranquility. Winchester is not a playground; the only cinema has been demolished to make way for more housing for the elderly.</div>
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A bearded man with a rucksack accosts me for money so he can get a bus to his family in Southampton. It becomes a familiar story. He greets me cheerfully later when I bump into him in a cafe. He seems wonderfully out of place here and tells me which bench by the cathedral an old lady goes to sit to offer her services as a self-appointed sexologist. At times it seems like nobody more than stockbrokers and retired wing-commanders live here so it is a relief to see this hint of a more quirky side of life.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Cheyney Court, Winchester, 1990</td></tr>
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The cathedral's spireless tower gives it an incomplete look and yet it still manages to dominate the skyline. Its first tower fell down in 1107. Having one of the longest naves in the country, it effectively cuts the city in two, keeping Winchester College and the water meadows apart from the rest of the town. In the summer the Cathedral Close livens up as people strip off to eat their sandwiches around the gravestones. Today they are taking cover by the west door, waiting for a shower to end on their way back from communion.</div>
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A walk down the south transept can be a disorientating experience as arches lean and the tiled floor undulates. Suddenly it is an uphill walk. The trouble is caused by the flood plain on which it was built, the River Itchen having rotted the wooden foundations to such an extent that in places nothing is either horizontal or vertical. By the lady chapel is a statue of William Walker, the man who worked underwater to secure the foundations at the beginning of the <b><i>[20th]</i> </b>century, showing him in full diving gear, his hands outstretched, palms up.</div>
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What have also survived in a less than perfect state are the bones of an array of Saxon kings perched in boxes along the top of the side screens. Each contains a haphazard cocktail of regal remains now, their contents having been scattered around by Cromwell's troops on one of his visits. We can only assume that one king's bones look pretty much like another's and they were swept back into these boxes as they were found. Further along the aisle is a memorial to Jane Austen who came to live in Winchester to be close to her doctor. Sadly it wasn't close enough and she died soon after in a house nearby.</div>
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The streets in the afternoon become busier with the boys from the college going with their parents for tea, couples ambling down the pedestrianised High Street window shopping, walking off the Sunday lunch. Even the few punks Winchester has to offer seem as respectable as the city expects. Some sit with their dog around the Butter Cross, which stands awkwardly close to a bakery with a traffic cone perched high on one of its spires.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Butter Cross, Winchester, 1990</td></tr>
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A walk down by the water meadows is a popular thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. Homesick little boys in suits are taking awkward strolls with parents past the cricket pitches, and happier-looking, scruffier boys peer into the river from bridges looking for trout. The meadows are remarkably unspoiled despite being so near to the city centre. A dual-carriageway snakes around the foot of St Catherine's Hill, the footpath to its summit passing beneath it. It's a steep climb that leaves me puffing. At its top there is a maze, the old Iron Age fort, and a wonderful view over the city.</div>
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For a city that has experienced such turmoil and fervour down its historic past, Winchester has earned a breather now. Those who still like to think of England as being a gentle, sleepy place brimming with royalty and history could only find it delightful. I'm just glad I don't have to live here anymore. To me it is a place that time has left behind, not somewhere I would want to live, but perfect for a day out as a retreat from a truer more real world. </div>
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The next day, having camped in a pull-in high up in the fields out of the city, fields famed for their <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-49608647/crop-circle-inventor-s-son-talks-about-father-s-legacy" target="_blank">corn circles</a> that will no doubt appear later in the summer, and among the stacked and numbered trunks of trees sliced down by the hurricane in 1987, I set out for the church of St Cross. Down a lane towards the water meadows and through an arched gateway there is a large quadrangle bordered by the houses of the men who live at the <a href="https://hospitalofstcross.co.uk/" target="_blank">Hospital of St Cross</a>. It was founded in 1136 to house 13 poor men and provide free dinners for 100 others, and a few of its present inhabitants are sitting on benches in the sun looking towards the church. Besides the three rooms that make up their quarters, there are the old kitchen, a dining room and a hall adjoining the gatehouse.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, St Cross, Winchester, 1990</td></tr>
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The church is beautifully proportioned and simple, and built at a time when Norman was (my guide book tells me) becoming Early English. Its quiet expanses of stone, wood and glass accentuate corners of activity. “Bird Beak Window” a sign says. Above it is the carved zig-zag arch and 500-year-old glass.</div>
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Along the back pew the May edition of the parish magazine has been sorted into piles fastened with elastic bands; Mrs Giles - 5, Miss Stanwyck - 9, and the visitors book left open. There is the mystifying nationality column, and then a comments section.</div>
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<i>Parents married here in 1912.</i></div>
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<i>Peaceful.</i></div>
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<i>Norman?</i> (This sounds like an attempt to communicate with the dead.)</div>
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<i>Damp!</i></div>
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<i>Kick out the darkness and let the light bleed in.</i></div>
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There is, as Morton would have said, a book to be written about the comments made in church visitors books.</div>
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The Wayfarers' Dole, the bread and ale handed out to travellers who demand it from the gatehouse, does not show the same unchanging qualities as the Hospital. Seven hundred years of generosity has resulted in a corner of a white Mothers' Pride loaf and a token sample from a plastic bottle of Webster's Yorkshire Bitter, both served with badly worn charity. A man serves it with the resigned air of one who has been through this a thousand times.</div>
