January 22 Reserve area fenced off as uncapped mine shaft found
During my first summer holiday from Humberside College of Higher Education, I painted three large paintings that I called we love telly, and on the middle panel, the mystery gang, scooby, shaggy, daphne and Velma stood behind a giant Anvil. I was studying Fine Art and had had a mixed year college wise. Socially it had been a blast. Scooby and the gang unravelled mysteries and told us there is nothing to be scared of really, it’s always an old man in a mask, they lived in a world of funfairs and mineshafts, hilltops and trapdoors. I know I’d struggled in Hull a bit to start with, didn’t know what to do, and all of the doubts that come with moving away from home for the first time but I can pinpoint a fixed moment when things changed, when that first flimsy piece of commentary told me things would be ok. On a particular Autumn day in 1986, one the tutors, not even sure who it was now, but I’m sure he was male, said something nice about a scruffy little thing I was potteri...