The SunUp Festival https://instagram.com/sunupsolstice?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= starts on Sunday 5th June at UpCo https://whatsupco.uk/ in Otley. It's running through out June/July 2022.

During the month I’m going to be sketching and writing about events I experience. And then I am going to pop a little QR code up, marking the spot where the captured moment took place. If you see the framed QR code, scan it to link you up with the sketch and words. I know! Right!

To start. Here's a drawing I did of the view from a window looking out from UpCo's gallery space towards Otley Chevin.

I made it with water soluble crayons and marker pens. For those who like to know these things.

I love West Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Pennine hills and their towns. The life and noise and the quiet and green. I am not very at home in North Yorkshire. The bits I know are a bit flat. And a bit too pretty. I think the thing that makes me decidedly a Wessie, is that I love the sight of proper hills, trees and functional stone buildings that have been kind of slam dunked together, then left, so long, that they've started to meld. The end of one and the beginning of the other blur. I love the way nature and people sit and live cheek by jowl here, marking each other but also letting one another get on. It's not picture post card pretty, but it does my heart good. It feels real. I think also, that perhaps this old landscape holds a clue to how more of us might live, going forward into the future.

And that, dearhearts, is the news. For now. xx