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In Morton's time there was always a steady stream of wanderers stopping here for refreshment, the vagrancy laws keeping the homeless on the move between towns. Now the homeless are more static in city doorways or wandering the streets asking for change, and rarely seen on the grass verges of main roads. Tourists who have read Morton's book are the ones most likely to ask for it now, the porter tells me.</div>
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Taking the wooden platter and small earthenware goblet to a bench in the sun I can only hope they have not come too far for this. The hungry are better off heading straight to the pub on the corner by the main road where a more satisfying lunch can be found.<br />
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<i>James Hobbs, 1990</i><br />
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<a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/06/from-romsey-abbey-to-southampton-docks.html" target="_blank"><i>Read on: Romsey, Hampshire, and Southampton docks</i></a><br />
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<i>See more of my drawings on <a data-blogger-escaped-target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/">Instagram</a>.</i></div>
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James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-46718044909584679482020-05-13T16:57:00.000+01:002020-05-14T12:05:12.791+01:00New York City sketchbook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTOJbQsINSdOo0NBxWC2WF8wF5_Kc1FXjhfSkmpHZmeAMZ6XDQPx3F3eiDgR4QHVNjfQkfhRz5uIZLRebBxczeao3epcKI-oL5mhonLon5NafwwVViBg7JfpaxHdggJefRWvlTRg/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1274" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTOJbQsINSdOo0NBxWC2WF8wF5_Kc1FXjhfSkmpHZmeAMZ6XDQPx3F3eiDgR4QHVNjfQkfhRz5uIZLRebBxczeao3epcKI-oL5mhonLon5NafwwVViBg7JfpaxHdggJefRWvlTRg/s600/jameshobbs_nyc3.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div>
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We had a celebratory family holiday in New York City a few months ago. Coronavirus was in the news of course, but was yet to really hit either the US or the UK, where we flew from. Less than a month after we returned home, both New York and London were in lockdown.<br />
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Our stay there was almost completely untouched by the disastrous events that were to come: there was hand-sanitiser in our hotel lobby, but we crowded into museums, squares, the subway, bars and restaurants, and face masks were a rarity.<br />
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These are the drawings from my New York City A5 sketchbook 2020, a snapshot of a city so soon before it largely closed down and life changed. I've spared you the pages of diary entries that intersperse the drawings. We feel lucky to have managed to visit when we did, and send our love to a city that we remember fondly in these tough times.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjdEqXtUXz_M-ZrkHfbr3QM51PrFNAI-XWIxnlwaXBUFAo6riTWrddBjFOuGYR6y846wyyN-7QTNBLv81Y2xxIDiA-ZZQ9uyjgPIByvZH_pK1QDN4yizfgrTw8SqznVsjnbrUHWg/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="905" data-original-width="1279" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjdEqXtUXz_M-ZrkHfbr3QM51PrFNAI-XWIxnlwaXBUFAo6riTWrddBjFOuGYR6y846wyyN-7QTNBLv81Y2xxIDiA-ZZQ9uyjgPIByvZH_pK1QDN4yizfgrTw8SqznVsjnbrUHWg/s400/jameshobbs_nyc1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lower East Side, seventh floor looking east</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJl6UVA-TETMR7mF0vEL85D4lmHxP4Pe_0WePbLxo6VJv_Iqb5aeeseb65WH1CgdYyZu0IBZIcV_1RsoSuZ2f5uJVLVbWiQvQsj2Go9g_mfvYYQ7wEAKEY2zm2qbk6jAMpdoAGVw/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="905" data-original-width="1281" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJl6UVA-TETMR7mF0vEL85D4lmHxP4Pe_0WePbLxo6VJv_Iqb5aeeseb65WH1CgdYyZu0IBZIcV_1RsoSuZ2f5uJVLVbWiQvQsj2Go9g_mfvYYQ7wEAKEY2zm2qbk6jAMpdoAGVw/s400/jameshobbs_nyc2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Delancey and Allen Streets, New York City</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8YHMJWxOVKo11ZLpMwb0XubrtwfqNH4ehyphenhyphenXfUKypL2_bAGOv5euPUEKoq7Fh1Dxsc-VxYWAKRiASGxJ2K7Ff5ZV_RVj5TYpitlNsPWB604qUNzOfLzKGhjFpZdlsLZvQZ50lGw/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="897" data-original-width="1273" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8YHMJWxOVKo11ZLpMwb0XubrtwfqNH4ehyphenhyphenXfUKypL2_bAGOv5euPUEKoq7Fh1Dxsc-VxYWAKRiASGxJ2K7Ff5ZV_RVj5TYpitlNsPWB604qUNzOfLzKGhjFpZdlsLZvQZ50lGw/s400/jameshobbs_nyc4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Breakfast at Russ & Daughters, Orchard Street</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv9950hMrecfvPYsDYqHwbyn8aJo6hevsvZ5Z-Xztk4zXShxf-lnjm9uERpwnJ5UHnnhDbarNi3rKeWUIc3aq7jL5rkqGRhZVUUrX6msE44S_t8iQOciqN5G-g0edeAt4fKYTuLw/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1263" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv9950hMrecfvPYsDYqHwbyn8aJo6hevsvZ5Z-Xztk4zXShxf-lnjm9uERpwnJ5UHnnhDbarNi3rKeWUIc3aq7jL5rkqGRhZVUUrX6msE44S_t8iQOciqN5G-g0edeAt4fKYTuLw/s400/jameshobbs_nyc6.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lower East Side rooftops</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park I</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park II</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhol_PdZM2Y6AHWiEzeGaMQJViFUpMghVD9mD8YZOu88HonFqwTtOVCXuI3VzwapqxIlfRj-eUgnxtUF_ThFvxc1-owQZYvyIKktMjPvrv0uoGhrShA6sD5rNKhPKXDkNe9-Zdbwg/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="899" data-original-width="1287" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhol_PdZM2Y6AHWiEzeGaMQJViFUpMghVD9mD8YZOu88HonFqwTtOVCXuI3VzwapqxIlfRj-eUgnxtUF_ThFvxc1-owQZYvyIKktMjPvrv0uoGhrShA6sD5rNKhPKXDkNe9-Zdbwg/s400/jameshobbs_nyc9.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Delancey Street subway</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the Empire State Building looking north(ish)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the Empire State Building looking north-east</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">MacDougal Street cafe, Manhattan</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The new Essex Market, Lower East Side</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Central Park skyline</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQDKKQERSFJSjR9kRXhLiFwFL_B8EwTrTXnukWBGBaUBQyVHPctxDcYfs1ZSV0fh9jHGBi2_oRYso6WRvzK0NNMOa5FFN_LNnjnodgsx1nJrs79-RjdMstICjQzzXTJuE7vDwpRw/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc15.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="907" data-original-width="1274" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQDKKQERSFJSjR9kRXhLiFwFL_B8EwTrTXnukWBGBaUBQyVHPctxDcYfs1ZSV0fh9jHGBi2_oRYso6WRvzK0NNMOa5FFN_LNnjnodgsx1nJrs79-RjdMstICjQzzXTJuE7vDwpRw/s400/jameshobbs_nyc15.