Falling Sky

A Little Bit Of Belgium

Last month my good lady & I escaped the gravitational pull of Scotland and Eurostarred our merry way to Belgium for a few days.  It's a country we both love, one that's greatly underestimated, possibly for its general oddness - people know what to think of France, of Germany, of Spain, but of Belgium?  It's an altogether more intriguing place, both familiar and bizarre, a worthy subject for Jonathan Meades.

Wifey's already blogged about it all here.  We were there to a) see our lovely chums and their wee boy (two months old and an absolute hoot, despite my innate fear of children we got on quite well, particularly when discussing bubbles and their blobulous bulbous bubbulosity) and b) catch the Moomin exhibition at the Belgian Comic Strip Center.  We do love our Moomins, and since the exhibition wasn't going to cross the Channel to the UK, the mountain must come to Moomin.  Lovely exhibition it was too, really good to see the original artwork up close - Tove Jansson had a mastery of a single ink line that I can only dream of, and the imagination at work in the Moomin stories remains spellbinding.  Sadly there were no adorable sproglets singing while we were there, but you can't have it all.

 

The museum's pretty ace too, particularly when I got to meet one of my heroes who kindly agreed to a photo:

 

Awesome!

I also got a spot of sketching done on the train journey down (no great shakes) and spent over an hour drawing the Church of Sainte-Catherine, the result being at the top of this post - if you're wondering what the comment below it is about, it's got a very stark appearance, stone that appears bright white covered by what appears to be thick black soot (see Wifey's photo here).  Good fun to draw, though as with such buildings it's all too easy to get lost in details, and it'd be nice one day to return with a larger drawing surface and charcoal.

Thanks to our splendid friends we saw more of Brussels and the neighbouring area than a visiting tourist might, first through a fascinating tour by foot around part of the city discussing the history of various streets and buildings (not the obvious stuff either, thereby much more interesting) while marvelling at the inexhaustible variety of architecture, then later heading out of the city and into Wallonia.  Beautiful countryside, farming villages that still farm, lovely houses, cycle paths that gave me ideas - perfect!  A day trip up to Gent was enjoyable, though much of the city had shut down for the summer.  Still, impressive to see just how cycle-friendly such a city can be, and in turn how popular cycling was, I'd never seen so many bikes!  It was particularly good to see bikes like this being used by families, though between the road traffic, wafer thin cycle paths and speed demons who think they're in the Tour de France it's impossible to imagine doing the same in Edinburgh.  Shame.

It was a lovely wee break, and though the initial focus of the journey had been Moomins the highlight was certainly all the time we spent with our chums and their petit monsieur, especially our last evening there sat outside a local bar with a few good beers and chatting away about things for hours as day turned to night - the 'café culture' that our politicians would so dearly love to see brought over here, if only our national mindset wasn't set to alcoholic-self-annihilation.  A votre santé!

Wildlife Drawing: 02/08/2010

Back from Belgium last weekend (more on that later), I went off for the now-traditional weekly zoo sketch on Monday, hoping it would be quieter than the last time. Nope! If anything it was even busier, and though I tried to get some decent chimpanzee sketches done the amount of noise and gibbering (from the people, not the chimps) just got too much. The penguin area was only marginally better but I persisted for a bit - I'm trying to get the 'feel' of their movement right in my head so I can have a go at animating their waddly walk - and the day was close to being a write-off when I poked my head into a viewing area for the Steller's sea eagles. Much to my delight, one of the eagles was perched in full view and stayed there long enough for me to get a decent sustained sketch that made the whole visit worthwhile. It's an incredibly beautiful bird, the overlapping feathers and great wings reminiscent of samurai armour and giant robots, the beak a bright violent stab of yellow, piercing eyes glaring out of shadow. With no-one else around, such a striking subject and plenty of time to give it the attention it deserved, it was a little slice of sketching heaven.

