Sketch Crawl : Sunniside, Sunderland.

West Sunniside, Sunderland
(Markers in A4 sketchbook)

This was the first outing for the newly renamed Urban Sketchers Tyne & Wear (Sketch Crawl North East, as was).

Drawing in Sunderland when there's a scheduled football match between Glasgow Celtic and the Black Cats makes for an interesting experience. Coming into Sunderland on the Metro from Gateshead, Richard, Pat and I watched as helpful fans and Metro personnel scooped up a legless Celtic supporter from the platform at the Stadium of Light. Getting drunk that early would certainly mean he'd miss the game altogether, but maybe he didn't have a ticket for the ground. Football is a mysterious game.

Mike led us from Sunderland Metro Station to the Sunniside area, where a bit of regeneration seems to be going on. There's a landscaped sitting area and a bit of public sculpture which didn't immediately attract me, so I started to explore the streets beyond. Straight away I ran into hordes of shambling Celtic fans, bottles and cans in their hands and incomprehensible chants on their lips. I felt a little as if I'd fallen into The Walking Dead tv series and there were bands of Walkers everywhere.

Retreating back to the Sunniside area, I eventually settled down on a wall and drew the first sketch, an interestingly elaborate building with a side turret. It turned out later that just about everyone else had drawn it too, but I couldn't see them beyond the bushes I was sitting next to.

You might notice the written sound effects I recorded on the drawing - seagulls calling, police sirens wailing not very far away and some women in a nearby building cursing, swearing and clashing pots and pans about. The sounds of the city!

I'm not too pleased with this drawing. I started to indicate the shadow on the top of the turret before realising that the same shadow extended down the whole face of the building, so I was just as happy to stop when the others decided to move on.

Elephant Tea Rooms
(0.8 marker in A4 sketchbook)

On the corner of Fawcett St and High St West is a fantastical building showing "a blend of high Victorian Hindu Gothic and Venetian Gothic styles." We all agreed it was an impossible draw, then settled down in the pavement cafe opposite and began to draw it. It soon becomes obvious, when drawing a building like this, that it's a matter of finding the patterns, then repeating them without worrying about there being the right number of elements. I was quite surprised at how much I was able to get done that way.

Next time : The Old Low Light, North Shields, 12 August.

My Dad's Diary : Wed 1st January 1947

Dad used to go to Redheugh Park to see Gateshead AFC play. They were still in the Football League then.

"Saw Gateshead v. Hull. Won 1-0.

Spent night at Mother's.

NATIONALISATION OF MINES."

St James's from Windmill Hills

St James's from Windmill Hills (Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 ins approx.)

It's been a disorganised few days, with only small bits of painting done. All bits that needed doing but which weren't worth posting here. The three pictures I was working on at the Club were brought home last week and all are nearing completion. This one I finished today. The struts on the football stadium were, as I expected, a pain to do, but they're done now and I've made a promise to myself to leave the subject of St James's alone for a long time.

The rain it raineth ev'ry day....

A Yellow Raincoat (Oil on canvas 36 x 36 ins)

The photograph has done some odd things to the colours of this painting, but it seemed appropriate. Not only is the underpass pictured near the Town Moor, but it has, rather obviously, a raincoat in it.

In fact, the rain lashed down all day on Thursday. It got to the point where I emailed Doctor Pam and pointed out the likelihood of the Hoppings being washed out. Since she's been waiting for 20 years to come up and visit the Hoppings, you can see that the purpose of her trip might be defeated.

However, she rang back and said that the car was already loaded so she might as well come.

In a sense this reminded me of the time I had what was thought to be a broken bone in my foot. (In these days of the Grand Limp, a memory ever on my mind.) They put a plaster cast on my foot, right up to my knee. Then they checked their X-rays again and found I didn't have a broken bone in my foot, just a hairline fracture.

"Still, since you've got the cast on, you might as well keep it for a month," said the doctor, smiling beatifically. Waste not, want not. A motto that made the NHS what it is today...

By the time Doctor Pam arrived, the rain had stopped. So provided there is a fiercely hot Equatorial sun today, baking the Town Moor mud dry, and the Council workmen haven't spent all night drowning their sorrows over England's Darkest Hour in Euro 2004, but labour like labouring has come into fashion and get the wood chips down on what's left of the puddles, all will be well.

All the Fun of the Fair

Untitled - detail (Oil on board)

Maybe walking for two hours on a sore foot wasn't a good idea, but, hey, the Hoppings are in town!

The largest travelling funfair in Europe, the Hoppings comes to Newcastle's Town Moor for a week at the end of June every year. As a child, it was always something I looked forward to with huge anticipation and the visits there, especially at night, were filled with excitement and wonder.

I still remember the time my parents steered me clear of any stall where I might have won a goldfish. Our last goldfish had recently died and they didn't want another. He'd lived on for years after killing off all other competitors in the tank and I think they were glad to see the back of him. Anyway, just as we were leaving the Moor, their attention was diverted just long enough for a lovely couple to come up to me and say, "Here, sonny, would you like this goldfish?" That one lived even longer than the previous one.

The days of giving away goldfish are gone, of course, and it's clear that most of the tat given away now comes from pretty much the same warehouse. Most of it made in China, I should imagine.

