It’s been getting warm. Like, warm enough to go outside, which I’ve started doing voluntarily. I don’t think I’ve gone outside willingly since last March, the last time it was actually warm. We had a fire drill today, and I think it was the first time ever that no one was wearing gloves. Well, I say fire drill. I hope it was a drill. It would be awkward to find out it’s actually been warm just because my school was burning down.
I bought a pair of walking boots last week, in an attempt to make myself leave the cave of Undermyduvet, and so far it’s been working alarmingly well. I have been for a walk every night this week, mostly down by my local river, which has been hilarious. With the rise of the warm weather, the wildlife has finally come out of hibernation, and it’s been a joy to watch. There’s the usual crowd of ducks, moorhens, coots, and the surprisingly violent trout (Don’t throw bread in the river while all of them are around. The fish bite the ducks feet to get more.)
There’s a pair of swans that come back every year to have babies, and the lady swan is currently sat happily on her nest on the island, while her husband chases down walkers to try and get food. Swans are essentially very pretty muggers. I’ve seen him follow a small family for almost half a mile down the river, just because he knew they had a loaf of Hovis with them.
The frogs arrived yesterday, and I think it’s a pretty high chance they have come as a plague from God to tell us that Gangnam Style really needs to stop now. There are quite a lot of them. It’s become a habit to walk down by the river and scoop any frogs out of the path and back into the water, in case they get trodden on. They are adorable, and make the sound of kittens crying. Although it does get very tiring trying to explain to them that interspecies threesomes with toads probably won’t work. Especially because they usually just run away.
I think the finest specimen to reappear so far has been the rock climbers. You can usually find them hanging around in groups of around four or five underneath cliff faces, try and failing to look busy. If you’re lucky you may witness one actually adventure up the rock face to build a web made from a thick, rope like fibre. They can be easily identified by their bright coats, long fur, and public school accents.
I'm in an art gallery right now. Like, literally, as I'm writing this. I've gone old fashioned and acquired a notepad and a half chewed Biro (the Biro wasn't half chewed when I bought it, just when I fished it out of the bottom of my hand bag.) I'm meant to be watching a scree, which is showing video clips of Sheffield and the surrounding area, but if I'm honest, it's really just a video of some damp trees. I'm just taking advantage of the bench space. Also, I'm listening to Adele, and she doesn't really fit with pictures of rainy council estates (would it have killed them to do some filming when it was sunny?)
Since I've sat down, everyone else who was watching the screen has left. I can't tell if this is because the film is really boring or because I look a bit like a really annoying art student, who may want to engage them in conversation about 'how the piece makes them feel'. The sort that takes black and white photos with cameras bigger than their heads, and sit in coffee shops discussing the methods of oil painting, and how they prefer digital art (ugh.)
Art students are currently making up a surprisingly small percentage of the people in here. They're probably over the road at the potato print exhibition. This exhibition is full of charcoal sketches of weather, and a large, multi-coloured tent. Most people in here look like rather lost hikers, who have tried going for a walk, and accidently fallen into a painting of the hill they were meant to be up. It's a mixture of them, and middle class mothers, desperately trying to expose their pre-school children to culture. The children couldn't care less. They're more interested in the fact that they can do a little drawing and stick it up on the public display board. So am I. I just did a landscape sketch of Camelot, from Monty Pythons 'Quest For The Holy Grail'. It was awful. I still stuck it up on the wall. I captioned it 'It is a silly place'. You're welcome.
There are three types of picture up on the wall, each (roughly) as awful as the next. There are the ones done by bored three year olds, who have desperately attempted to do a professionalism water colour of a mountain side, covered in trees. Then, there are the neat little drawings of perfectly shaded fur trees, done by grown up, who were probably just try to show off in front of a date. Finally, there are the worst ones; stick men captioned "By Ben age 17" or "By Clara, aged 17". No. You are not being funny by pretending to do a child's drawing. It's just annoying. And probably quite offensive to the children. Theirs are much better.
