All my hamsters have died in the last six weeks or so, and Herbert's the last of them.

I didn't have many photos of Pickwick and Filkins, the Russian hamsters, largely because they were very fast and were likely to get into trouble in the brief period of time it took to set up and point the camera. Herbert was a little bit better; and here's one of her having a wash, appropriately enough, in the bathroom.

I found her dead in her cage this morning; she was 25 months old, which is respectable for a Syrian hamster, but I'm really going to miss them all. I'll be constantly reminded of Herbert in particular, because once I left her in the bathroom while I took what I thought would be a quick phone call. It took longer than I'd thought, and when I came back I noticed that she had chewed holes in the carpet in the corners of the room. She'd obviously got bored with one before moving on to the next. She was an expert in finding bad things to do in apparently innocent situations, but she did know her name, and one time when she managed to get under the floorboards she did actually come out when called. Eventually. That was why her name remained 'Herbert' even when it became it was apparent that she was female - which was not what the bloke in the shop had told me.

I hadn't realised that hamsters could have attitude, or, indeed, pull faces, until I got Herbert. She had a penchant for hanging upside down from the bars, or, later on, the mesh at the top of her cage. This is not a naturally tenable position for a hamster, and I always used to worry that she'd get hurt when she fell (normally after 3.5 seconds), but she never did, or when she used to climb to the top of her water bottle and jump off.

I'm still half expecting to hear the sound of the little chirrups Herbert used to make, or the high pitched indignant squeaks which made the munchkins sound like squeaky toys, and the scrabbling and wheels going...

Illustration Friday - 'Match'

Here is a picture which features not only a fountain with matching birds on the side, but also matching fish floating around somewhere in the ether. So you should be feeling really 'well-matched'.

Terrible jokes aside, I've just submitted the draft for my dissertation to my tutor. I'm within the permitted word count by three words (or else they start deducting marks!), so I'm severely hoping he doesn't want me to add to it. If he looks very carefully, he'll see that I'm a really sad individual who does this sort of thing on a Saturday night when everyone else is out enjoying themselves.

I'm off to do some drorin tomorrow, though, and that's what I REALLY DO!

Illustration Friday - Play

This is an illustration entitled 'March past of the kitchen utensils', and shows a scene from Aristophanes' play 'The Wasps'.

Vaughan Williams has also written a piece based on 'The Wasps', and one of the movements has the same title as my painting (though I have to admit he did it first!)

For anyone unfamiliar with the play, I really really recommend it - it's surreal and totally mad!

The characters at the bottom of my piece are the wasps themselves. They aren't insects, just jury members ...

I've dun a narchaeological illustration!

This is a drawing of a secular badge which would date from the late 14th century if it weren't a 21st century copy. The image is around 7cm high, being a 2 x enlargement from the actual object. I was curious to see how it would reproduce, though it would have been more useful to have reduced it down. The practice is to draw them twice up for reproduction at ss. I'm concerned that some of the detail might fill in ...

This is who I met when I went to Warwick Castle to seek my fortune

This is a character I met when I went to Warwick Castle on Saturday. I would have posted it before, but it took a long time to walk from Warwick with my worldly belongings tied up in a spotted handkerchief on a stick, slung over my shoulder. Anyway, you see the perplexed looking kids in the background? He was watching one of them make a call on a mobile phone, and was asking them what the strange instrument was, and whether it was magic that meant they could use it to talk to people a long way away ...

So after a couple of minutes of this, I asked him if I could use my magic lantern box, which was powered by imps and fairies, and that if I pressed this magic button it would form his likeness! 'My LIKENESS!' He was intrigued now. I reassured him that it wouldn't steal his soul, and that if it did I'd give it back immediately. After looking a bit doubtful, he said he'd trust me. I subsequently showed him the picture on my camera, and he said that it looked a bit small. I reassured him that it was because he had been magically transmuted by the imps and fairies, and that this was nothing to worry about. I left him shaking his head at all the magical things he keeps seeing around him.

He was actually right, though, as he was much bigger than the picture of him.


Then I went up the tower and ramparts. Then I remembered that I don't like Heights. Or Enclosed Spaces. Or either of the Above in the Dark. Or Uneven Spiral Staircases. And it's also a one way system to cope with the number of visitors they have there, so you can't get halfway up a staircase, change your mind and come back down again. I did manage to take this rather tipsy photo from one of the ramparts, but other than that I just escaped as soon as possible, leaving much of this august edifice unexplored.

And then, safely back on terra firma (good old terra!) I sat down to do some drawing, and then ... the heavens they did open, and aqueous torrents streamed earthwards, and landed on me. Lightning flashed, the thunder crashed. Somewhere a wolf howled. (Or was it those Italian tourists who looked like football fans?) Unearthly charges rampaged in the firmament. I duly escaped back to the Warwick Folk Festival from whence I had come, by this time so wet that I really didn't care any more, and left my own personal rain puddles everywhere I stood.

So - Warwick Castle - you can't beat the place for a really DIFFERENT sort of day out ...

My life is galloping past before I even have time to grab it by the tail!

Yes well. At the moment, I am finishing off a PG Cert in Heritage Management, with a dissertation on the use of site-specific myths at heritage sites. Fascinating subject, fascinating myths, and yesterday I visited Mythstories at the Morgan Library in Wem, Shropshire - to talk to the people who had largely pioneered this in Shropshire. It was a 2+ hours interview. I realised at some unearthly hour this morning that it actually takes longer to transcribe an interview than it does to record it in the first place. My fingers are accordingly 8mm shorter and my typing speed has now increased to 80 wpm (though this goes down to 30 wpm once you've taken off all the mistakes.)

And today I've been writing about medieval horses and their equipment ( harnesses, stirrups etc - FOOL!!!!) - and medieval society structure as background to a project for the MA in Archaeological Illustration which I will be starting in September. Considering I haven't actually started the course, there seems to be a lot of work ...

Anyway, here are some preliminary sketches for the finished illustration which is part of the project:





















My drawing's absolute c**p at the moment, probably because I spend more time typing than sketching - but don't you think my model's got a wonderfully medieval face?

Look what's grown!

Last year, at the end of the season, I bought a very sad looking lily from a garden centre, largely because I felt sorry for it and it was being sold off cheap. Its leaves had been nibbled by vine weevils and it was generally rather the worse for wear.

At the start of the year, the new little shoots suffered from late frosts, depredation by slugs and an attempted incursion by lily beetle. (This was strange. I only found one, which was squished immediately. I haven't seen traces of either them or their disgusting larvae since. Here's hoping).

It's only a very small lily, around 40 cm high - but look at the bloom it's rewarded me with! There are two more huge buds waiting to open, and this one's about 21cm across. But you'd never have guessed from last year that it was capable of a performance like this!

P xxx