Wildlife Drawing: 25/07/2010

  

As we're heading in the general direction of Belgium this Monday morn, I did my Edinburgh Zoo sketching on Sunday instead. This was, in retrospect, a mistake - while in principle I'm really really glad to see SO! MANY! PEOPLE! going to Edinburgh Zoo, from my own selfish viewpoint it rather got in the way of drawing. Normally I'd spend quite some time sketching the chimpanzees, but the Bonobo Trail was absolutely heaving with people, as was the sun bears area. Thankfully the penguin pool offered more space, and I suspect many families were waiting for the parade later in the afternoon, so I was able to get a couple of pages drawn there, but the noise of so many people just got off-putting after a while. Hardly surprising it would be so busy at the weekend, and it's clearly a Very Good Thing that it was, but I'll keep my sketching to weekdays in future.

Dram Tweeting

It's not every day that vials of rare whisky are delivered to the front door of Nagl Towers (more's the pity), but one such day dawned earlier this month. I've been a fan of Isle of Jura whisky since I bought a bottle of Superstition four years back (even committing it to canvas back in April '06) but never had the chance to try some of their rarer, pricier bottlings. What a treat, then, to be sent these samples of the Boutique Barrels vintage range, so named for the particular casks each whisky has matured in. There's the Bourbon XU 1999, from heavily peated Bourbon barrels, the Bourbon JO 1995, matured in 1st fill Bourbon casks, and the Sherry JI 1993 taking its flavour from old Olorosso Sherry barrels.

In the past when trying out samples of alcholic goodness, thought about them for a bit, then burbled on-and-bleedin'-on. Such wanton verbosity just doesn't cut the mustard any more, so I thought I'd capture my impressions as they happened through the enforced brevity of Twitter. Here's how it went...

Right, time to open up those vials of whisky from @jura_whisky and give them a jolly good glugging. Or maybe just mix them with lemonade.

JUST KIDDING.

First up, the Bourbon XU 1999. Nice smell, quite mild, not a nostril-stinger, some sweetness there. Well, if sweetness can have a smell.

Whoo! Whoooo! Okay, that's a hearty one taken straight, strong, warming, peaty, bit Laphroigy but more going on. Real attention-grabber.

With a dash of water it's a whole lot smoother, the bourbon-cask making itself felt, a lovely sweetness just like honey. Very moreish.

A cleansing of the palate, then onto the Bourbon JO 1995. Curious to see how different this tastes to the XU...

OOH MY. *Very* different, slipped down smooth & rich then aglow at back of the mouth. Really nice sweetness & spice.

JO 1995 with water, the sweetness & spice come to the fore, not oversweet or treacly, honeyish but hints of cinnamon. Reeeeally nice.

Last up, Sherry JI 1993. Fascinating smell, there's an aroma in there I can't quite nail down, a wood of some sort? Anyhoo, down the hatch!

GOODNESS. There's WAY too much happening there to fit in 140 characters. There's sweet & spice as JO, but warmer, richer, zingier!

The smallest sip slinks right around your mouth, makes itself at home, puts on a smoking jacket and dims the lights. Quite something.

JI 1993 with water, impact diminished but still quite mysterious, flavours I've not tasted in whisky before, can't quite nail down.

Nearly got it, nearly got it... ARRRGH ALL GONE.

Well, that all seems pretty accurate, though I don't think I'll be writing tasting notes any time soon. All three were absolute crackers, an almost brain-discombobulating experience trying to identify and describe the range of flavours, scents, sensations in the tiniest of sips, all the more impressive for the difference between each one. How I lamented the fact that lids for two of the vials had loosened in transit, losing half of their contents to the surrounding packaging, because how often do you get to taste whisky of this quality, of this range? Not nearly often enough. I must confess to letting my attention stray towards the more peaty island malts in the last couple of years, so if nothing else this has been a handy smack round the chops to remind me not to get blinkered in my whisky picking. And if you're in the market for something particularly special, or have been looking for a quality dram that's certainly out of the ordinary, any one of those three would be ideal - they're also available at the Whisky Exchange.

