Pub?

Pub. It has to be one of the best three letter words in the English language, closely followed by Sex, and occasionally in that order. It's such a beautiful day today that I've spent the afternoon in front of a computer, writing long and important emails and looking out of the window at the clear blue sky, listening to the sounds of the seagulls, swifts and some bloke who thinks we all want to listen to him wailing along to his guitar. All of which makes me want to be in a pub garden, drinking pints of shandy and eating crisps. And so I'm sat here briefly blogging...

This is from the garden of the Red Lion in Swanage, drawn in chalk on the wall in the kids play area. We have 10 pubs, I think, and The Red Lion is one my favourites, along with The Black Swan, The Anchor in the winter, The Ship when I want loud music, and the others when my friends are in those... This picture makes me think of hot summer afternoons when a long drink is in order before a few pints of ale... here's the Red on a map.

Where is he from, Uranus?

I watched ET with my kids on Saturday. I hadn't watched it since I was 12 and they'd never seen it before, being only 5 and 7. We all loved it, and I'd never realised what a great film it was in many more ways than I'd appreciated as a child. I'd never noticed the child-like perception of adults, where the only recognised adult is Mary, the mother, important to the children, and everyone else is seen only in part until they intrude upon the reality of Elliot and ET and impose their significance. I'd forgotten too how influential it was to me - I remembered having toys but had forgotten how it influenced my cycling style! Both my boys want to do jumps like on ET now. I'd also forgotten the use of the phrase 'penis breath' which I hope to hear my kids using real soon...

I wanted to write about this as it reminded me that I had an 'alien' love landscape picture to put up here - I'm sure I've seen this style of street art in a book before, but that was a book about Berlin and this was taken in Barcelona. It's a lovely textural piece, cut from flock wallpaper and stuck on the smooth metal side of a news-stand. It was on La Rambla, probably the busiest street in the city - amazing that somebody had the time to get this stuck up here without getting caught.

I found it after eating at a vegan cafe around the corner and I was feeling really positive about the memory. It's been spoilt now because as I type I have the news on and there are reports about a baby deer being stamped to death by some teenage boys in Upton Country Park in Poole, too close to Swanage. No doubt they were high on KFC and Maccy-D and too meated up to have any empathy left for something helpless on the ground. Really depressing. No more depressing that the millions of animals that will be killed today in the name of food, but really depressing nonetheless.

Sun, Sea & Sagrada Familia

Was it last year I went to wet Wales, sunny Spain and New York too? Seems like another lifetime, though my carbon guilt hasn't faded. For the past few weeks Vick and I have been discussing holidays, checking cheap flights from Bournemouth (not too far to drive, so better for the environment!) and then deciding to either stay in this country this year or play it by ear if the summer's as bad as the last two.

We've been spoilt by the experience of foreign travel and now we expect so much from a trip away. We crave the exotic, the unfamiliar language, the daily joy of finding vegan food where we'd least expect it, and the warmth - warm air, warm sea. Our experiences of travelling in the UK have been generally good too, but listen - we live in a seaside resort. It doesn't get better than this! Actually, it does, but you get my drift, I'm sure. We live with the sea on our doorstep, and it's wonderful, but we do feel the urge every so often (and as often as possible) to go abroad. This year, France may beckon, travelling by car. We'll see...

This picture is one that I absolutely love. Taken at La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the astonishing cathedral designed by Gaudi and still under construction - absolutely breathtaking within and without and certainly worth the wait to ascend the towers. I was amazed to find at the base of the lift, almost as you exit the building, a wall of graffiti, all hearts and names. I don't know whether the guards are just slack at guarding or whether they accept that visitors have a desire to leave their name on a wall and they'd prefer it to be all in one place, but the hearts at least are all drawn or scratched in haste so perhaps all the work is seruptitious. The accompanying photograph is a detail of the large brass doors nearby. The doors feature polished parts which are representative of aspects of Christian faith, though I'm not entirely certain who or what this face represents as it glows amidst the dark tarnished brass. It looks to me like the face of an angel.

The Sagrada Familia is here, and if you've never been, devote a day to it. Not sure of the most carbon friendly way to visit, but if you're feeling flush, a train down through France would be nice...

And so it begins

Purbeck Art Week begins today. Lots of hard work to get ready. Imagine if I ever did a major national show! Hope people like my show...