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katz's deli, crammed</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNesMRmPJUHl6e_O2Gus-epcgIiSNaLNWFVBWyinxNucp2DeHIhtLaFZqad96tRpAVeGGyJ5e7ClxJ1AFTuF_yxf6H-AnqDcRkgQHLN72dTflTvtfYs7oB87M0n3PaTMP_ID_RGQ/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc16.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="903" data-original-width="1294" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNesMRmPJUHl6e_O2Gus-epcgIiSNaLNWFVBWyinxNucp2DeHIhtLaFZqad96tRpAVeGGyJ5e7ClxJ1AFTuF_yxf6H-AnqDcRkgQHLN72dTflTvtfYs7oB87M0n3PaTMP_ID_RGQ/s400/jameshobbs_nyc16.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, and a bridge</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiGQS7rHRtb1QIeUM5TG8rkxMTpJKovAOm_UzJkQ4KpXLn2DquZ6hMsLXpxWAS5ttUkntcm35Wgj6yFffZL5QhjgxdQnOnpMtya4gnV3QorHqEE27cA5-P3NyVNc26xI46scmS7A/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc17.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="1272" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiGQS7rHRtb1QIeUM5TG8rkxMTpJKovAOm_UzJkQ4KpXLn2DquZ6hMsLXpxWAS5ttUkntcm35Wgj6yFffZL5QhjgxdQnOnpMtya4gnV3QorHqEE27cA5-P3NyVNc26xI46scmS7A/s400/jameshobbs_nyc17.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washington Square, New York City</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdNygQu7o8CrV72ACNo1WaMhiNZ7qx4w-SU-KhCLY9xlwc442RL-jj31N1IKHPkDg5p9LXayYnlELBX3keMzWgXme-k3DPVhvr2tsjOmj5XpfWxvKmkGgIfEk6iSYSqZvF79qjww/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc18.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="909" data-original-width="1296" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdNygQu7o8CrV72ACNo1WaMhiNZ7qx4w-SU-KhCLY9xlwc442RL-jj31N1IKHPkDg5p9LXayYnlELBX3keMzWgXme-k3DPVhvr2tsjOmj5XpfWxvKmkGgIfEk6iSYSqZvF79qjww/s400/jameshobbs_nyc18.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Three bridges: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6rbLuXihpYJrV2JFJDdn00BjcYj5q0sMmetAkhxrYMmk1jars5H60jigSLecODSJSWIYVkV3yugDW7vzAq0H91Q-NWdI5SIuKrVu_vZFgW3DSO6DwnbTOGjTzsSE14Z70Z3pwIg/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc19.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="915" data-original-width="1294" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6rbLuXihpYJrV2JFJDdn00BjcYj5q0sMmetAkhxrYMmk1jars5H60jigSLecODSJSWIYVkV3yugDW7vzAq0H91Q-NWdI5SIuKrVu_vZFgW3DSO6DwnbTOGjTzsSE14Z70Z3pwIg/s400/jameshobbs_nyc19.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Remedy Diner, East Houston Street</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLR27Lk4JpubJKBAJzAirSTDFR2wi4YAyg_-a0O2bL1_6XUL8d_xOaASeNVeLlHRJRNA5mWNmjOmLNeV2ZZU_Thq0Tf0brt4rmuG7TMHeBgYlhhvzjyLgHU0GCwF50djhtbHAifA/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc20.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="927" data-original-width="1296" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLR27Lk4JpubJKBAJzAirSTDFR2wi4YAyg_-a0O2bL1_6XUL8d_xOaASeNVeLlHRJRNA5mWNmjOmLNeV2ZZU_Thq0Tf0brt4rmuG7TMHeBgYlhhvzjyLgHU0GCwF50djhtbHAifA/s400/jameshobbs_nyc20.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lower East Side from floor 14 (an added page)</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPu_2DrwjPallYQwUhHnyZ6CVZyH1IsVwfrK8g1rJenIHIA5MHyuKRhSzDfZIYA7AX-l3VyWVto4b0BEzkqiFGiYszbuoEFuHvvE3cfRUY-uxzspvj0ajk13MrN9LAvpkoIVSNmw/s1600/jameshobbs_nyc21.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="909" data-original-width="1294" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPu_2DrwjPallYQwUhHnyZ6CVZyH1IsVwfrK8g1rJenIHIA5MHyuKRhSzDfZIYA7AX-l3VyWVto4b0BEzkqiFGiYszbuoEFuHvvE3cfRUY-uxzspvj0ajk13MrN9LAvpkoIVSNmw/s400/jameshobbs_nyc21.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Room 514 in the Museum of Modern Art: Man Ray's <br />
Chess Set (1920-26), Brancusi's Blond Negress II <br />
(1933) and Tarsila do Amaral's The Moon (1928). <br />
And a window with a view</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-51770108048324970272020-04-29T18:00:00.002+01:002020-06-29T15:35:33.385+01:00Bucklebury, Combe Gibbet and the RAC<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha-tOY5xnvLrmNHB-JGHcXD72GUmYp0zT58Qg1mA1UzH3mya1W86CewlnEcKQWA8HujLZzhqTIK33JMUdKwDzhsyxn17fkrduznEf3tCbEGJXb4zKaW6xnNBgWb8Z9NYRovfxI_A/s1600/02jameshobbs_bucklebury_0L9.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="938" data-original-width="1600" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha-tOY5xnvLrmNHB-JGHcXD72GUmYp0zT58Qg1mA1UzH3mya1W86CewlnEcKQWA8HujLZzhqTIK33JMUdKwDzhsyxn17fkrduznEf3tCbEGJXb4zKaW6xnNBgWb8Z9NYRovfxI_A/s400/02jameshobbs_bucklebury_0L9.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Bucklebury, Berkshire, 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<i><a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to my drawing journey around England, which started 30 years ago</a>. </i><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </b><br />
<br />
The first night out. I have ducked off the A4 down a narrow road that, by the speed they are going, is well known by the commuters rushing home. I get the idea that the van and I are a rude intrusion into their well-ordered lives, getting under their feet. I dawdle along in the same direction, trying to find the village of <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/rVPXZjgQinkAU6P49" target="_blank">Bucklebury</a>: it is spread thinly through the lanes, and I never know quite if or when I have found it.<br />
<br />
In looking for places to camp each night I am going to avoid the camp sites whenever I can and knock on peoples' doors to see if they can direct me to some quiet corner, and at least give England's reticent population the chance to say something to me and save money into the bargain. I have driven miles searching for the right sort of place when I come across a large white house at the end of an intimidating gravel drive that I select as my first target for somewhere to stay.<br />
<br />
The door flies open to reveal a man in plus-fours and a mobile phone hanging from a belt like a revolver. A lean, elderly, military looking man, barks over to me, "What can I do for you m'boy?" in a colonial sort of way. I tell him what I'm doing and how I am looking for somewhere I can pull in for the night, words I was to repeat hundreds of times over the months.<br />
<br />
"Morton! Aha, of course! My father had a bookshelf full! Never did get around to reading any myself." <br />
<br />
But he leads me to a small gate down one side of the garden, which goes into a narrow field where I can stop for the night. He leads me past firewood stacked against a hedge to show me where I can park. The pile, he says, has not gone down over the past mild winter - "but it's a dreadful frost valley down here. Down to minus ten last week."<br />
<br />
Expressing surprise here was a mistake on my part, and he jumped as if he'd caught me out.<br />
<br />
"Towny! You're a towny! Only a towny wouldn't know it's been so bad!"<br />
<br />
The sky is ominously clear, and I feel I am about to find it out tonight.<br />
<br />
