Every design in the Fox and Boo range starts life with a name only I understand. This one, long before it had anything to do with search engines or product listings, was simply ‘Robin - Walking Buddy.’
It began a few winters ago, on one of our regular lunch-time dog walks, the usual forty-to-sixty-minute loop down the lanes and across the fields at the back of our house. There was one particular stretch where, without fail, a little robin would appear. He'd start up his chitter-chatter from somewhere in the hedge, then hop along beside us the whole way down the lane, keeping pace, keeping up his bizarre commentary, clearly not remotely bothered by the dog. He'd follow us right to the point where we left the lane and crossed the fields.
He always seemed to launch the whole performance from the same spot: an old, disused fence post, well past its working life, wrapped in a bit of stray barbed wire and creeping ivy. It was such a specific, unglamorous little perch, but it's exactly the sort of thing you find dotted along British hedgerows, and exactly the sort of detail I love capturing — the bit of the countryside nobody else stops to notice.
He doesn't turn up on that walk anymore. I don't know what happened to him, whether he moved on to another place or simply reached the end of a robin's short life, but he earned himself a permanent spot in the Fox and Boo range all the same. This design is my way of honouring him and holding onto that memory.
As for the design name, Robin on an Old Fence Post’ is about as far from ‘Walking Buddy’ as you can get, and that's entirely deliberate. Google has no idea what a walking buddy is; it would sooner guess I meant an actual friend I go rambling with than a bird. If this design was ever going to find its way in front of someone hunting for a robin greeting card or a robin tea towel, it needed a title that does exactly what it says on the tin. So the design name Walking Buddy’ stays as my private name for him, but it is listed as such on the back of our greeting card, but ‘Robin on an Old Fence Post’ is how the rest of the world gets to meet him.
It's a small, ordinary moment turned into a design, a little wild bird who graced us with his company on many occasions, and an old fence post that had otherwise been forgotten.
0 comments