First Night Design | Great Rail Restorations with Peter Snow #2 days left!

© Channel 4

I meant to write this post two or three weeks ago but I forgot all about it. You have two days only (tonight and tomorrow) to catch up on Channel 4 [the UK only] with a programme that ‘stars’ my family’s railway carriage and the writer of this blog!

Episode 2 shows the incredible work done by talented volunteers on restoring our Oldbury carriage which dates from 1864. It is part of a series called Great Rail Restorations with Peter Snow. Channel 4 bankrolled the series enabling four carriages around the country to be restored to their former glory. I am interviewed first by Henry Cole and then by Peter Snow.

I don’t think it will spoil the watching of it if I give you a little of the backstory, most of which is not included in the programme.

After the Second World War and with my maternal grandfather having been killed in 1940, my grandmother bought a house in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight which had a large garden and an overgrown orchard. At the bottom of this orchard was a dilapidated railway carriage. She later sold the house and garden leaving the path that led to the orchard and carriage. In the 1960s and early ’70s, this shabby beauty became the setting for all our childhood holidays. It was glorious. It felt and still does when I look back on those years like we were part of an exciting Enid Blyton adventure, not that I was ever very fond of Blyton. I was more of a ‘Chalet’ girl myself!

© Pete Jardine 1980s – one of the passionate volunteers at Havenstreet

My brother and I were both grown and my grandmother in her grave when my parents decided in the mid-1980s to donate the carriage to the organisation that is now The Isle of Wight Steam Railway and replace it with a Scandinavian log house. The land and log house were sold by my brother in 2001; it saddens me greatly that this part of my history is no longer in the family.

It is my love of the Isle of Wight and the memories of those times that have brought me down here to live.

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | #Valentine Blush #Screenwriting

Valentine Blush © First Night Design/Sarah Vernon

I can’t bear it when I have nothing of my own to post because while I love finding other work on art, books, writing or photography to introduce you to, there’s always those niggling thoughts that run: “But you need to be promoting your own work to earn money!” or “Why aren’t you going back to writing your memoirs?” But it’s got to stop, as I’m sure you’ll tell me. Living is more important when push comes to ultimate shove and you’re not the twenty-eight-year-old you feel.

Quentin Crisp NYC 1992 Ross Bennett Lewis

Valentine Blush is new and I had every intention of uploading it to the galleries in time to catch the Valentine market. It didn’t happen and so it’s still not available to buy. I don’t care because I’ve become more embedded in the local community by making some new friends including writer Barbara Jane Mackie whose screenwriter father, Philip Mackie, adapted short stories by Saki in 1962 with a cast that just happened to include my father, Richard Vernon. Some of you might remember Mackie’s later work as he was responsible for the incomparable adaptation of The Naked Civil Servant [1975] with a never-to-be-forgotten performance by the late John Hurt as Quentin Crisp.

Take care and keep laughing!

‘I’ve Got a Ticket to Ryde’…and remembering a much simpler time. | My Life as an Artist (2)

Janet is joining me on the Island next week.

On my Lambretta scooter in 1965 (the same year that the Beatles wrote the song – ‘I’ve got a ticket to Ride’)   My friend Maureen is on the back.   She and I went to art col…

Source: ‘I’ve Got a Ticket to Ryde’…and remembering a much simpler time. | My Life as an Artist (2)

In pictures: The Prisoner at 50 – BBC News

It was such an iconic programme that I can’t resist re-blogging this post on First Night Design. (My mother was at RADA with Patrick McGoohan!)

Rogues & Vagabonds

Images from the cult television show The Prisoner mark the 50th anniversary of filming in Portmeirion, north Wales.

Source: In pictures: The Prisoner at 50 – BBC News

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A la recherche du temps perdu

A beautiful and heartfelt evocation of growing up in the East End of London in the 1950s and ’60s, written by Pete Johnson, with the rose-tinted spectacles removed.

Originally posted on beetleypete:

With apologies to Marcel Proust for stealing his title, I confess to a lot of time spent in remembrance of things past. Not just lately, but for much of my life. Even as a man in my twenties, I constantly reflected on my childhood, and my early school years, developing a habit of looking back that I never lost. I was caught up in a chain of nostalgia, from which I found it difficult to escape. When I got to secondary school, I pined for my primary school, and less pressure. Once I left school and started work, I really regretted leaving education, and thought about those last few years at school with great fondness. Every job seemed better than the one that followed it, and I managed to conveniently forget my reasons for wanting to move on in the first place.

During a convivial dinner party that we were…

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Take care and keep laughing!