I heat a tin of soup and then follow the footpath that leads through the field to a horse-smelling criss-cross of tracks behind the hedges. There is a leafy wood that muffles the footsteps and every other sound, the acoustics of the English jungle.<br />
<br />
But it isn't as silent as it seems. Over the birdsong is the white noise of the M4 and a ceaseless rumble of Heathrow traffic, two inescapable links with another pace of life. Coming back out of the fields as darkness falls I pass a line of bungalows that look over to the woods and click, click, click, their security lights come on one by one.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3yaOocam21gUE4uA5Xrl3ywwjbbFK2GWzJ_yqTUCEw1jjcu_iVmFsjrQSpCq9r8V8N98nqAEAilicN_1r-J6KTL86Qy486O2RF1lkuJg7fpoUO6C2kbCsrM8O6Vpoexu0kaSNvg/s1600/02jameshobbs.buckleburychurch_0L8.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="693" data-original-width="982" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3yaOocam21gUE4uA5Xrl3ywwjbbFK2GWzJ_yqTUCEw1jjcu_iVmFsjrQSpCq9r8V8N98nqAEAilicN_1r-J6KTL86Qy486O2RF1lkuJg7fpoUO6C2kbCsrM8O6Vpoexu0kaSNvg/s600/02jameshobbs.buckleburychurch_0L8.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Bucklebury Church, 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In the morning, my host is up in time to chat with me while the toast burns, painting a vivid picture of the whole of the south of England being overrun with deer, stripping trees of their bark as they go. He's really got it in for me now.<br />
<br />
"If you'd been up at a decent time this morning, your..." he points at the van, struggling for the right word, "thing would have been surrounded by them. No education!" he concludes.<br />
<br />
I offer him a cup of tea, but he has, after all, not yet concluded, and turned instead to his views on letting the starving of the third world die out naturally rather than being "mollycoddled" by the likes of "us". "Thinning out" he called it. <br />
<br />
He waves me off, and I think he will miss me being around to shout at. I stop to draw in a gateway on the way to Bucklebury Church, listening to a cuckoo somewhere across the valley while a stack of pornographic magazines blow around the road. The church is hemmed in between the rectory and post office, now The Old Rectory and The Old Post Office. This is ideal commuting country, encouraged by all those country living articles in the colour supplements. The migration of rich and poor between city and country continues. It seems quite possible though that one day there will be no such thing as a "local".<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
Even if you are driving around the lanes of Berkshire looking for a gibbet on a hill, it still comes as something of a surprise when you finally come across it. And today probably more so, as, chugging up the hill towards <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/w4kScV4Z1uL23cPf7" target="_blank">Combe Gibbet</a>, I can make out the unmistakable form of a figure hanging from it.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3NjUC4g7rfmtvrnKaK-DnoS8MDoI8UySrlPd-xsw5pJC8_c2BsGeoBAWaHGpx6AAeGy2_W_x5kbT2WIyT9_qPif1vICn5BBnjwmYmdCRwy6SRTlhiDdiCfWiZ1UJvRxgbrZHi7w/s1600/02jameshobbs.gibbet.1L5.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1095" data-original-width="1596" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3NjUC4g7rfmtvrnKaK-DnoS8MDoI8UySrlPd-xsw5pJC8_c2BsGeoBAWaHGpx6AAeGy2_W_x5kbT2WIyT9_qPif1vICn5BBnjwmYmdCRwy6SRTlhiDdiCfWiZ1UJvRxgbrZHi7w/s400/02jameshobbs.gibbet.1L5.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Combe Gibbet, Berkshire, 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
From the twinkling lights reflected from car windows parked on the hill on this hazy warming morning, there is evidently a crowd out to see it. I have never considered myself an ambulance chaser but there is an allure to this macabre sight, and one I can't resist.<br />
<br />
Getting closer, leaving the car park and its drowsy occupants with their BBC Radio 3 and vacuum flasks, I can see they are not concerned with the gibbet at all but giving their attention to group of grounded hang-gliders in the next field.<br />
<br />
"'Not enough wind, just not enough,"' a helmeted man is saying. He turns to the little group and just for a moment I get the idea he's going to ask us all to blow.<br />
<br />
The limp legs hanging from the huge T-shaped gibbet are way out of reach, but a soft stuffing is still visible oozing from one of the trouser-legs. The jacket is packed so tight that the few buttons that are left are popping off. The head is of stuffed sacking. It droops weightily, the noose giving it that same jerked angle you see in old black and white photographs from the hanging heydays.<br />
<br />
On the opposite arm of the T, a sign has been hooked, awkwardly written, weathered and calling for good neck muscles and eyesight. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I am a farm worker who earns £120 a week. My rent is £30 a week, food for my wife and I is £60 a week. This leaves me £30 a week for clothes, transport, furniture and all the other things in life. I cannot afford a holiday. How can I afford £4 a week for our poll tax. This is the only way out. Please help to change this unfair system.</i></blockquote>
<b>[The poll tax or, as the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher insisted on calling it, community charge, was a flat-rate tax that fell disproportionately on the poor. Her insistence on its implementation helped bring her down later in 1990. I came across a few other poll tax demonstrations on the tour.]</b><br />
<br />
As a site for such a protest, you had to hand it to him. How can you resist such an apparition visible across half of Berkshire? The gallow's uses are now certainly few, but the farm nearby is obliged to maintain it in the condition it was in when it was erected to hang two child murderers in the 17th century, the only time it was used. There are signs of recent repair, new wood and metal plates to show it is still observed, and a steady supply of walkers over the hills to stand and watch.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLapN_zSCbKjORwm7XBpVFKJy5wvZ_qkh8zHtPrz0JoAg7aGQxewrqsxJJRfaIsdPwRc8D52eBfItrF8YAePji9aCcpGSK610e9X3BnM4BZTw0vWu9SVr6ggTkEhRUy-M9EJODMQ/s1600/02jameshobbs.inkpenbeacon_1S2.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="817" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLapN_zSCbKjORwm7XBpVFKJy5wvZ_qkh8zHtPrz0JoAg7aGQxewrqsxJJRfaIsdPwRc8D52eBfItrF8YAePji9aCcpGSK610e9X3BnM4BZTw0vWu9SVr6ggTkEhRUy-M9EJODMQ/s400/02jameshobbs.inkpenbeacon_1S2.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, From Inkpen Beacon, 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It is a small point, and one no doubt lost on those about to have the noose about their necks, but there can be few finer views from any gallows. There is a massive expanse of countryside laid out below us, almost totally still except for flocks of birds and a tractor gradually working left to right across a field perhaps a couple of miles away. There are two palls of smoke, one very black, the other blue and emerging vertically from woodland. Several patches of oil seed rape stab yellowness into receding diamond-shaped fields.<br />
