Bird bath with Crocosmia Lucifer, July 2023 Yesterday I visited the Wirral Society of Arts' members exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery in Oxton. Entry is free, while the optional printed brochure costs just £2. The brochure gives each artist's name plus the title of their painting(s), and lists their fee. Most work here is for sale, and prices vary from a modest £65 up to £2,300. When I visit an exhibition, I like to do a quick walk-round to assuage my curiosity as to what's there. Then I'll do a much slower circuit, and take a longer, deeper look at the display. Quite often, with a local exhibition, I'll visit more than once. Looking at the work, I was sometimes able to identify which artist had created it without needed to check the brochure. So I was immediately able to recognise Alla Barkova's detailed tree drawings, Emma Dromgoole's joyously colourful nudes, and Janine Pinion's melodramatic, misty landscapes. But there are 85 artists taking pa

Rosie helping in the garden Earlier this week, at approximately 5am, we were awoken by our dogs barking. The room was full of flashing blue lights and a strong smell of heavy smoke, and we could hear voices outside in the road. We looked out of our bedroom window to see various neighbours in PJs, all looking and pointing in the same direction. Thick black smoke was billowing up the road and one neighbour's dogs were running around in panic, whereas they are usually either in their garden or with their owner. Other neighbours corralled them in one front garden, and a police officer captured a ball of fluffy white fur and carried it over to join its buddies. The fire was quickly extinguished and then all the police suddenly sprinted for their cars and even commandeered an approaching van, or so it seemed, whose driver followed the police vehicles off the scene, all driving very fast. All this took place within a very short time. It turns out that someone threw oil or similar onto our

Join me on a walk around my small urban garden. Listen to the birdsong, see what's in bloom, watch what my dogs and a neighbour's cats are doing, and generally chill out. No commentary or conversation here, on this video you can simply listen to the calming sounds of nature.

The garden changes rapidly at this time of the year, emerging from near-dormancy to erupt into the fullness of May. We've not altered the garden's layout in the eight years of living here, even though the design is too linear for my taste. Ours is a typical urban garden, a small oblong shape surrounded by high walls and fences, which means each part of the garden gets some shade at different times of the day. I've a pile of unused plant pots waiting for more plants, and at some point I want to create a pond. The one thing I miss about our old house is my beloved pond. I'm no gardening expert, but I've picked up some knowledge along the way. We have introduced a wider range of plants to this garden and aim to continue doing this as, inspired by Claude Monet's example, I plan to turn my back garden into a source of painting ideas. Okay, his garden was on a somewhat larger scale...  If anyone has any bright ideas for the garden then I'd love to hear them.

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri