Marsh Sentinel; watercolour; Adele Cosgrove-Bray 2015. This week saw me sailing down the Shropshire Union Canal in a narrowboat.  The weather was lovely,  warm with bright autumn sunlight which proved perfect for sitting on the prow of the Pot of Gold, eating egg and mayo sandwiches while ducking under towering weeping willow trees and dodging wasps which homed-in on the Victoria sponge cake. The narrowboat is owned by the Wirral Community Narrowboat Trust , a charitable organisation crewed by trained volunteers. We sailed past Waverton, and admired the houses whose gardens run right down to the water's edge.  Then we left suburbia behind and slid through open countryside, passing by a long, long line of narrowboats with permanent moorings.  It was like a floating village, some of the moorings being equipped with wind-power and solar-power systems.  Some narrowboats were cheerfully painted, others had more sombre colour schemes, a few looked rather rusty, while others'

My brother-in-law, Andrew Hart, passed away on the 10th August.  He suffered a heart attack, following a stroke earlier this year.  His funeral took place on the 21st, at Southport Crematorium.  Andy was known on the northern club circuit for his singing, and in younger days for his musical contributions to Golborne Brass Band, The Philtones and the David Charles Dance Band. Rapid sketches of ducks and geese, August 2015. I was unable to attend the funeral, having started a new day-job all of nine days before this.  I've been talking to my sister Evelyn, though, and nagging her well-meaningly about eating decent meals and taking care of herself, making a joke of "sounding just like Mum". There's not much anyone can really say at times like this.  It's instinctive to want to fix things for the person going through an awful experience, but really all anyone can do is simply listen. So, I started a new job...  I'm still doing arts and crafts, and si

Orange  daylily - Hemerocallis fulva Fabian: An Artisan-Sorcerer Story  is now being edited.  The novel will be published on 1st December 2015, all being well. Today I had a wander round The Arno, a small park in Oxton which gets its name from fusing two Anglo-Saxon words:  'arne' (hill) and 'howe' (which means either the name of a person who was as strong as an eagle, or that this was a hill where eagles nested.  Linguists weren't quite sure which it was, apparently).  But a host of volunteer gardeners have been busy making The Arno into a lovely little hideaway usually known for its formal rose garden, but which also has a vibrant Long Border crammed with numerous and colourful cottage garden plants.  If any Wirral artists are looking for masses of flowers to paint, this would be a good place to head to right now, as you can see from this post's photos which I took today.  Click on the photos to see them larger. The Long Border at The Arno, Oxton.