<br />
The air moves a little, enough to set a body rocking on a gibbet, but still not enough for the hang-gliders.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
The second night out, and I'm feeling pretty good having parked up a long, disused lane, waking to silence from the fields around, silence even from the skies, but then too silence from the engine, which splutters but does not start. And so my second morning out brings my first appeal to the RAC. With the help of a farm labourer who was happened to be spraying a field nearby we pushed the van to within sight of the road and I set out to look for a phone. <b>[<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/262950/global-mobile-subscriptions-since-1993/" target="_blank">Mobiles</a> were a rarity in 1990.]</b><br />
<br />
There are few more uplifting sights than an RAC roadside recovery van coming around the corner and one I was to find did not diminish with frequency. A man jumps out with a precise moustache slicked into place. He is the nearest thing to Salvador Dalí I have seen. He fiddles with the spark plugs, and I have to turn the engine over from time to time as they are tested.<br />
<br />
"And again." It is like a doctor asking me to say "aaah".<br />
<br />
"The compressor," he announces. I am still dreading that this may mean the whole journey is over before it has hardly started, when he asks for £1.50 for a replacement. A rummage through my pockets only brings to light £1.24 in assorted change, which he accepts.<br />
<br />
As I'm pulling away, he calls to me, words I cannot quite make out. They may well have been: "See you again!"<br />
<br /><i>
James Hobbs, 1990<br /></i>
<br />
<a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/05/return-to-winchester.html" target="_blank"><i>Next: Winchester. Read about it here.</i></a><br />
<br />
<b>[See more of my drawings on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.] </b><br />
<br />
<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-55962273825038889152020-04-24T08:30:00.000+01:002020-06-29T15:21:32.534+01:00Buying, waiting, setting out: Heathrow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthnBoXvw3syAcXM6RfTBN1BDY9-PBMg_nw8eyf7_X6mfFn81lfsPk4OAZAkWUTrws0K9wCFsJ8uRDLh10H5cRPibp-eKHgcksA-hd-4oO5dFOtJ0Ov6m12TBxBxUeqVQE6y2zjQ/s1600/01jameshobbs.mobilA4_0L2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1126" data-original-width="1600" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthnBoXvw3syAcXM6RfTBN1BDY9-PBMg_nw8eyf7_X6mfFn81lfsPk4OAZAkWUTrws0K9wCFsJ8uRDLh10H5cRPibp-eKHgcksA-hd-4oO5dFOtJ0Ov6m12TBxBxUeqVQE6y2zjQ/s600/01jameshobbs.mobilA4_0L2.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, A40, West out London, 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b><i><a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Read an introduction to my journey, which started 30 years ago today, here.</a> </i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
<b><i>[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] </i></b><br />
<br />
It is hard to know quite where London ends now. Even when you think you have finally escaped it, reminders sneak through. It seeps undetected well past the outer membrane of the M25 into towns beyond, its influence unmistakable. The skies are hardly ever silent to the sounds of aircraft nor the fields to some dual-carriageway or another. Heading west, the greener expanses are undeveloped plots rather than pasture, a padding of cotton wool around Heathrow. <br />
<br />
Everything is built for speed and everyone is straining for more. "We can be out of London in an hour," people say, not mentioning the dangers this entails, the jumped lights, the rubber burned into the tarmac. At 50mph, I am the slowest. Black taxis rush to the airport, and business people bored with travel sit reading in the back seat. The City and Heathrow are London to them. Holding onto my shaking steering wheel I want to catch their eye and laugh. <br />
<br />
I pass beneath a gridlocked M25, queues of sales reps held ransom so they have to rearrange appointments on their carphones, lorry drivers leafing through tabloids snatched from their dashboards. A scrap metal yard of stacked rusted cars in the shadow of the motorway is just another lost irony.<br />
<br />
Suddenly I'm not quite sure why I am doing this. After all the delays it is a surprise to find myself on the road. The van is perhaps something of a joke, a pocket dormobile that often squeezes smiles out of people when they see it. A Volkswagen would be more serious, proof of a greater dedication to a nomadic lifestyle. This little 1972 Fiat, for all the wonders of Italian design, is not exciting or glamorous. It has the aerodynamics of a brick. Signs of rust are reappearing already through the recently sprayed white paint. The man who sold it to me from his home in the shadow of the Hinkley Point Power Station had smiled too much perhaps as we agreed a price.<br />
<br />
"The wife and I were going to have our summer holidays in it," he had said, "but – but we've different plans now." He didn't expand on this and I didn't dare ask. It looked to me that he'd bought it cheap, had done it up and was selling it quickly to some mug at a profit.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ZjEsQEVVGcjrTnJ33Zu1jFTzS31MTB3ShwRYWzdbGtJnCebzcrVHoD0-c4wZpY7PmP_R2YT5DRfHVNm4AggrGPo8sb8BzSdykKjVaISh2bZFiQGJEhXdobACA2e5ZQ3bcFmbuw/s1600/00intro.van4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="879" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ZjEsQEVVGcjrTnJ33Zu1jFTzS31MTB3ShwRYWzdbGtJnCebzcrVHoD0-c4wZpY7PmP_R2YT5DRfHVNm4AggrGPo8sb8BzSdykKjVaISh2bZFiQGJEhXdobACA2e5ZQ3bcFmbuw/s480/00intro.van4.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good for six months (nearly): the Fiat 850T</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I took a friend along to check it over before I bought it. Chris claims to know Something About Engines and so I watched him slide underneath it with a grimace while I kicked the tyres purposefully and checked that the gas rings worked. <br />
<br />
Inside there are a hundred bolted flaps hiding storage spaces, a table that emerges from the kitchen to make it a dining room from which unfolds a mattress to turn it to a bedroom. The roof unbuckles and concertinas up in a red and white striped canvas so it is nearly but not quite possible to stand up straight. From the roof a strange uncomfortable hammock comes out, a precarious pretence of a second bed. A tap pumps water up from a plastic container stowed away in a cupboard. Brown curtains with poppers seal the inside from the outside world.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidEivhDta5Kb9Z1d69nSRnhzmTPaehRHbmPduZwqGDTPmtFMrRkmVGMHA4Fk7sQgIBGgD4gFJJW3aCrC5eech0euBTb9Oor3ToyTGuBDqKu7yf8ntF1_dma_eftNnQ7ihvksUkZw/s1600/00intro.van2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="518" data-original-width="856" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidEivhDta5Kb9Z1d69nSRnhzmTPaehRHbmPduZwqGDTPmtFMrRkmVGMHA4Fk7sQgIBGgD4gFJJW3aCrC5eech0euBTb9Oor3ToyTGuBDqKu7yf8ntF1_dma_eftNnQ7ihvksUkZw/s600/00intro.van2.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "kitchen"</td></tr>
