Non-illustration Leisure Time: goodbye to bricks and mortar.

 ~ The iconic yellow type of the Lei(s)ure Centre, set in Cooper Black ~

I've always gone out of my way to use my body, ever since the day post-graduation that I realised I would no longer a) be walking miles into college carrying stuff or b) riding a bike to my boyfriend's house up several hills, now that I had acquired a yellow Citroen 2CV in lieu of a debt.

That's meant a lifelong gym habit, the acquisition of yoga, a taste for running and in the last couple of years, a twice-weekly early morning swimming routine. When you sit down drawing and thinking and typing all day, if you don't get off your ass now and again it will literally be the death of you. My body might sometimes feel like it's just a thing to carry my head around, but I'll be damned if I let my job do me in.

So me and my Mum and Dad go to Hinckley's defiantly 70s Leisure Centre two mornings a week to smash out as many lengths as we can, then get changed in the no-longer-fashionable open-plan changing rooms, where everyone stands around discussing husbands, politics, jobs and telly in various stages of stark-bollockness. It's reassuring, grounding, and completely delightful.

All that's about to change as the Leisure Centre I watched being built with my Dad, as a small child in 1978, will close on Sunday and be demolished two weeks later. It was never quite right, its construction dogged by controversy - the pool was never big enough, there were alleged shortcuts taken all over the structure, and the concrete was meant to be poorly. But I always liked its awkwardness and slightly heroic feel. It's stood there serving my town for nearly 40 years, ugly, dingy and angular as it is, and this morning was my last ever swim there.

I spent some time in the building today recording details ahead of its destruction. As I walked through what used to be the café I remembered that I once went for a part time job there, in the kitchens, and being asked 'if I could cook'. When I replied 'you mean can I flip greasy burgers and lower chips into a fryer', I was most assuredly not going to be given the job.

As we sat outside in the mossy 'Al Fresco' area I also remembered locking up my bike one night and being groped out of the blue by a mystery man whose face I never did see, because he ran off before I could even shout 'oi, perv!'

And my best mate at the time, Dawn, now deceased, who laughed at the story and told me with fabulous logic 'it's OK Colehole, he probably thought you were a bloke'.

Ah the memories!

Here are some of my photographs from this morning. They show both the wear and tear that are the reasons for its replacement, and the efforts of the staff to keep the place going. The Leisure Centre is Dead! Long Live the Leisure Centre!

The strange red building has always had a beautiful front garden:

Stand here and hear the hum of the mysteriously scary pool machinery below:

The diving pool with its 'moveable floor', the idea of which used to really freak me out. 

It stopped moving a long time ago, and the diving boards were removed years ago. 

Those angles! The place is full of 'em.

SO much concrete.

All quiet.

The last post-swim breakfast, in the outside eating area. 

As far as we know, we are the only people to have sat here in all the time we've been going!

Not about to be repaired any time soon.

ALL TORQUE AND PLENTY OF ACTION

Our friend Rich is a kind and busy soul who has petrol in his veins, wiring looom diagrams printed on the inside of his eyelids and big nut-wrenching fingers, just the sort of bloke you want to hand your precious special car to.

Which is what we’ve been doing for many years now. His Dynodaze Customworx garage has looked after, embellished, repaired and modified our Soarer UZZ32 V8, our Mazda 323 V6, Chrysler Jeep Straight 6, Pao, Micra(s), Peugeot 406, Peugeot 406 Coupé V6, the Surprisingly Great Mondeo ST (V6…), The Carry Van and The Other Pao. He’s patient and tolerant of our vehicle-based whims and ideas, and is just as happy* forcing a Micra engine under a Pao bonnet as servicing our incredibly dull Family Saloon.

*”happy”

So when he asked if I would look at the graphics for his big project, his Honda Civic EG, I said OK. The car was to advertise his business, Dynodaze Customworx, and he’s been working on it for a year (while maintaining his Supra, rebuilding the engine on his 'daily', a VW Passat and modifying his son's Seat Arosa and now new Honda Civic). He’s just painted it white:

and added SHINY NEW PEARLESCENT ORANGE WHEELS, so this became the original of the colour palette:

Oh sorry, didn’t you get a proper look at that?

I first of all tweaked his Customworx logo as it had become a bit dated, so I backed into it with my calligraphy pens and gave it a fresh flow and up-and-down energy.

Here’s the old logo, all bruised from an over-revved vectorising:

Here’s all the penwork:

And here’s how it ended up - still vector’d, but still very much looking like its spiky youthful self:

Then we put that together with some slabs of starts-every-time Impact, in grey:

A rev counter drawn in Illustrator, to Rich’s specification:

And TA-DA!
Vinyl man came and stuck it on, after thinly-veiled threats from me to ENLARGE OR REDUCE IN PRO…

and here is the finished beast:

Ouch! Those tricky br(e)akes! No wonder Vinyl Man was a bit 'cool' towards me at first, till I bought him a coffee!

It's always good to see one’s daubs on a different surface. Next thing is to sort out the colours for the engine bay, which we think will be orange and purple…or will it be purple and orange…?

Master Thatcher to you.

This is our friend Lee Miller, a Master Thatcher and, actually, a World Champion Thatcher. The tall beaming bloke next to him is Andy Cowling, his right hand man on the job.

I love a good skill set and delving into processes which are nothing to do with my own, and Lee Miller’s work is not only incredibly specialist, it’s HIGHLY skilled and evolved through years of practice. He’s spent his entire post-university life thatching, after deciding he preferred working outdoors, starting with an apprenticeship with his uncle and eventually opening his own business in 2007.

His work is beautiful and mind-bending - it’s difficult to picture how such a material can be formed into the array of shapes and patterns shown on his website. If you think icing a cake with a fancy edge is tricky, have a go at doing it 2000% bigger out of reed or straw and 30 feet in the air.

Miller is re-thatching the roof of Hinckley’s only thatched building, the Framework Knitters' Cottages which are now Hinckley Museum. They’re a five minute walk from our studio, and are very old (though altered a little in the 1920s).

This thatch, says Miller, will last decades, and is attached to the roof via a sequence of time-consuming steps that can only be carried out in reasonable weather conditions - though on the day I gatecrashed their thatch party, the winds were terrific and thatch-dust blew in our eyes every few minutes.

I don’t know the first thing about thatching really - you’d have to ask the man himself if you wanted details - but there are certainly some marvellous processes and intriguing tools involved. Here is Miller attending to the underside of some recently-applied thatch:

He’s patting it into shape with a home-made tool, fashioned from a table leg for a handle with regular slices of copper pipe pinned to a board:

(That’s my knee and my winter tights you see next to it.)

This is the view down from the exact spot Miller was working in. Ooh!

The bundles of thatch are corried up the ladder to the roof, thus.

Then they’re laid in bundles, like this:

The T-shaped ‘pins’ that are holding the bundles in place are ordered in bulk, and are quite handsome objects in their own right:

View from the top of the roof:

Looking back toward our place, you can see the very neat rows of thatch that will be trimmed at the apex and formed into a ridge:

And a view looking back at the work in progress:

It doesn’t look that spectacular yet, but feast thine orbs dusty and windblown on these examples of Miller’s previous work. Absolutely beautiful.

Thanks for letting me on the roof Miller.