Feeling small?

Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

Travelling bear

This bear was not dangerous, just well travelled. Our lad brought him home from school for the week so we could show him the sights. His diary recorded his far flung visits to hot climes and Disneyland, but we couldn't compete with that. Instead we took him for a walk with the dog and let him rest a while on our Chesterfield.

'It's not so much a matter of solving the problems as learning to live through them in the grace which God provides.'

- David Prior

Love

This piece is so familiar that it sounds like a cliche and the words trickle past me like rain on a window, I hardly notice them. Then again there's too much in these short sentences to take in. Wedding couples often pick them for their big day.

Just recently they shot into my head and I reread them:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

As a yard stick it makes me feel like a midget; petty and small minded. But, like my little boy's school coat, I will try, with time and God's grace, to grow into it.

'We lose what we try to keep; we gain what we give away...whatever God gives is for passing on.'

- David Prior

On my mind

OK, so I saw a film 'Keeping Mum' and enjoyed it. Left with the words of Rowan Atkinson on my mind," I'm mysterious, folks... ...live with it!" A paraphrase of Isaiah, "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord." And so it is on my mind.

Giraffes

My wife's favourite animal is the giraffe. Because of her interests I would have thought it was the horse, but they do have similarities. Have you ever watched a giraffe walk? The most incredible and surprising thing I've ever seen; they seem to float along and, by coincidence, they just happen to be moving their legs very slowly, as if in a dream, at the same time. It's like they can slow down time all around them. Magical. We've visited Marwell Zoo in Hampshire a few times and spent most of it hanging out with the giraffes. They're a good crowd even if they do look down on you a bit.

If you'd like to see more of them, visit: http://www.marwell.org.uk/interactive_zone/webcams.asp



Old sketch

This is what I was drawing some eighteen years ago. Oh, those legs!!

Not my wife

This is not my wife - it's not any body's wife, of course. My wife does not dress like this and never did (as far as I know) although she might be persuaded for a fancy dress party. Not that I expressly want her to dress like this; I didn't draw this as my ideal girl, no, I drew this just for fun and it was. I did tag it to a verse about not judging from a series of verse posters. I used to feel that when I wore my leather jacket I got disapproving stares for certain sections of society. I later painted 'Jesus is Life' on the back of my jacket and got even more stares from those poor car drivers stuck in traffic while I overtook them on my Yamaha RD350.

...one cat, one life.

Our dear, departed cat - I miss him still. He was a very good mouser, ratter, even rabbiter! Have you ever watched a cat eat a rabbit? They start at the nose and finish at the tail - logical I suppose. I've noticed, though, since he has been absent the mice and the rats seem to have left. No trails across the garden, little holes now bunged up with a years worth of dirt and leaves. I wonder if it was not so much a little plague of rodents we had as a little cat's larder that was frequently restocked. Even so, he was such a good lad that I'd forgive him all his misdemeanours. And every now and then I see a small black shadow out of the corner of my eye and something in my head says, 'There he is. What's he brought in now', and I look and he's gone.

Animated

This is a short (very) animation, featuring my wife as I imagined her as a little girl. Imagination is a wonderful thing; it lets you have all sorts of things, airbrushed reality. Some people even live in it, they spend all their time watching television, playing computer games and reading about celebrities. But if you look hard you can see the airbrushing makes it dull, however reality is far more beautiful and interesting in all is lopsided, pimpled asymmetry.

The icon

This illustration I did for the Sheepdip for one Christmas. More recently it was used for the cover of the service book at our parish church. It is true that I based Mary's face on my wife yet I didn't think it looked much like her, however, more than one person at church commented they knew that face. I guess there is something iconic about my wife!

A damp day in Sussex

Rain fell, the dog got wet, I got wet, and I took to thinking.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

- Rudyard Kipling

It's only when we look back that we can see 'afterwards' how far we've come and how much we've endured. In fact, Hebrews 12 attributes the tough times in life as the Lord's loving discipline, and the key to our endurance as humbly accepting his love in growing us to maturity.

- Steve Wickham

All the way through wind and rain…

Hand in hand, across the land, we’ll walk the road together.

- Kate Rusby

Thoughts are like raindrops; they soak you through if you stay in them too long, until you shiver from the cold.

