Richard Bell's Wild West Yorkshire nature diary
Wednesday, 24th January, 2007
TAKING
A SCHOOL PARTY around Horbury Bridge gives me an opportunity
to see familiar scenes through their eyes. They're 7 to 9 year olds so what
seem to me like recent changes to the local landscape took place before they
were born. Living memory for me is history for them.
Armed
with clipboards, we’re completing a town trail; reading or sketching road
signs, looking at buildings, bridges and the local park, and counting and naming
the narrowboats in the canal basin; Geisha, Kittle and Patendale.
Nellie the narrowboat (left) is no longer moored by the lock gates to the Calder (which are now never used) and the barge that is there now fills the width of the lock. I drew Nellie for my last Sushi Sketchbook (before I went on to larger formats) Four Corners of Horbury.
Back
at the school, I go through what we’ve seen and draw this map as we discuss
each place we visited on the trail.
It seems strange that blackboard and chalk have disappeared from classrooms. The squeak of chalk, the way words & diagrams disappeared into dust when the teacher rubbed away the day’s lesson and the occasional risk of a blackboard rubber flying through the air towards some pupil who wasn't paying attention are now history themselves.
I
find it tricky to draw on the computer-controlled white-board, especially since
I’m so tall that I keep standing between the projector and the image I’m
drawing. I have a habit of picking up a handful of ‘marker pens’
from the pressure sensitive rack below the board, confusing the computer as
to which colour I’m using.
Pick up one marker pen and you can then draw with your finger. Run out of space
and you can scroll down the page and draw more but you could do that in the
days
of chalk; I remember our geography teacher having a canvas roller blackboard
that gave him three separate areas to draw in, one of which was gridded
into squares. That was a state of the art blackboard in 1963.