My personal favourite of the bunch? I'd say the Bourbon JO 1995, for the rich mix of sweet and spice without becoming sickly or cloying, warming but not burning, recognisable elements from other whiskies yet still a pleasant surprise. All in all, everything you'd want a treat of a tipple to be. Cheers to @jura_whisky for the opportunity to try these goodies and to @craigmcgill for helping to make it happen.

Wildlife Drawing: 19/07/2010

 

Another rain-drizzled summer's day in Edinburgh, I managed to get two hours of sketching done at the zoo before the downpour intensified. It went okay - starting with the sea lions, who stayed in the water the whole time but raised periscope now and then, with two of them frolicking/arguing/wrestling. Then back to the Budongo Trail for the chimpanzees who are consistently wonderful models - particularly pleased to get a study of a foot, oddly clenched in sleep. Then a single sketch of a pygmy hippo, the chinagraph toning helping to get that feeling of shiny blorpness, finishing off with a couple of sketches of the newest arrivals, the sun bears. Shame I didn't get to spend more time drawing, though at least it meant I was able to go and watch Inception at the Cameo. Bloody brilliant, but I still missed the penguins.

"The Penis Is Evil!"

No, no, it's not another post about overly chaste websites (posts passim), rather a celebration of new music from electronicky bloopmeisters Orbital who've come back with two new tracks.  The first, Don't Stop Me, is a cheery number that wouldn't look out of place on The Altogether and samples Buggles to oddly blissful effect. The second, on the other hand, is downright MENTAL.

That's The Gun Is Good, probably the heaviest thing Orbital have done since their 1997 classic Satan, and I've been playing it to death ever since Tom Ravenscroft broadcast it to the world a few weeks back. The doomy voice making such anti-penile pronouncements is Zardoz, from the barmy 1974 film of the same name which starred Sean Connery in a really unfortunate red number.

And that speech two thirds of the way through? One of the best depictions of evilness in the history of cinema, the genius that is Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. Nipples for men!

And to round things off perfectly, Orbital's performance at Glastonbury last month featured a certain Matt Smith on stage, the day after his debut series as Doctor Who came to an astonishingly triumphant end, introducing their final track for the night. Really, what else could it have been?

Wildlife Drawing: 05/07/2010

Another partially-dry Monday, another couple of hours at Edinburgh Zoo. Figuring that I'll get more out of these sessions if I focus on a few particular animals that I should keep coming back to, rather than try to cover the entire zoo. Right now I think that the chimpanzees, the penguins and the sea lions are the three to study in advance of the next zoo visit, to have more of an understanding of their anatomy and how they move. What I really like the thought of is turning these sketches into animations of the animals, but that's quite a challenge. It's one thing to do really cartoony quasi-humanoid animal animation, another to try and capture the motion and anatomy of the real thing in animated drawings.

Watching the chimpanzees in the Budongo Trail today was absolutely fascinating - a new group of chimpanzees seems to be getting introduced to the existing group, leading to all sorts of ruckus, which I tried to capture in the above drawings. The energy and aggression that seemed to explode out of nowhere was quite startling - it's one thing to see it on an Attenborough-narrated documentary, quite another to see it on the other side of a perspex window. As I looked at them swinging, running, lunging, I realised how hard it would be to try drawing these actions frame by frame, to really do it justice. Still, worth a go, eh?

Free Wheeling

Life with a bike has been going very pleasantly since I last wrote about it, certainly helped along by events like the Edinburgh Cycle Challenge and Bike Week.  There's a sense of momentum behind cycling (uh, pun not intended) that this post from Copenhagenize picks up on nicely:

I really sense that there is an irreversible buzz and drive about not only returning The Bicycle to the urban landscape but creating the culture and infrastructure to make it possible.

