Blood moon and bloody tired

When shortly before 3 a.m. the alarm clock rang, I took the camera and the binocular and went into the garden. The weather was great and the sky looked as if it were alive with all the stars one could see up there (this was one of the moments when I am truly grateful for the fact that Hastings is such a relatively small town, meaning there is not so much light pollution here). I seated myself in a rocking chair and spent the next one and a half hour or so out there in the dark.

Luckily, it was only when the moon's usual bright white light returned that I realised how cold it actually was.

Great British Beach Clean 2015

The day before yesterday, on Saturday, I went to Birling Gap near Eastbourne to take part in the Great British Beach Clean event, organised by the Marine Conservation Society, that was held there. Birling Gap, the hamlet that is in the process of vanishing due to coastal erosion, is situated between the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head ans thus attracts a high number of visitors. This in turn means that, although it may appear beautiful at first sight, there is usually also a lot of rubbish to be found on the beach.

The area our group, consisting of approximately 15 people or so, cleaned was not exactly huge (we went along the red line in the picture below) as it was more important to clean a relative small beach section properly than to go over a bigger area and do only a half-hearted job. We were, however, advised to stay away from the edge of the cliff - although quite a lot of rubbish was lying around there - due to safety concerns.

After about an hour of picking up rubbish this is what we got:

And we still did not manage to collect everything lying around, not just because some of  the rubbish was too close to the cliff edge but also because it was very easy to overlook especially the smaller pieces (e.g. sweet wrappers) between the stones and pebbles. So, even if a number of other people had already covered a certain area, you could still find something that had escaped their eyes.

For the Beach Clean event today on Monday, at Rock-a-Nore in Hastings, we were a much smaller group (six people) and the pile of rubbish found on the beach was smaller as well - but still about 6 kg in toto. The things we picked up there were for the most pasrt small bits: plastic bottle caps, lollopop sticks, sweet wrappers, pieces of nets and strings.

Finds at the beach

When I went for a walk on the beach at Hastings yesterday, I came across a few bunches of seaweed. So, I took a closer look and found what I had been hoping for: egg cases (also known as mermaid's purse). I do not know to which shark species the egg cases belonged to, but could be catsharks maybe.

Although some of them were already empty (the pale ones), they were entwined with those where the sharks have not hatched yet. One can actually see the yolk and embryo very clearly inside one of the egg cases (second picture). Anyway, I could not take the egg cases home with me, so instead I returned them to the sea in order to protect them from drying out.

  

Less pleasant, however, was the finding of a number of fishing lines, complete with fishhooks and shiny bait (little plastic fish) and some sort of a weight (the oval grey piece at the bottom) which I all found on a short beach section at the most eastern end of the beach.

Since I almost always carry a pair of simple garden gloves with me for reasons like that, I picked the fishing lines and hooks up and disposed of them. It was not that long ago that I was able to witness how potentially deadly these things can be when a seagull mistook the bait for food and got entangled in the fishing line with the hook through its beak. The seagull was lucky though, thanks to some beach goers who freed it, but it was still a horrible sight.

All in the all, the beach at Hastings is place where one can always find all kinds of litter lying around. Not a place I would recommend to people with children.

Dodger the Dog

A private commission I worked on recently. It shows the pedigree English Labrador* Dodger whose "real name" shall not be disclosed in order to protect his dignity. The name Dodger, by the way, has nothing to do with his personality but was given to him by his owner in reference to the Jammie Dodgers biscuits.

* English Labdradors have shorter legs and are blockier in appearance compared to American Labradors.

The Bergische Kräher

Not that I am in any position to keep animals at the moment but should the opportunity ever arise I would love to have some chicken (and pigs and goats and turkeys...). They would have to be rare (i.e. endangered) breeds, of which there are, sadly, plenty. One of them is the Bergische Kräher (Bergische Crower), one of the oldest chicken breeds in Germany. There is something elegant and kind of aristocratic about their frame and plumage; the hens, for instance, have black and goldisch yellow feathers.

Having said that, the Bergische Kräher probably is the kind of chicken breed one shouldn't keep in an urban environment as these birds belong to the long crowers with the roosters' crow lasting up to 15 seconds. Although, personally I would much rather be woken up by this "opera chicken" than the noise of cars, construction work and drunk people on their way home from a night out.

Gardens of Bateman's

Since I have come to England I have been doing some voluntary work for one of the National Trust properties, Bateman's in East Sussex. Part of this was creating individual border designs for the new garden information sheets:

The Formal or Rose Garden,

... the Orchard,

... the Mulberry Garden

... and the Wild Garden.

All the plants, as well as the chicken, can be found in the respective gardens. The only exception is Puck (yes, that Puck), to be seen in the bottom right corner of the Wild Garden, who is not, in fact, an actual inhabitant of any of the gardens. However, there is a literary connection between him and the Wild Garden through a book by Rudyard Kipling, famous former owner of Bateman's. Puck's design is based on his description in "Puck of Pook's Hill".

Hats and caps

This is actually an older drawing (ca. November last year) which I did because of the trouble I had with, well, drawing hats (I know, preferably you do this before you start drawing a comic). While there are a lot of historical pictures of hats floating around the internet, I still was not entirely sure what it would look like when you put them on your head, so I watched some period pieces in order to see how to wear Regency hats - mostly Austen or Austen-related stuff, even though I am not really a fan of this kind of stories.

 As for the four ladies, each one carries two hats and a night cap with her, except for the maid Betty who only  has one rather plain hat and a night cap. Jane's hats are adorned with flowers, Mary's are decorated with feathers and Henrietta's are fur-trimmed.

Most of the hats depicted above are taken directly from fashion plates published around 1811.