The Morning Train
Monday, 7th March 2005
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary
The Morning Train
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| No room to sit on the train, so I perch on a suitcase
rack. All I can see to sketch is a letterbox-shaped sample of the trackside
but as we go out of Wakefield I'm looking down an embankment so I can
at least see As we enter a cutting my slot of view is filled with
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passing
trees.
dull,
rusty, dried bracken. I glimpse a
deep
curving lane just after we pass under the motorway; a snapshot of a rural
memory, hedged in by later highways. Gulls are sitting about on 
a
pasture not far from the White Rose shopping centre. We pass a 
big
half-timbered barn, still standing on its hillside between us and the
morning traffic. Miniature daffodils on a landscaped mound bring an incongruous
touch of Wordsworthian freshness as we approach Leeds City station.
I'm
in Leeds sooner than I thought so I've twenty minutes to sit in Starbuck's
with a mug of chai latte. The elaborate towers of the Victorian Quarter
are just in front of me, across Briggate, but they're too much for me
to draw in the time I've got available so I try to settle to a quick sketch
of the back of a truck. It doesn't turn out well but it helps me to wind
down a little before my radio interview.
It's
the first time that I've been to the new BBC Centre next to the West Yorkshire
Playhouse. For the want of anything more interesting, I draw some coffee
mugs as I wait to be the first guest on John Boyd's morning
show. John has a glance through my sketchbook during the interview and
I tell him how I'll be encouraging my students to draw at my workshops
over the next couple of weeks by suggesting they could focus on particular
things - like the mugs and the truck - rather than feel that they have
to produce a big 'picture'.
They've
arranged for a taxi to take me home and as I wait in the open plan office
it's the fire extinguishers that seem like the best thing to draw.