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<br />
Before Chris has wriggled back out from underneath I know it's exactly what I want. It didn't really matter what he was going to say.<br />
<br />
"Hey, this is it," I tell him. "I'll offer him £850."<br />
<br />
"James," he goes, "let me take you home now at great speed because this machine here can only be a source of sweet anguish and possibly eternal misery for whoever owns it."<br />
<br />
I consider it. "OK, OK. I'll try £825."<br />
<br />
It's true: later, there are problems. It will need a new water pump, not an easy thing to find for this model. In the weeks I wait for one to arrive, I practice packing in everything I need to take and then take it all out again, much to the amusement of the neighbours. I try a few short runs to camp overnight in the hills on the Welsh side of the Severn Bridge. The bed seems unnecessarily fiddly to assemble and takes up all the space inside the van once it is up. It needs to be made and unmade while still in it, a skill not easily acquired. The whole operation seems so time consuming I wonder if it's even worth my while going away.<br />
<br />
It is the middle of April [1990]. I have the van booked for a service at a little local garage before I set out. I have given up on waiting for the water pump. The old one will last a little longer before it completely disintegrates. People have started saying to me "Haven't you gone yet?" each time I see them. The service goes reasonably well but before I can leave it needs a new brake light switch. They say this will be quicker to get than the water pump, but may be several days before it arrives from Warrington.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfd2P3Jj4u-xA05mmlI_7KoBcDWQxbKus1lYRwVYHPJtlpbkneonLOD9hS7-dQZmmfTCuCTjarg9FOmcpTDm4mlCMs1D3nkK_v6UfyfPRi4s4zGPe6V4MkR8pO9lQrhzCx6IrCxw/s1600/00intro.van3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="874" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfd2P3Jj4u-xA05mmlI_7KoBcDWQxbKus1lYRwVYHPJtlpbkneonLOD9hS7-dQZmmfTCuCTjarg9FOmcpTDm4mlCMs1D3nkK_v6UfyfPRi4s4zGPe6V4MkR8pO9lQrhzCx6IrCxw/s600/00intro.van3.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My late brother Dave: it looks like he knew what he was doing, and he probably did</td></tr>
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<br />
Then I get flu, and spend days lying on the sofa wishing for an early death. <b><i>[Thirty years on I did again, Covid-19, and wished for nothing more than a long life.]</i></b> By this time a few people are even beginning to ask if I'm back already. The boxes are packed in my room waiting to be loaded in to the van at a moment's notice, and I start to eat the food I've packed into shoeboxes to take on the trip. There is a photograph of Hadrian's Wall in the paper one of these days. Right then, I couldn't envisage reaching London, let alone that remote outpost.<br />
<br />
But then, and it's odd just how much of a surprise it comes as considering how long I've been waiting and expecting it, news comes from the garage that the switch has arrived and they can fit it straight away. Immediately I feel fit and well and ready to go.<br />
<br />
I have a pile of sketchbooks and pencils, Morton's book and a road atlas. I have packed the provisions of a round-the-world yachtsman. I have a Shell Guide to England that can help me distinguish between what comes from the 13th century and what from the 14th century, but should the van collapse tomorrow it will all be over. On a budget of £40 a week there isn't too much scope for disaster.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaoEOe14jrL11cG407Zeg66tmdaEVL3FVxq1kFuBMAbYWN4HpDl9rJdEYXSIAF_P5ALepsg45fb58F-7-fXM-YXYkp6safJ0nK5UhIQ4Qi12Vbfsx9abXyRnKZrEFjv03_ge6nwA/s1600/01jameshobbs_datchet_0L4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="831" data-original-width="1600" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaoEOe14jrL11cG407Zeg66tmdaEVL3FVxq1kFuBMAbYWN4HpDl9rJdEYXSIAF_P5ALepsg45fb58F-7-fXM-YXYkp6safJ0nK5UhIQ4Qi12Vbfsx9abXyRnKZrEFjv03_ge6nwA/s600/01jameshobbs_datchet_0L4.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Datchet roundabout, 1990</td></tr>
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<br />
The faster we can travel the further London spreads. Through Windsor where a crowd is gathered around the lights of a film crew shooting outside the castle, and Datchet where the green embossed with mini-roundabouts is overlooked by estate agents and antique dealers. The churchyard is shady and calm, and a woman passes by on her wicker-basketed bicycle as I draw, but the planes still rumble away and we may as well still be in London.<br />
<br />
<i>James Hobbs, 1990</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i><a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/04/bucklebury-combe-gibbet-and-rac.html" target="_blank">Next: Bucklebury, Combe Gibbet and the RAC</a></i></b><br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-11371035618434661792020-04-18T14:24:00.000+01:002020-06-29T10:06:24.861+01:00Following Morton: the 1990 introduction<i>This is the original 1990 introduction to the story of my van trip around England</i><b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><i>with sketchbooks and pencils</i>.<i> <a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/03/thirty-years-on-van-revisited.html" target="_blank">Find out more about it here.</a></i><br />
<br />
<i><b>[Bracketed sections are comments added in 2020.]</b></i><br />
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It was at a car-boot sale near Winchester School of Art one Sunday morning in 1989 that I first came upon a battered paperback edition of HV Morton's In Search of England. First published in 1927, it tells the idiosyncratic story of a man's looping journey around England in his bull-nosed Morris. Once I had it in my hands, the temptation to flick through its pages to find his reactions to places I knew was irresistible.<br />
<br />
It is a book that has hardly been out of print since. Morton blended an informal, humorous style with an interest with history that brought the country's past within reach of anyone who wanted it. The growing popularity of the motor car was making the towns and countryside more accessible to the public than ever before. Within 14 years it was into its 27th edition.<br />
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Morton had an aim, one that his readers evidently shared with him, and that was to "find" England. He knew what he wanted and he set out to discover it. His journey was loaded with many of the views you may expect from a gentleman's tour in the time of the Empire, so much so that by the last page he is able to turn to a country parson and pompously tell him, "You have England."<br />
<br />
<i><b>[Pomposity was the least of Morton's many failings: you can find a bookful more in Michael Bartholomew's 2004 biography of him, titled In Search of HV Morton.]</b></i><br />
<br />
