Steve Bell right on form this week

He is just brilliant!

The South Downs

Tony Rawlings, a very great friend of both Linda and myself died, much too young, in 1994. He was 50. We had known him for more than 25 years. When we first became friends we were students in Brighton and he was living in Plumpton Green, just north of the Downs and about 5 miles west of Lewes. It was the sort of friendship based on a wealth of common culture and experience, and inevitably developed its own shorthand of catch-phrases, cliches and gestures, one of which was that whenever any one of us was depressed, mildly fed-up, or just having a moan about something, one of us would sweep an arm round the horizon, usually ending by pointing at the Downs and say, facetiously:

"But the eternal things remain . . . "

A week ago, in Sussex, I took this photo as research for a painting I'm doing. Now I have looked at it again I want to say Tony, this one's for you.