Some of my sketches for my blog – 100 Sketches of Port Talbot – url: - http://100facesofporttalbot.blogspot.co.uk/ - are spontaneous, that is, I see the building or object or scene that appeals to me, and I make the sketch there and then, never having set out to make that sketch in the first place. Other times, though, I make a special trip to sketch somewhere which is ‘on my lst’ as it were. When I have a specific target in mind, I do like to do a little bit of research about it. This morning I set out to sketch the milepost at the bottom of the page. Not much of an expedition, but then it’s only a five minute walk from my home. I wouldn’t say that I found out a huge amount about it, but I’m very glad that I did my research. After I’d been standing and sketching for about 15 minutes, an older gentleman who had come to wait for a bus at the stop, started asking me questions about what I was doing. I explained, and he asked me why in particular I wanted to sketch the mile post. So I told him that I liked it because it looks like carved stone, but it’s really cast iron. He didn’t know that. I like it because it’s a historical remnant. This, and the half dozen or so other nearby mile posts still standing were put up to mark when the main Swansea to London road was made into a turnpike. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know that one of the other posts closer to Bridgend was removed from its place, and can now be found in the open air Museum of Welsh Life near Cardiff. Before he got on his bus he said, and I can’t remember his exact words, but the gist of it was that he’d lived in Port Talbot for more than 6 decades, passed by the mile post hundreds, probably thousands of times, and not actually known anything about it. It’s a small thing, but it made me feel good.