2) Belgium - Ieper, Menin Gate - August 2016

Approaching the Menin Gate

If you are ever in Ieper, and you don't visit the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate, then you are really missing out, and shame on you. It takes place every evening at 20:00, carried out by members of the Ieper Fire Brigade, and it is intensely moving.

The Menin Gate itself was originally intended to carry inscriptions of the names of every soldier who died defending Ieper during World War 1 with no known grave. However, there is only room for 70,000 odd, while over 90,000 soldiers who died in and around Ieper have no known grave, and so the memorial has inscriptions of the soldiers who died between August 1914, and August 1917.

It's not the greatest sketch I've ever made, but again, enough people came and had a look and made nice comments while I was making it, which I found really encouraging.

1) Ieper, Belgium, August 2016: The Cloth Hall

So, as I said, the first time I made open air sketches of buildings in a European city was before my diagnosis.

Over 10 years ago I started researching my family history. All I knew about him was that he was killed in World War I. After some fairly tricky research I found out that he had been killed on the first day of the 3rd Battle of Ypres in 1917, and that although his name was originally inscribed upon the Menin Gate, his body was subsequently found, and buried in a small war cemetery in a suburb of the town. I planned for years to visit the grave, but did nothing about it.

Then, in Easter 2016, my daughter Jenn had an interview for maternity cover with Thomson's travel agents, and did so well in the interview she was offered a permanent position. Thomsons - now Tui - seem to be a fantastic company to work for, and Jenn has done brilliantly. In 2017 she has been nominated as Travel Agent of the Year. Jenn organised my family to buy me a return flight to Brussels, a hire car, and a hotel room in Ieper in August 2016 so that I could fulfil my ambition of visiting the grave.

While in Ieper itself, I made three sketches. Firstly, this: -

Ypres Cloth Hall - 2016

Now, the problem with this sketch is that it's in pencil. I've since found that I much prefer using sketching pens. I made it while sitting in a café forecourt about 50 years away from the Cloth Hall, and I had the lovely experience of passers by coming up for a look at it, and a chat.

The Cloth Hall is a remarkable building. Would you believe it was actually opened during my lifetime? Well, this is a complete rebuild of the original building, after the identical medieval building on the same site was destroyed during World War I, and it wasn't opened until 1967. You'd never know. It houses the In Flanders Fields Museum, and so I've been inside and out, and it seems absolutely authentic.

I fell in love with the ornate sculpture of the facades and sides of the building, and made a biro sketch of some of the detail: -

Cloth Hall Facade

This convinced me that biro is not a great medium to use. The ink doesn't always flow freely, and the ballpoint tip can dig into the paper of a good sketch book.