Boxing Day

Had to get out for a run in order to fit in more food later! Running across Ranmore the sun came through the dark clouds above Dorking and lit up one field and part of the vinyard at Denbies. The sun really beamned down through the cloud. I took a reference photo but of course this sport of thing is impossible to photograph!

Holly

I picked this on Bookham Commons. Its a very good year for berries, apparently because it has been so very wet. Yes, a surprise for those not from the UK, we do degrees of wetness and this Autumn has been extreme!

Just back from Ghana where I sketched the sun setting over the Fort at Elimina. It was a challenge because it was such a striking sight, but I caught something of it. I wish I had got my horizon a little straighter though!

A page from my journal about anniversaries. How things never stay the same, for example these tendrils of new growth over a log pile on Bookham Commons. I first drew these logs when they were freshly felled a year ago.

This is a picture I have made to use on a PowerPoint slide. It shows a mutant cocoa bush with three stems, and a common root and leaf system. It all has a meaning! I will use it in Ghana in a couple of weeks time.

The walk at Polesden Lacey is an elegant promenade with yew hedges that allowed the upper classes to walk 'in' the country side and enjoy the view whilst not leaving the formal gardens. Now its ususally busy with pensioners, families with young chilren in varying states of frsutration and me, cutting through on a run. I have done several versions of this view, and so far this is is my favourite.

Drawn from memory, this helmet with crown and goat in Leatherhead Parish Church is placed to one side of the aisle, but its high position and forbidding look seems to be sending some kind of grim warning to those gathered below. The Church is hundreds of years old, perhaps nearly a millenium, and I assume it has some historical meaning. It would fit well in a Dan Brown novel, but I prefer to think of it as a reminder from the local feudal Lord that he owns our bodies if not our souls....even if we may think we live in a town in the 21st century busy with office workers looking for a quick sandwich!