Emergency Notebook, standby ballpoint pen

When Barbara's mum went into hospital two or three weeks ago (she's out and she's fine now) it was such a sudden thing I ended up at A & E still wearing my slippers.

You can tell that I was in a hurry because I didn't grab my sketchbook, which is always to hand in a shoulder bag, along with a pencil case-full of pens, pencils etc.

Luckily in the glove box of the car I keep an old plastic notebook cover with a small pad of recycled sheets in it; so these alder cones were drawn on the flip side of one of the pages of a recycled Gary Larsen Far Side page a day calendar.

I wouldn't choose an old blue ballpoint pen (probably one of those which charities keep sending us) to draw with but it's better than nothing. I drew this maple leaf and keys a few weeks ago when I had 20 minutes to spare before an appointment for a haircut.

Luckily Barbara had a rather better black ballpoint pen with her so I switched to drawing with that. There were long periods of waiting, either for tests or the results of tests, so I left Barbara and her mum in A & E.

I headed for a bench I'd seen by some shrubs and drew trees, wood pigeons, a jumping spider and a wasp scraping wood from the bench.