Sketchbook

A small space for wandering, forgotten, displaced, disordered observations, field notes, journal entries and draft photographs to finally have a home and live in all their generally unpolished and unfinished form.

Threatening Tales - Hellish Ghosts

Wandering, somewhat lost near Fitzwilliam a week before Christmas. The thin, grey winter light is barely making it through the dense fog, and we've hardly seen a soul for what seems like a lifetime - yet it feels like this area is saturated with tales and ghosts of the past. Threatening tales - hellish ghosts. This is an ex-mining area, classic Yorkshire. Bleak Yorkshire. Desolate Yorkshire. Ominous.

Ive been reading David Peace's Red Riding Quartet over the past couple of months (im just about to pick up the last, Nineteen Eighty-Three) and its given me a renewed focus on the recent history of the area that I live and grew up in. In the quartet, Peace creates a fictional narrative around factual events, noteably that of the Yorkshire Ripper...

You can’t help but be drawn to it.

“I’m not sure I want our children christened now”

It’s Friday night and we’ve only just sat down for a pint after a a hectic week. Starting to de-tangle the week on this topic jolts me from a tired daze. Its clearly something that’s been on her mind. Raised as a catholic in Ireland this comes both as a bit of a surprise. Whilst not particularly religious, she’s always said she liked the ideas and traditions around her upbringing. It feels like a big shift away from her connections to home that I wouldn’t want her to lose living in England.

“You were never christened”...

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