A Ford Cortina for Florian Afflerbach

I've had my eye on this 1970 Ford Cortina, which is parked outside a house around the corner, for a while since I heard the dreadful news about Florian Afflerbach. Florian was a German architect involved with the Urban Sketchers movement who was killed in a traffic accident in May aged 35. He made sensitive pencil and watercolour works of cars, among other things. A tribute to him can be found on the Urban Sketchers blog. There's going to be an exhibition of car drawings by Urban Sketchers around the world as a tribute to him at next week's USk symposium in Manchester, and I'm taking this one.

I never met Florian, and didn't know him, but I feel that I got a bit closer to him by sitting on the kerb to draw this. My parents had a Cortina in the 1970s, and just to look closely at this crumbling example took me back. I admire Florian's drawings even more now too; this doesn't look anything like a Ford Cortina.

The house of the Brexiteer

Boris Johnson's house in Islington is on one of my regular cycle routes into the city, and in the brutal political atmosphere of the past few weeks since the dismal vote to leave the European Union, it had often appeared as a backdrop on the news, surrounded by the media, as its Eurosceptic occupant set about his business. By the time I drew it, the circus had moved on, and a last few cameras were disappearing into the back of a van.
Johnson, having betrayed Cameron, was in turn stabbed in the back by his mate Gove, who was stabbed in the front by practically every other Conservative MP, leaving the field open, eventually, for Theresa May to become prime minister. It's been a turbulent time in UK politics, in which all the leading Leave campaigners, having got their way, have left the field.
This is all true as I write, but could be out of date by the end of the day.