This picture is from Swanage, recently. I like this one, I like the sunlight on the tarmac and the tiny blue flower. Vick doesn't. Ho hum. One of my favourite things is reflected sunlight on tarmac, and this, though direct light and dappled, is close to that.

It was taken here.

Art Week, Hurtling Towards Me

Every year I tell myself that I'll be ready early for Dorset / Purbeck Art Week and every year I find myself in a crazy rush the week before. This is the week before and I'm now in a crazy rush, sitting here putting way too many £££s worth of ink on lovely lovely paper that costs more than I like to think about and I know that if I want I could be sat here doing this til midnight... and you never really know if it's worth it until the Art Week is over. Even then sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

However. I know why I do it. If I didn't I'd have less incentive to get my work together and to a point nearing finished. This is a never-ending project and I'm hopeless without a deadline, so the imposition of a deadline makes me get things done. And every year since I started this thing I find myself meeting strange and interesting people who express a fascination with what I'm doing. Hence the 'strange'! But that makes it more than worthwhile. It makes it wonderful, and it makes me keep going.

This is a heart found at Studland, a few miles from here. Being a local picture it stands a chance of selling during Purbeck Art Week! I don't do these pictures necessarilly to sell of course - I'd have given up a long time ago if that was the case. I do them because that's what I do, and each picture tells a little story about the place it was in or the person who put it there. Then when they're put together in a book, they tell a story about Love and about People In Love and about the world we live in, with all its love and hate and anger and warmth and how we cope with that as a species. So I really hope to sell some books, as there's an awful lot to learn in there!

This heart at Studland is here.

The Density of Cities

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend on a Transition Training course - learning how to help create a town that is ready for the world after the Age of Cheap Oil. Thinking globally and acting locally, how will we avoid the worst of climate change, and what will we do when we can't afford the energy we use day-to-day today because the price of oil is inevatably going to rise and everything we do relies upon it? The course assumed an acceptance amongst participants that change was necessary and was designed to enable us to spread the word, expand our local groups and to understand a lot more about the psychology of change, and of the psychology of resistance to change, as resistance is surely what we will meet a lot along the way.

I should also add that the course was amazing. This was an incredibly inspiring weekend - to meet people from all over Dorset who are working towards sustainable communities at all levels fills me with hope. I would urge anyone with an interest in a positive, sustainable future to make contact with their local Transition group and to add their skills and dreams to the mix.

The Transition Network website might help if you want to know more about what I'm on about.

I didn't mention my New York trip last year... I felt too guilty about the carbon footprint of the trip. I did think, however, about the differences in community resilience between a village, a town, and a big city. Villages are reliant on the car for survival and nowadays lack the necessary facilities for everyday living, though they do have land, required if we are to grow food for our own communities. Towns can often be reliant on a larger neighbour (Swanage lacks facilities because our County Council assumes that we will travel to Wareham or to Poole to reach them), but they have more potential to regain resilience, to grow food on surrounding land and so to be sustainable environmentally and as a community. Big cities can do this too - many cities are a collection of towns and villages that have merged together to become a larger entity, but they may lack the green space they'd need if they were to be self supporting.

The Transition Handbook has an interesting quote about New York. New Yorkers have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the USA because of the way they live within a dense city, so in a sense they are getting something right. In a recent pwer outage, however, the structures the city dwellers were dependent on began to crumble, however - without energy based on fossil fuels the modern city cannot function. New york does have a Transition movement though - it'll be great to see how they get along. Maybe next time I go, which I hope will be soon, I'll travel there by boat and pay the Transition people a visit ... wouldn't that be nice!

This picture, taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, shows the density of the city and the lack of anything natural. It's an exageration of course, the whole city doesn't look like this, but it paints a picture of an artificial space that we need to work back from towards sustainability.

Happy St George's Day!

I took this this afternoon in Bridport, and it seemed so terribly, terribly English that I thought I'd offer it as a St George's gift to you all! Only the English could come up with a pet shop window display as oddly sweet as this is, and Bridport is a wonderfully English market town itself - the heart was here, just opposite the pet shop on the wall outside the gents'.

I was over there after visiting the very English seaside town of Lyme Regis to drop some work in at the Blue Lias gallery - actually I took the work over to show the chap there and he liked it so took some straight away, which was great. It's a really lovely gallery right in the centre of town, so if you ever need an excuse to visit Lyme, it's a good reason to go!

I'm heading downstairs now for a pint of English Ale, and I may even treat myself to the traditional English bag of crisps in front of the telly. We show St Patrick how to celebrate!