But flicking through this paperback more than 60 years later, I wasn't so sure what the bombs and bulldozers had left to be found today. I had an idea that the "heritage industry" would have packaged much of what he had described into neat bundles of visitor centres, gift shops and theme parks set against a rising tide of satellite dishes and out of town shopping centres. But before I knew it, I had bought a small camper van, loaded it with pencils and sketchbooks and had a summer of drawing stretching out before me.<br />
<br />
As it turned out, almost everywhere had its surprises. It came as a shock to find some places exactly as he had described them, just as it was to find others so changed. But it was those unlikely events that popped up out of nowhere down country lanes looking for somewhere to park overnight that I enjoyed most, the people ready to invite you into their homes or help push the van. They were the things you could never plan. The English people don'’t seem nearly as wary of strangers as we are led to believe.<br />
<br />
But it made me aware, too, of just how much colour and history there is a short drive up the least likely roads. We rush to the international airports with only the haziest idea of what is just over the hedge. What is closest to home is so often what is most overlooked.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEFz-VcBqK0Haq2O4r-C9q-w_XgVjJXt4X8R25TfHTVPHCTSvVOcOIrfBGIiy_uK2CzGKRFJ7gqgNFA_Bq3pbrod2uv3byZRqNH_CcnHHaSDgwIzbhSIctVhCWwPWnrdW9BLxFhw/s1600/00intro.chester.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1039" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEFz-VcBqK0Haq2O4r-C9q-w_XgVjJXt4X8R25TfHTVPHCTSvVOcOIrfBGIiy_uK2CzGKRFJ7gqgNFA_Bq3pbrod2uv3byZRqNH_CcnHHaSDgwIzbhSIctVhCWwPWnrdW9BLxFhw/s400/00intro.chester.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Hobbs, Bridge Street Rows, Chester, 1990. </td></tr>
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<br />
We are regularly spoon-fed the heritage trail hype, shepherded about as if we are incapable of original thought, depriving us of any sense of discovery. Perhaps that is the natural conclusion of what Morton was encouraging in his book. But if you have the time to slow down and stay off the motorways and dual-carriageways and see what you can find, there are many more rewards. England is a compact island and it never fails to respond to the slow, patient search.<br />
<br />
With that in mind it was at times frustrating restricting myself to follow Morton's route. We were hardly ideal travelling companions. There were times when I would have happily thrown his book out of the van window and struck out on my own way. There were roads off his tracks that I found impossible not to take, and few were disappointing when I did.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, however, I remained faithful to Morton and his book and I suppose I'm glad of that. Had I not remained faithful I would probably still be out there somewhere even now, driving the lanes looking for somewhere to camp or, more likely, waiting yet again for the RAC man to arrive.<br />
<br />
<i>James Hobbs, 1990</i><br />
<br />
<i><b><a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/04/buying-waiting-setting-out-heathrow.html" target="_blank">Next: Buying, waiting, setting out: Heathrow</a></b></i><br />
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<i><b> </b></i> <br />
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<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-33258208913123171162020-03-11T14:36:00.000+00:002020-06-29T15:33:55.438+01:00Thirty years on: the van revisited<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Thirty
years ago, in early 1990, I bought a camper van, packed it with
homemade sketchbooks and pencils and, funded by £40 a week from
Margaret Thatcher's enterprise allowance scheme, set off around the
country for six months retracing the route of an old travel book I'd
found in a car boot sale: HV Morton's In Search of England. Once home, I
wrote about my experience, exhibited drawings completed on the trip,
found a literary agent, and saw a parade of the UK's top publishers
politely turn it down.<br />
<br />
What since? While most of the 900 drawings
have been kept safely in cardboard boxes and occasionally shared
online (a selection of them were exhibited at Wolseley Fine Arts, London, in 1996), the 50 chapters have been archived in a series of devices that
tell a story of technology since that time. The book was started on a
typewriter, completed on an Amstrad and stored on floppy disks, and then
passed through a succession of Apple Macs to laptops, the cloud and
hard drives, and now to this blog. Over the coming months, to mark the
30 years since I started the journey, I'll be posting chapters from it
along with the drawings.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwawzMhCUfiaF-jlEUNObPHHb2yxhP66__h7XOshm7YgrdXuZ9ldX_NrK9XkSW5hs8YuowwMwmVXyLZFaXSlgFh0qFPUNxu49BpL_eYXv26J3Y9HS5CNNUvn5O67FeU7az6ci_SQ/s1600/00newintro.ludlow.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="865" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwawzMhCUfiaF-jlEUNObPHHb2yxhP66__h7XOshm7YgrdXuZ9ldX_NrK9XkSW5hs8YuowwMwmVXyLZFaXSlgFh0qFPUNxu49BpL_eYXv26J3Y9HS5CNNUvn5O67FeU7az6ci_SQ/s400/00newintro.ludlow.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ludlow's Boots</td></tr>
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<br />
An admission: these chapters were
written and the drawings were done by a man half my age, and the person I
am now would do things differently. My story has been given a gentle
edit, but I have resisted changing things too much. It represents where I
was during those six months. There are parts I wince at, but they
survive. <br />
<br />
Morton has fared even worse over time. The truth about
the hugely popular travel writer, who died in South Africa in 1979, was
revealed in Michael Bartholomew's In Search of HV Morton, published in
2004. The way Morton portrayed himself in his books was a carefully
constructed work of fiction. There were plenty of warning signs about
his character that I became aware of as I followed his route, but I
hadn't expected to him to turn out to be the racist, adulterous, hypocritical Nazi-sympathiser that Bartholomew's book reveals him to have
been. But, ugly as we can now recognise Morton as being, that too has become
part of the story of my journey.<br />
<br />
My drawings, only some of which
are included in these posts, were done at a formative time of my
artistic career. Although I had just come through four years of art
education at Hastings College of Arts and Technology and Winchester
School of Art, those six months of constant drawing around England saw
my work evolve almost beyond recognition. Again, I have kept in some of
those early, clunking images, because they too are part of the real story.<br />
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My trip in the van was delayed for a while because of its
hideous unreliability and, particularly, a faulty water pump. The date I
started my journey, 24 April 1990, was noteworthy in a couple of ways.