- Steve Vaughan-Turner

I got very wet today.



The Kayak Kid

One of the things I enjoyed so much on our visits to Saint Marcel du Perigord was the kayaking down the Dordogne. Our lad had a great time telling us to paddle faster, spotting birds of prey and sapphire coloured dragonflies, threatening to ram other river travellers and intermittently splashing us via his paddle. The views were fantastic - bridges, towns, cliffs and castles. 

There is a river near where we live but it's not the same...

Guard what has been entrusted to your care.

An eventful day

An interesting day for this Pointer included devouring my danish pastry when I wasn't looking and rescuing a rabbit from the clutches of a sparrowhawk by interrupting the kill at the eleventh hour (actually it was more like half past twelve, lunchtime).

You are what you eat and she ate my danish!



Living without answers...

Following on from the last blog, my Great, Great, Great Grandfather was buried at St George's Church, West Grinstead where he lived most of his life. Born in 1777 and raised in neighbouring Ashurst, he married in Shipley then lived in West Grinstead. Although a humble agricultural labourer, he somehow manage to raise ten children to adulthood, at a time when most labourers were heading to find work in towns. His eldest son found employment with Queen Victoria's Equerry, another son was gardener to the Rathbone family of Liverpool and my own Great, Great Grandfather was part of Queen Victoria's own palace staff. I think Richard Turner may have been employed on the West Grinstead Park estate by Sir Charles Merrik Burrell, 3rd Bart, to achieve what he did for his children. But here's the thing, no proof. How I searched databases and books for any little clue and found no hint. I almost got a bit obessed. I found so much information about so many people I wasn't looking for. And all the hours I spent not doing something else. There's only so many times one can bang one's head against a brick wall .

When doors are locked the time has come to stop the searching and let go, and be content...

...to live without answers.

The Shipley Gang

In the heart of West Sussex lies the small village of Shipley, from a Saxon word meaning 'the place of pasture'. Within stands one of the oldest stone churches of Sussex, built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century on the sight of an earlier church. It was here that on the 10th of April 1785, James Ewens, son of Henry and Lydia, was baptised. On the 10th of October 1810 he married Hannah Nye in the same church and so began his association with his wife's father and brother and a number of others who became known as the Shipley Gang. 'Robin Hoods' of their day, they stole goods by night from landed gentry, redistributing them amongst members of their family. Times were hard; wealthy men were taking advantage of the law by putting fences around common land and selling it off, leaving the locals with no grazing pasture, firewood or autumn berries. The winters were harsh and machines were taking the work that the poor would do by hand. But the law was upheld and the Gang captured and sentenced to death. This was commuted to transportation. In 1818 James was taken, with other gang members, on the ship the General Stewart to New South Wales. Although pardoned in 1838, he remained in the locality of Sydney until his death in 1861. James left behind his wife and three children in Shipley. His two sons died in the workhouse and his wife remarried.

Since finding this out I've often wondered what James' sister Hannah thought of his behaviour. Was she part of the gang's network or was she distant and disapproving? Hannah Ewens was also married at Shipley, to Richard Turner, my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, both buried in the neighbouring parish of West Grinstead.

If I ever visit Australia again I'll make a point of going to St Peter's Church cemetery, Campbelltown, New South Wales, to pay my respects to my Great, Great, Great, Great Uncle James.

St Mary the Virgin, Shipley, Sussex.

Oh, deer

When my boy was four he entered this artwork in a competition and won. He did do it all himself, but under a great deal of verbal guidance from me. I asked him to think about what he wanted to do as a job when he is older; he said he wanted to be an artist and I said, yes, but what did he want to do for a job?

Seal pup

Yet another image of our holiday in Saint Marcel du Perigord. My excuse is that my little seal pup excelled himself at his swimming lesson today and I am so impressed with his efforts that I want to tell the world. My lad, today you were great!

'You are special because I made you, and I don't make mistakes'

-Max Lucado

My treasure

Another happy memory from our days at Le Manoir in Saint Marcel du Perigord. One mermaid and one seal pup. The irony is that I swim like a brick. As a child I attended swimming lessons a few times until the swimming instructor saw fit to push me in. I took umbrage, so as to spite her I never went back - serves her right. As an adult I now see the folly of such a decision. I see the same attitude in my own son and wonder why he can't see it is for his good, not anyone else's, that we teach him things. (If anyone can help me make sense of that, feel free.) And so it was that I started to learn to swim while in New Zealand at the age of twenty-seven, completing the job back in the UK. I can now traverse a pool without the aid of a lifeguard rescue, but I fear any kind of medal at the Olympics would be an ambition too far!