As a cycling n00b, it's very reassuring to feel this support, be it from volunteer groups like Greener Leith who held a commuters breakfast on my bike route during Bike Week which allowed me to get my bike registered with the police, have a tasty BLT roll and We Love Leith bell for free, all before work, or my employers who arranged for Dr Bike from The Bike Station to come to the office and give bikes a good check through. As I'm still in a position where I wouldn't know good brakes from bad (until they stop working, which is a bit late if halfway down Ardmillan Terrace), it was a relief to know an expert had given my bike a thorough check and found things to be okay, with some adjustment in the brakes making them notably more responsive than before. When society as a whole seems so focused on car-driving being the norm, this kind of external support definitely helps, both as encouragement and as reassurance that as a cyclist you're not on some forgotten fringe, some bizarre car-shunning outsider.

I've also gained a lot from reading John Franklin's Cyclecraft, as close to a cycling Highway Code as you could hope for (as such it should be required reading for cyclists) but with much more to it. It does a particularly good job of hammering home your responsibilities as a cyclist, the consideration you need to give to fellow road users and pedestrians, and the confidence that's needed to cycle successfully on roads. The temptation, especially as a newcomer, is to keep to the side of the road as much as possible, avoid traffic like the plague, a terrified shrinking violet on wheels. Cyclecraft makes clear the folly of this, how it's ultimately of benefit to both you and other road users if you're confident and know where best to be on the road, how to make yourself visible, how to ensure other road users know exactly what you're doing. Sticking to the sides means you're at risk of not being seen by traffic, of coming into contact with parked cars or pedestrians, and if you're going to be on the roads you need to be able to assert your place there, to be confident. While there'll always be the odd white-van driver who'll yell at you for no reason other than you're on the road (this has already happened to me, most bemusing), I think car drivers as a whole would rather share the road with a cyclist who is confident and clear in how they're cycling and their position on the road, than with one who appears anxious, afraid, unsure. Thanks to Cyclecraft, I've been able to make the gear change from one to the other, and feel a whole lot better about being on the roads as a result.

I'm starting to appreciate the freedom that cycling brings, especially at weekends (and why cyclists can end up getting so obsessive and evangelical about these two-wheel contraptions). Last Sunday I was able to cycle out to halfway along my usual commuting route in order to pick loads of elderflowers which the Missus magically turned into tasty cordial. Yesterday I decided to head out on a longer route, certainly compared to the usual 5.5 miles to work. The initial target was Cramond but I ended up overshooting this, instead finding myself heading for South Queensferry. Getting to such out-of-Edinburgh places is usually a right faff, especially when they're beyond the reach of Lothian Buses, so it was almost startling to see how easy it was to get there on just my bike. Well, notwithstanding my first case of chain-coming-off, but after an initial panic it was pretty clear how to put it back on, though I do wish I'd had the Bike Doctor app installed on my touchy Spod at the time (this has now been rectified, and well worth getting for £2.99). There's a strange thrill about the freedom that cycling brings, probably the same feeling a new driver gets, enhanced with the physical exercise you're getting from doing so and the way it seems to combine the boundless options of walking with the ability to cover distances that would just be daft on foot, and I think I got a bit giddy with it all. From roads to woods to coastal paths to a golf course (well, I got off the bike for that bit, seemed a bit disrespectful otherwise), part of the fun comes from not knowing quite where you're going to end up next, whilst still having a general idea where you're heading.

After a tasty bacon roll at the Picnic café in South Queensferry (with a piece of rocky road saved for later) I pondered where to go next. Initial plan was to just head back to Edinburgh along where I'd came, but now I'd got the cycling fever and wanted to push myself further. This despite not having the Spokes West Lothian cycling map on me, which in retrospect was sodding essential. BERK. I headed out of the town, roughly in the direction of south but soon ended up completely bamboozled. After one complete dead-end of a path I tried another which thankfully turned out to be going in the right direction, my plan being to meet up with the Union Canal and follow that back to Edinburgh. Sadly I got utterly scuppered in the general area of Newbridge, my befuddlement only saved through numerous uses of Google Maps on my mobile. Even when I got to Ratho I still managed to balls things up considerably, hurtling through the nettliest path in Christendom only to end up in the grounds of a swanky looking hotel estate just as a wedding party was arriving, then making my way along the edges of a field in the hope of finding a way out that didn't involve crossing the M8. Eventually, I did - but it should never have come to that in the first place and demonstrated how important it was to come prepared map-wise. Once stung, twice shy.