On that very day, at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html" target="_blank">Hubble Space Telescope</a> was launched on its own long-term mission to send back to
Earth images from the corners of the cosmos, a role it is expected to
continue until at least 2030. With humbler technology and a more
terrestrial focus, my Fiat 850T camper van trip also started
sending back a series of images, except these were images drawn in
pencil and from such other-worldly locations as fields near Hereford,
front gardens in Bradford-on-Avon and lorry parks in Lincoln. <br />
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<a href="https://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/2020/04/following-morton-1990-introduction.html" target="_blank">Read on: Following Morton: the 1990 introduction</a><br />
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<i>You can also follow me, and see more of my drawings, on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.</i><br />
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The second – and more personally significant – way that the date of my
launch around England is worth remembering is that ten years later to
that very day, 24 April 2000, my elder brother Dave died of cancer. I have a photo of him with his head under the
bonnet of the van that I'll post if I can ever find it.James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-15983914724368299262020-03-04T17:25:00.002+00:002020-03-04T18:01:32.448+00:00A visit to the Sketchbook Project, Brooklyn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmp4HAKoMIg54-2K3BShOHAG-5v_fM2GAAqXYB9QdueO3N9ysFy5qSsJzkVENYGQk_pZGPgD4A0R-4VFUGxW1-vL_ZjpKqZ7Y7GJ0lOv-aUHZaPAKwr2WJ0gAyEu__bS4ypJocqw/s1600/IMG_2904.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="850" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmp4HAKoMIg54-2K3BShOHAG-5v_fM2GAAqXYB9QdueO3N9ysFy5qSsJzkVENYGQk_pZGPgD4A0R-4VFUGxW1-vL_ZjpKqZ7Y7GJ0lOv-aUHZaPAKwr2WJ0gAyEu__bS4ypJocqw/s600/IMG_2904.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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A library dedicated to sketchbooks? We had a family visit to New York recently during which I finally had a chance to visit a place that I've heard a lot about over the years. The Brooklyn Art Library is home to the Sketchbook Project, which consists of more than 40,000 sketchbooks from around the world, submitted by whoever buys a book from the project and then sends it in.<br />
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The library, located down an unassuming road just a short L or G train ride away from Manhattan, is in a bookshelf-lined space behind a shopfront. You could almost mistake it for a shop at first, in fact: there's a counter and tables of merchandise, and then, as your eyes adjust to the light, the receding shelves of sketchbooks come into view.<br />
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The sketchbooks used for the project are small – 5x7in and 32 pages – and not so space consuming, but because of their lack of a spine they are mostly anonymous when on the shelf. This isn't a place to pick books off the shelf at will and browse at length. The process for handling the books requires placing a request by doing a catalogue search on the provided tablets or on your smartphone through artist's name, subject, locations or tags – or randomly. Within a few minutes, or seconds even, the book is delivered to you by the librarian. (The book's creator even gets a message to say it has been accessed.)<br />
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The reasons for this system are obvious, but it can have the effect of stifling the best of serendipity that working your way through a physical shelfload of books would allow. And the search for items is only as good as the metadata. The books are also not curated, so of widely variable standard. This could perhaps be considered an advantage rather than a disadvantage. One of the project's founders, Steven Peterman, told the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/inside-a-strangers-sketchbook" target="_blank">New Yorker</a> that one of the reasons for setting it up was to subvert the traditional exploitative gallery culture: "We wanted to create a community anti-gallery space that was inclusive of everyone that wanted to be a part of it." But on my own visit I never felt I cracked the search system in such a way that I found a rich seam of exciting work. Some preparation with regards to what I wanted to see on my visit would have been a good idea.<br />
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Participants can, for a fee, also have their books digitised, so opening them up to a much wider audience – you can check them out <a href="https://sketchbookproject.com/library" target="_blank">here</a>. Seeing the books online is not the same as holding them in your hands (I'm turning into a cracked record), but it's an accessible route in, wherever you are. A mobile library in the form of a three-wheeled bookmobile (which is parked in the corner of the library) takes examples of the collected books beyond the library's confines on occasions, and there have been tours of the books in the past.<br />
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Not everyone is keen on the idea of buying a sketchbook and giving it back to the people they have bought it from (the book becomes theirs while the copyright to your sketchbook's contents remains yours). The project has very recently become non-profit, which will bring new things such as more education programmes, but it is still a good idea to check <a href="https://brooklynartlibrary.org/terms" target="_blank">the small print</a> before participating, which includes:<br />
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1.2.<strong style="word-wrap: break-word;"> License to Content. </strong>By providing Content through the Services, you thereby grant The Sketchbook Project a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform such Content in connection with the Services and The Sketchbook Project’s (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Services (and derivative works thereof) in any merchandise or media formats and through any merchandising or media channels...</div>
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This may seem like a reasonable price to pay (beyond the financial one) to have your work in this unique sketchbook environment. Here I should admit that several years ago I bought a sketchbook from the project fully intending to submit it, but I never have. It languishes in a drawer next to the desk among a pile of old art materials. The librarian told me it was not too late to finish it and send it in. Maybe I still will.<br />
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<a href="https://brooklynartlibrary.org/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Brooklyn Art Library</a><i> is at 28 Frost Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA. It's worth a visit.</i><br />
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<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-38949115884918725082020-02-08T14:56:00.003+00:002020-02-08T15:00:51.152+00:00Pictures at an exhibition <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There are times while visiting an exhibition when the temptation to draw what is on display becomes too great. As well as making me look at works much more closely than perhaps I would otherwise, drawing exhibits in the sketchbook is a way of taking some of the experience home, an experience that can perhaps dissipate too quickly otherwise. Sifting through my books I realise that I have quite a few of this kind of drawing, although some are inevitably more successful than others.<br />
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This was brought into stark relief when we visited the Bridget Riley show at the Hayward Gallery recently: her clinical lines and optical effects and my organic ink swipes don't really work well together. My drawing of her massive Composition with Circles 4, 2004 (above), for instance, lost everything of her original rhythmical arrangement, resembling little more than an array of cack-handed circular tea cup stains, but the process of making it made me look closely at her work's structure – or at least a part of it. It's a process that makes you ask questions about a work, spend time with it, and stops the eye just gliding past. Sometimes it's about more than just the drawing.<br />
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I've included some other drawings of works I've encountered at recent exhibitions:<br />
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Phyllida Barlow's untitled: blocksonstilts, 2018-19 at the Royal Academy in May 2019 (top image),<br />
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Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at the Royal Academy's courtyard in November 2018,<br />
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and Kader Attia's Untitled (Ghardaïa), 2009 (above), and Monica Sosnowska's Pavilion, 2016 (below), both at Tate Modern's Living Cities display in January 2020.<br />
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There are more of my drawings on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.<br />
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<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34845174.post-58148843992440655192019-12-20T07:00:00.001+00:002019-12-20T07:00:55.468+00:00Skaters at the Natural History Museum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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London's Urban Sketchers group met at the Natural History Museum last weekend. The conversations and support from the people who go is always more important to me than the actual act of drawing on the day. I spent a bit of time outside the museum drawing people having a good time on the ice rink, and I offer that page from my sketchbook to you here with whatever season's greeting is appropriate to you. Here's to 2020.<br />
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There's more information about <a href="https://urbansketchers-london.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">London's Urban Sketchers here</a>, and you can see more of my drawings on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jameshobbsart/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.<br />
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<br />James Hobbshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01751173890194690530noreply@blogger.com0