Drawing and painting Canterbury, the maids and men of Kent, the Kentish men and maids, some thought about the invention of perspective, a few books for my bookshop, Flat Eric plays guitar with a tactless cactus and some thoughts on the value of music and art.

Starting with this pen and ink sketch of the inside of Canterbury Cathedral and working backwards and forwards in time, I will do my best to write some sort of blog post today.

My apologies for not posting for the last couple of days, I have been getting up early for my daubing activities and just haven't had time.

I started in the cathedral at 7am this morning and did the pen bit, unfortunately I had parked myself in part of the cathedral where some intensive god bothering was going on and what with that and not having had any breakfast. OK to put it another way, it felt as though with the act of drawing the cathedral I had developed some sort of empathy with the building, and that it wanted sung matins and was uncomfortable with anything else at 7am and that its being uncomfortable made me so.

So I meandered of to La Trappiste where, as I am getting fat, I had a very modest breakfast of toast and marmalade, surrounded by thin people eating the Full English. Narniaistically I drew a lamppost.

Back to the cathedral for a bit more daubing.

On to Canteen to try and draw the view looking down onto the street from above, as you can see this is something that I can't do very well.

The camera is better at this sort of thing I think.

Back to the cathedral to slap some paint on.

Back to La Trappiste for a cuppa and to bung some stuff around the lamppost.

I have started drawing real live people that I don’t know in public, a scary business, these maids of somewhere or anotherish maids, seemed fairly happy about this, and I guess if I were single and 45 years younger I would have tried for the full Clockwork Orange, or at least a bit of a boogie.

Recently several people have asked if I sell my daubings, so I have been thinking about this and don’t really know the answer, price, the value and so on, I guess the answer is I will get around to getting some prints done, some framing done, and even produce a few greeting cards.

 Anyway with this rolling around in the back of my mind, I sketched a couple of buskers that I stopped and listened to in Canters, and instead of putting my small change in their hats, I chucked the sketch in their hats.

Floyd Rose guitar tremolo, double locking wosisnames are one aspect of guitar maintenance that I leave to the expert (the one in the middle) who in this case is Luke aka Barry, who runs the guitar shop in St Luke’s Avenue and used be an Animal in The Rising Sun sense of the word. So when I went to pick up my Washburn I mentioned the business of getting paid for art to Barry, and showed him the photo of the sketch of the banjoist. Barry like most drummers, didn’t waste time replying my semantics, but looked at the photo of the sketch on my phone, and says. “I know ‘im he buys strings and stuff off me.”     

Flat Eric has discovered that the low action and the amplification is such that he can now do the tactless cactus song with furry hands. The lyrics are loosely based on Geoff Chaucer’s, “Wife of Bath” tale, only it’s a cactus not a red hot poker that features.

I did buy some books for my bookshop and a couple of records that I didn't have, who would have thought I could have got through life so far without having Johnny Cash doing them old cottonfields, while having umpteen versions of pick a bale day? 

Afew photos of Canterbury, showing that perspective hadn't been invented 800 years ago and so on