Anyways, once on the Union Canal everything was fine, a lovely flat route that weaves through West Lothian and into the south west of Edinburgh. There were a few nifty little resting places on the way out from Ratho, the cycle path running alongside the canal with surrounding fields eventually giving way to industrial estates, blocks of flats and parks (not to mention large wooden men). We've walked along the Union Canal plenty of times from Harrison Park, but never further than the other side of the Slateford Aquaduct, so it was nice to see what lay beyond. I've always assumed the canal path would be filled with traffic on sunny weekends, but it was surprisingly empty yesterday afternoon - whether this was down to the World Cup, I've no idea, but there were still a few cyclists, walkers and a barge to pass by at an easy pace. All in all, a thoroughly good way to spend a day, tempered only with the annoyance of having wasted time and energy getting lost when a map to hand would have solved everything in a flash.

There'll be more of this sort of thing over the summer I suspect, especially as I plan on giving the Friends of the Earth Fife Coastal Challenge and Pedal For Scotland rides a go, both in September, both 50 miles. Yesterdays was just over 30 miles (you can see the hapless route here) and stings aside I've not felt much complaint from my body today. The only downside to these weekend cycles is that my lovely wife currently doesn't fancy the thought of cycling, yet it's such a lovely experience - and how good to be able to get out into the countryside without train or bus! - that I'd love to share it with her, though only if she felt completely comfortable with it. It opens up such travelling possibilities for us non-drivers, bringing the countryside so much closer without being beholden to bus stops and train station locations. After all, cycling's not just about getting from A to B as quickly as possible - like train travel, the very journey can be a pleasure to be savoured. No wonder there's splendid blogs and Facebook groups for those cyclists with no desire to be hurtling along in top gear and lycra.

1,826 Days Later...

Five years! Fancy that! Terrifying but true, it was five years ago today that I got on the Glasgow to Edinburgh train as a single bloke looking to make poverty history (I fear I may not have been entirely successful in this particular endeavour) and ended the day bewitched by the considerable charms of a certain lady. Much to my astonishment and jamminess, she appeared to feel the same about me too, and so began the five best years of my life. Thanks to Chatiry/Katherine/Mrs Nagl I'm a far happier, mature and generally better person than I was back in 2005, and I'm the luckiest lad in the land to be with her.

Wifey's been a bit under the weather this last week so we're not leaving the city for any day trips to celebrate. However, a partial retreading of some of our steps from that fateful day seems quite fitting - ie, pop on white t-shirts, get some ice cream, have a wander around the Meadows and go for lunch at Peckhams, just as we did back then. I think we'll skip on the War of the Worlds (terrified Chatiry) and Mariah Carey at Live 8 (terrified me). And this time round I don't have to get the last train home to Glasgow at the end of the day. Progress!

(Nostalgia posts: his and hers reports on the Make Poverty History march, his and hers official statements revealing relationship to the world)

Wildlife Drawing: 28/06/2010

Another couple of hours at Edinburgh Zoo on Monday went okay - this snoozing bulbous sea lion was especially fun to draw - the highlight being the King Penguin up there. It was good to start getting some colour involved and using watercolour pencils seem the perfect portable way to do so, hopefully I'll be able to use them more and more for other animals. I also tried using white Conté pencil on black paper when sketching some primates which made for some striking effects when drawing the faces, I was particularly taken by the face of the alpha male drill, such striking contours and form that it could've been a mask - I'd love to do a more detailed study sometime.