Category Archives: Personal

10.11.12 – it's time for a party!!!

Cup cakes courtesy of daughter No1

Today we celebrated my Dad’s 80th Birthday at an event organised at Furzey Gardens at Minstead in the New Forest.

Dad spent his early career as commercial artist for the original Selwood company (the plant hire and pump people) and helped design the gallery at Furzey back in the 1970s when the gardens and Minstead Lodge were acquired by the Selwood family.

It seemed a very fitting venue for celebrating his life and work to date and I was delighted when Tim Selwood offered me use of the Gardens and Furzey House for this private event outside of the official opening season. It was fascinating to re-visit a place I remember from childhood outings and also to learn more about the excellent work the Furzey Charitable Trust and Minstead Training project do for those with learning disabilities.

As part of the birthday event I created a small exhibition of Dad’s work from over the years which include a number of paintings he has produced during the last ten years that have rarely been seen outside of the family home. Thanks to my brother’s diligent efforts on a scanner and the masterful photography and album production of Ben Goode, we have captured a selection of Dad’s work digitally that we remember being created over the years.

I have added the output of some of these efforts to a portfolio website to accompany the event and to give exposure to some of the lovely paintings beyond the walls of the family home – http://www.brianhoskins.org.uk/

Thanks again to all those who helped make this a delightful, fun and memorable afternoon and I very much hope to be organising a follow-up event in 10 years time. If Dad has just enough of the family genes that enabled my 98 year old Aunt to attend the event and regale me with tales of how she used tour around the New Forest pubs on a motorbike (as I used to do in my youth) then hopefully I will be writing a similar post in 2022!

Click for larger view

Blast from the past

T minus 13 seconds …

I had a real surprise this week when communicating with an old school friend. He had some pictures I never even knew existed that were taken coming up to 30 years ago.

They are of a space shuttle model that I carved out of balsa wood, painted and then stuffed with parts of dismantled fireworks. It is then apparent from the photographs that we built a metal gantry out of Meccano to hold the shuttle in position and launched it from a friend’s back garden on Friday 12th November 1982 – (which incidentally was the day after the real shuttle programme’s first operational flight when Columbia carried four astronauts and deployed a satellite for the first time)

If I remember rightly, I had created a secondary fuse mechanism that would ignite after take-off which was then designed to blast open the payload doors and release a parachute to enable the shuttle to float back to the ground.

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50 months to save the world …

… as we know it.

This is the stark reckoning from onehundredmonths.org who’s countdown process and excellent updates I have been following for a few years now.

Beyond this point, there is steadily growing scientific conscensus that if we have not taken sufficient action to curb greenhouse gas emissions within this timeframe there is the very serious possibility of runaway global warming. The resulting rise in temperatures will turn our planet into quite a hostile place for the vast majority of the human race in its current form and locations.

As usual, claim and counter claim continue from both sides of the climate change debate and without being blessed with a crystal ball or DeLorean time machine we have to decide as individuals which side of the debate we stand or else take no notice at all and carry on with our lives as usual.

Given the unpredictability of Mother Nature, who really knows for sure whether one event will counteract another in the future and the human race has shown it can rise to challenges when the need is strong enough. However, looking around us in the year 2012, it’s clear that things are changing. The wettest summer in the UK for 100 years and record levels of ice melt in the arctic are just two events relatively close to home that we have felt the effects of. A very tangible example of which I have discovered this last month in my back garden. Continue reading →

Confessions of an amateur herpetologist

Throughout my childhood, if someone asked me what I feared most I would always say ‘snakes’. Contrary to this professed phobia, which is believed to be an innate fear in humans, I was fascinated by the idea of finding snakes in the wild and would spend hours in the fields close to my parents’ home and alongside the railway line, where they were believed to bask, hoping to see them. Despite the efforts however, sightings were rare; a glimpse of a grass snake in a field of thick grass once; the discovery of a dead grass snake on the side of the road from which I cut off the tail as a trophy; and the even rarer sight of an adder swimming across a pond and slithering into the undergrowth very close to my feet. Beyond such fleeting encounters, my fascination and curiosity remained limited to studying them through the glass of zoo and reptile centre enclosures and watching documentaries.

I was in my late twenties and married before I took the opportunity to handle a snake for the first time. I still remember the occasion well as it was during a ‘reptile encounter’ session at a zoo local to my home to which we had taken some young relations on a day out.  Recollections of the snake itself are a bit fuzzy but I seem to remember it being a young python or boa constrictor about a metre long. What I remember more than anything is my heart pounding and my hands shaking as I took hold of the creature for the first time. Typical of such scenarios however, that initial fear turned quickly to wonder and also the realisation that the experience was very different from the one I had perhaps imagined.

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Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three

Well, we’ve made it through Blue Monday, which is reckoned to be the most depressing day of the year – and presumably the rest of the week isn’t deemed to have been much better.

If I was looking at things on face value I’d have to say they weren’t looking so good right now. This last year has been the toughest I have known it since first entering the workplace in the mid 1980s and a lot of commentators are talking about us teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession. Some recent number crunching by The Guardian illustrates quite well what this latest recession looks like graphically in comparison to other major downturns.

Ian Dury - legend of the UK new wave scene - had a good list of reasons to be cheerful in the dire 1970s

Although young at the time, I remember the effect the recessions of the 70s and early 80s had on family members. In the recession of the late 80s/early 90s, I lost the first main job I’d ever had when the construction industry I was working in virtually imploded overnight. In the early part of this century during the dotcom bust, the two big companies I worked for, NTL and Lucent, lost billions and laid off many, many thousands.

It doesn’t surprise me therefore that this current recession looks graphically closer to the great depression of the 1930s because, based on experiences of other recessions and market bubble bursts, it feels like it too, as it grinds on year after year.

On face value this doesn’t look like a great time to be trying to start a business but then this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone against the flow. So, as new wave rockers Ian Dury and the Blockheads sung back in the 1970s …

A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
A little drop of claret – anything that rocks

Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three

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