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Puppy love

Just to balance up, it's not always my wife asleep on the sofa, I'm just as guilty. However, as my wife is much prettier than I, she is, and will always be, the focus of my work.

A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day,whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.

The path

My wife told me of someone she knows who is going through a difficult time. There is an element of her trouble that struck a cord with me and my experience. When something has gone wrong in my life without warning, and an emotional truck has bounced me into the sidewalk, I try to reason myself back on my feet, solve the problem. If I can make sense of what has happened, understand why I didn't see it coming and see where the faults are then maybe I can change things and fix it. I like things to work the way they should. But if bereft of the full facts, as at times I have been, I'm left with an equation that I can't solve, that swirls around my head day and night and won't leave. It calls doubt into everything: me, them, my past, my future, scrabbling for what I missed, what I did wrong, for answers. Like the high revving of a diesel train engine while in neutral, overthinking is a constant noise in my head, robbing me of sleep, using all my energy and wearing me down. Maybe I'm blind to my faults, or maybe it's not even about me. Whichever, I have learnt from experience logic is useless when information is absent.

Then I have to put all that down and see that all I have, is all that is left - just to carry on with life.

And only when looking back over the journey made can I see that wounds need to be left alone to heal and that I've learnt to live without answers.

Sometimes there's nothing else for it but to just walk the path.

Change

If I had a pound for every time I have thought, 'I can't do that because it would change...'! Both my wife and I have worked with children with an autistic condition; we know how some of them can be. The factor of not accepting change can be quite pronounced and I have noticed that in myself. I get settled into a routine and don't notice that I'm doing it, sometimes to an extreme. I love the change in the seasons and the weather. I like to change things around at home or in the garden. Even breaking with any kind of tradition, I'm up for! And then I do the same things at the same time everyday and say, 'I do that then, so I can't do 'whatever'.' It takes my good wife to tell me I'm being a little bit autistic.

When our lad was born it cast me adrift on a sea of uncertainty; that was good for me.

If it changes your life, let it.

St Giles

There has been a church on this site since before the Doomsday book. A couple of years ago it nearly disappeared! A long story about tradition verses modern reality, spirituality verses accountancy and commonsense verses daft old landowner. It still clutches onto an existence although I fail to see how it serves. I can only assume that the God who made the whole universe is working out something there; it really isn't for me to judge.

'the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.'

A birthday surprise

A cartoon I put together for a friend's seventieth birthday, commissioned by his wife. It was his wife's idea that she should be represented as a dragon with tiara and cocktail. The picture is full of their interests and history plus a few mice - can't remember why the mice. One of the few personal commissions that I had the presence of mind to photograph before it left my hands. As I remember they were very pleased with the result. I don't remember that I was paid, I was just happy that they were happy and to let them have it.

My wallet

Since autumn 2002 I've had a photo of my beloved in my wallet.

At the time we met I was sorting though the wreckage of the end of my first marriage, wondering what was wrong with me and consigning myself to a life of solitude, when suddenly an angel walked into my life (that was my lovely here). The sketch below is from that now very torn, scratched and dog-eared photo in my wallet. Every now and then, throughout the past eight years, I've looked at this picture whenever I'm out and it's always given me a thrill - my angel. 

I looked at my wife as she came in from work today and thought - she's so much more beautiful in real life!

If you get a second chance, grab it with both hands.

Poor Christchurch, NZ

This I drew for the YHA in Christchuch when I was there in 1995. A composite of interesting architecture from the city centre, now sadly damaged. I'm not one for cities, most I can't wait to get out of, but Christchurch was an exception to that rule. My sympathies to all to live there.

Once she was only little...

It's true! She was once a helpless, tiny creature, frightened by the world. And now she's a monster who opens doors, pinches food off the table, steals socks and takes the whole sofa as soon as as I've got up.

We strive to have the things we love when we should strive to love the things we have.