I met the Frootbat beside the bandstand in the Exhibition Park at about 3.30 and we set off up to the Moor. There's always a sense of bewilderment, I find, when I get to the Hoppings. A sort of "Where do I start?" This is compounded by the fact that the Hoppings now grows appreciably year by year. For years it consisted of two long rows but these have increased to four.

The answer to where to start is actually the same every year. Walk up the first row to the top, walk down the next, up the next and so on. And despite the increased entertainment, it's always laid out more or less the same every year.

First of all, there are the fortune tellers - the innumerable daughters of the one and only, the original Gypsy Rose Lee and the occasional Gypsy Rose Higginbotham. They were always an attraction to young women and I guess it's still the same now. Why is it young men never want to know how their lives will turn out, I wonder?

During the afternoon, of course, there's not a lot of activity, and the lady clairvoyants, evidently unable to tell when their next punter will turn up, sit about in the sunshine outside their caravans, trying to catch an eye.

Sunshine! There's an innovation of recent years. For some reason (connected perhaps with the Fair's origins in the Temperance movement) the week of the Hoppings always coincided with the most torrential downpours imaginable. Wellies were always de rigeur when I was a kid, and at least one visit was a complete washout.

But global warming seems to have brought about a change in the fortunes of the showmen. OK, so it rained once or twice this week, but the ground was still firm and only the occasional slough of bark-covered water lay here and there to trap the unwary. But then if you're daft enough to not watch where you're going, you're just as likely to walk into a mess of discarded noodles, a heap of fallen chips or a slippery ice cream cornet. All part of the fun.

After the fortune tellers, there are rows of hoopla stalls, hook-a-duck stalls, penny arcades, darts stalls and shooting galleries and even a few of the old lucky number stalls (where you pick a straw and push out the ticket from inside).

Rounding the top of the Moor, you start to come down the row of sideshows. In my youth there were real sideshows - boxing booths, ghastly old women doing "artistic tableaux" to the strains of "The Swan" by Saint-Saens, dwarfs and three legged sheep and halls of mirrors.

The crooked mirrors still survive as part of the Houses of Fun - those places where the floor shakes back and forth and blasts of air blow up girls' skirts. Some things never change, though the number of girls in skirts has, I suppose.

Many of the sideshows now are developments of two basic entertainments. The Ghost Train in various forms still seems to pack 'em in and people still come out looking slightly breathless and rearranging their clothing. The Rotor seems to have made a big comeback, although the original, which was doing no business the last few times I saw it there, has gone. But there are lots of new ones declaring their "sticky walls." The Rotor, in case you don't know it, is the ride where you go into a room which slowly spins, then picks up speed until you're stuck to the wall....and then the floor drops away.

Down the middle of the ground are the big rides. Waltzers, dodgems, helter-skelters and one or two old fashioned merry-go-rounds with properly painted horses. I even saw a set of shuggy boats for the kids. But mostly the really big bits of technology have taken centre stage here. There's a colossal Big Wheel, the biggest I can remember at the Hoppings. How the hell do they transport such a thing? There are a surprising number of people prepared to pay big money to get strapped into a metal ball and then get flung heavenward by two massive bungy-ropes.

So how many of these potentially suicidal rides do you suppose the Frootbat and I went on? Absolutely correct. None. We went to see the fun, not take part in it. I guess the showmen could tell that, because with one exception, none of them tried to rope us in. The exception was a guy who was either very desperate or simply the world's worst judge of character.

"Come on lads," he yelled," kick a football through the goal!"

The Frootbat! And me! Kick a football!!!

Tales of Mum

It's always interesting visiting my old mum. I get to catch up on all the things I've been doing of which I'd otherwise be totally unaware.

The £1m she told me about last time has had another half million added to it. This is compensation for my having to bear the indignity of being wrapped in chains and having all my clothes torn each time I go to visit her. Luckily, all of this money is in a bank and two signatures are required to get at it - hers and mine. One benefit of this is that Tony Blair has abandoned his attempt to marry my mum, because he cannot get his hands on the loot, and has married someone else.

I guess I should also find myself in the Births, Deaths and Marriages column, because I'm now married with a baby. This came as something of a surprise to me. It will come as an even greater surprise to Patsy123, whose baby it is, and who is now going by the name of Lulu.

It was my mum's turn to be surprised to learn how improbable this is, due to our both being 57. She thought we were only 40.

As I was leaving, one of the nurses asked, "Did you see the football?"

I shook my head.

"Worra load of rubbish!" she said. "They couldn't play football in my front passage!!"

She said nothing of any forthcoming fixtures in her back passage, and I didn't ask.

Football match? What football match?

Jackie Plays On (oil on canvas, 36 x 72 ins)

Living as I do in a constant state of football apathy, I might be excused for not noticing that there's some kind of football event about to happen. But even I can't miss the madly flapping flags of St George attached to every car going by, and the tv trailer overkill.

So, OK, I know there's some kind of footie tournament about to addle the brains of much of the population (I was about to say "male population", but women are so keen to be laddish now). I won't offer my Henman-inspired scepticism about the likely outcome (largely because I don't know what I'm talking about and prefer to hold my counsel on such occasions).

Instead, as my part in the festivities, I offer my painting of the statue of Jackie Milburn.