Call me simple minded but I thought that Hotel Chocolat was a small specialist retailer – having had a coffee at their Northants factory I realise how wrong I was. Now this isn’t Cadbury world but had an enjoyable vibe – well really nice chocolate helps but it was worth the short drive down the M1.
So what is the connection between the two images? Why they are next to the M1 of course.
If you have Disney+ then I’m sure you are fully aware that Renegade Nell has just been released. If you haven’t started watching it then I would suggest you do. It is quite a swashbuckling romp with Sally Wainwright’s usual edge riding underneath the surface. However, and I know this is going to upset some people, the real power in the series is Louisa Harland along with a series of other great female actors. To top it all off there is a colour blind casting.
I am enjoying it and should you watch it I hope you will to.
Not sure why but I’m on a bit of a graphic art trip at the moment.
Milton Keynes is the one place in Britain that I just don’t get on with. For those of you who don’t know Milton Keynes is a new city planned and built from scratch since the late 1960s. As a result of this it is very very regular having none of those features that come with a couple of hundred years of use. This makes the place seem soulless which I think it is. However, the villages that came together are far from soulless. One of them, Stony Stratford, was a famous stop on the road to Chester in the medieval period. It is also where the origin of the phrase ‘cock and bull story’ comes from. Perhaps in several hundred years time a future me might look at Milton keynes and think what a wonderful place. Current me doesn’t.
With all that said the reason we were in Milton Keynes was to see the Saul Leiter exhibition at the gallery, which is one of the better galleries (I know it doesn’t make sense – welcome to my life or I guess my head!). The exhibition was great if a little underwhelming. Leiter would appear to have been a jobbing fashion photographer who worked for many of the major fashion magazines. The exhibition however was not of this work but rather his person photographs captured in and around where he lived in New York city. I love this period of photography, what I call Life Magazine New York and there were some great examples in the exhibition. When ever I see works from this period the opening few moments of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue echoes around my head. This happened yesterday.
Yet at the end that, despite his reputation, I didn’t feel I had seen anything groundbreaking. Shame but there you are.
Ove lunch I found a mysterious Red Door – strange or bad planning? You decide.
I, like many other people out there, have cut the cord. In the US, where I believe the phrase comes from, it means no longer having cable TV plumbed, (can you plumb a cable?) into your home. For me it is a little more complicated as I have fibre optic cable bringing the internet to my home and it is along this conduit I can consume TV through individual apps. My TV consumption is internet based not a signal transmitted from Waltham or Sutton Coldfield. I have access to countless programmes and films yet what do I do a lot of the time in the evening to relax? I sketch little portraits. I never said I was logical.
I had a very depressing conversation the other day after enjoying the excellent Saad Qureshi exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery at the University of Nottingham. There is a better than even chance that within the next 6 months or even less that this will be only major gallery left in Nottingham as all the others will have been closed due to the city of Nottingham council running out of money. Now I am sure that there have been any number of bad and costly decisions made by the council over the past 14 years that might have contributed to this lack of cash. However, I am equally sure that the cost of these decisions is only a small percentage of the cash that has been striped from the council due to the austerity measures taken by central government over the same time.
Now I have travelled all across England over the last few years and there is one thing that hits you again and again. The place is falling to bits and this is, in part, because the local council has no money. I only mention this because we are about to go through the depressing charade of the Conservative government cutting a few pennies off of tax or national insurance whilst knowing that the country cannot afford the cuts. Is the country a better place now than it was in 2012? I think not and the evidence is all around…and don’t get me started on Liz Truss!
Some days it is just great to be alive. I know the world at the moment appears to be going to hell but this afternoon travelling along the Gartree Road over the hills of Leicestershire was a moment of peace and solace. I know we have an awful lot of problems that need to be sorted out but we have so much to be grateful for. Britain isn’t a bad place to live.
In case you are interested the Gartree has long since disappeared but the Gartree Road still cuts a straightish line through this part of the Leicestershire countryside…not bad for a road that is nearly 2000 years old.
I am drawing and drawing and drawing at the moment. Few photos though. February, for many reasons is turning into a funny old month!
I made these images whilst listening to the Three Body Problem audiobook yesterday. I have no idea why but they all seemed to make some sense at the time of their creation.
This morning whilst messing around on Photoshop with image one I made this…again listening to The Three Body Problem.
I do sometimes wonder what life means?
Yesterday I downloaded the audiobook version of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin and spent most of the day listening intently. So far so good but it does appear to suffer from a problem I’ve noticed in many long novels, yes I’m thinking about the A Song of Ice and Fire series of books but they are far from alone, it does seem to dwell on details that at the moment don’t appear to drive the story forward. Perhaps at the end I’ll think differently?
It will be interesting to see just what a hatch job Benioff and Weiss do on the forthcoming Netflix series. Here’s hoping for the best.
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