I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of a goods train hurtling through the bedroom, the bed shook and I slid around on the sheets like an egg in oil, I thought it must be his lordship having a bad dream, but it wasn’t, he was sound asleep. The bed shook again and I heard the sound of the Earth beneath the house, it wailed deep below the surface as if in pain, and again the bed shook, and then the wailing stopped. I was still only half awake and turned over, pulled the sheets over my head and calmly fell back to sleep. I missed the 4am aftershock and had by the time I rose forgotten the quake. Then I saw on the news a man with a chimney in his garden and I remembered. So if you ask me what I had for my birthday I guess the truth is I had an Earthquake.

Last night I stood on the stage at The Globe Theatre, a slight breeze blowing down out of the night sky I saw the faces of the audience in my mind, roudy, laughing, cheering and leaning over the balconies, bright and alive from a time that was so real in this place that I could really feel their presence. I was extremely lucky to have this opportunity, to walk the boards, to feel my racing heart and my deluded desire to bellow Shakespearian monologues was bearly controllable, infact some 15 hours later still rising and falling inside me wishing I was there again and this time all hell would be loose about me. Yeh right!

In the village of Braunston near Rutland I sat and sketched a small chapel that is in the process of being converted in to home.

Sitting in the coffee shop looking out again.

Sometimes strange things happen and this photo was intended to capture the odd light that sat sulphurus on the common last Tuesday. The deep orange glow of the sunset was mesmerising, golden red filtering through a heavy wet mist, I stopped alongside a field that was shrouded in this early evening miasma, the increasingly thickening vapour expanding and engulfing the Fen. I expected to capture some faint sense of the colour and the unnerving density but didn’t imagine anything so hauntingly strange as I downloaded. What are the perfectly spherical beads of light? Some may say orbs, the ghostly dwellers of Fenland waterways, the many who perished in the harsh landscape whilst trying to eek out a life. Others may suggest fog on the lens or the bounce of the flash on the mist. I don’t know the image is mystery to me.

Travelling north of Cambridgeshire into Norfolk at sunrise in heavy mist is an unearthly experience. I did this last week in search of a small garage into which my car had been booked to repair a suspension spring, yet more cash seeping out of the bank and into the mits of others. In this case I wasn’t too upset as the garage wasn’t brand lead, it was a proper old style ramshackled building with an inspection pit half filled with oil, a sort of engineers jacuzzi I guess. The journey to the garage was alongside the weaving river, fortunately the bank to the river sat higher than I did in the car and so my recurrent nightmare senario of plunging into the icey Winter waters was safely tucked away in my head. The landscape lay pale and bright, washed of almost all its colour and in soft focus like an aging Hollywood great, a sort of geographical Lana Turner. The village of Southery straddles the A10 just north of Brandon Creek, it is an eclectic mix of old and new but most definately bound into the face of the Fens. Some houses cling to the pancake flat surface with the same grim determination that a stranded climber might grip the vertical face of an extra slippery cliff, sinking like the Titanic deep into the black soil, cracking and twisting under the stain, they are beautiful and sad. Amoungst this slipping and sliding, resting peacefully and soundly, sit others proud and errect, unmoved in the rising and falling of the Fen, holding their breath and whispering there but for the grace of God. In this allegorical landscape there are truths to be found, we all, to some extend cling grimly to our own cliff face, breath held, eyes tightly shut hoping that we manage to hold on. I guess like the houses we have to ask why? What are we clinging to so tightly? and what, if we let go would happen?

…visit WSPA and make a difference

Rutland is small but beautifully formed. Sitting to the left of the A1 northbound it is an undulating landscape peppered with lovely stone villages that have an excitingly generous amount of pubs, cafes and walks. Particularly pleasent in February when the sky is blue and the sun sufficiently warm that sitting outside is easy with a pint in your hand and in my case a sketchbook begging to be filled.

There was a beautiful sunset coming home yesterday, although I was steaming my way through ‘On Chisel Beach’ I was momentarily distracted and took this photo from the train.

Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida
Order: Ericales
Family: Primulaceae
Genus: Primula
Species: P. veris