The first sketchbook I took travelling was on a trip to Kenya with friends. I spent my 25th birthday with them on Lamu Island. I remember because I was carrying a tray of drinks from the bar at Petly’s, the only place we could buy beer, when the sarong they’d given me as a present came undone. I saved the beer.

Mike Yule, a cartoonist with a wicked pen, chose our kit: a long, tapered, thick-nibbed Rotring fountain pen loaded with ink siphoned from a little bottle by twisting a cartridge. It’s funny how tools shape style; those sketches were scratchy, and the ink forced me to forgive inaccuracy and enjoy making marks with the charm of wonky proportions.

Those holiday snaps required a long exposure: finding shade to draw Masai tribeswomen or a bloke making clothes in the street on a pedal sewing machine, and I ended up having to pay a magnificent Chief, Charles Kamau, wearing his ceremonial garb, to stay still long enough for me to get it all in.

They were sketchy but satisfying. Maybe because they were a pause, a chance to stare at something for a while and not think of anything else. A lifetime later, I wonder if the pleasure was relief from the skipping thoughts of a younger ADHD mind. Something to focus on without having to make anything more of it than the thing itself.

It didn’t feel strange to find a spot to sit and draw while we backpacked around Kenya. It was familiar. My father recorded our first family trip overseas in a sketchbook, and when he and Mum travelled without us, they’d send postcards and letters with drawings of their adventures.

Dad always drew. Right up until his eyes finally packed in, he couldn’t get through a day without drawing or writing something. Sorting through the papers he left for us to discover in beautifully organised files, there were plenty of sketches to remember him. All carefully observed with his generous, inquisitive, playful worldview, including the letters he sent to my mother in courtship, which my Grandmother couldn’t wait to see too.

One of the things we talked about just before he died was his travel journals, packed with drawings. These were his legacy, things he was proud of. There are other accomplishments, but the journals were top of mind, possibly because, after his family, they were uniquely his life, and he’d enjoyed his later years; when he couldn’t line up his hand with his increasingly unreliable eye to make marks he could control, he’d look back through them. As his memories faded, he could leaf through his journals to access the happy times he had shared with Fay.

He’d say that when you drew something, you were understanding it. You’d be figuring out how something was built, the thoughts and feelings behind a person’s expression or pose, what they’d choose to wear, and how they wore it. Histories revealed. Ideas expressed. The same applies to his watercolour landscapes, or the cityscapes, urban allegories, and abstractions he painted in his studio.

He loved to make art.

A lot of things came to a confluence when he died earlier this year. I guess the death of a parent is a knot in time that can’t be undone. Family, home, health, work, money, loved ones, unloved ones, and existential preoccupations that can’t be controlled, twisted and tied around an immutable event.

Anyway, to unpick the knot, I thought I’d do some drawings. An arbitrary 100, loosely based on the time I can afford to travel, hang out with Jodi in our old haunts, with family and friends, not worry too much about work, and see what happens. And remember Dad. So far, there are just over 50 drawings, from the porch of our new home in Auckland, to London, Istanbul, Barcelona, the Chamonix Valley, the English countryside, and back home again.

More to come.