Deliverance

I saw my friend Ross Adams at the school today. I haven't seen him for ages. He asked me if I was going on the canoeing, drinking and shooting trip? I hadn't any idea what he was talking about, but said I might be interested. It turns out that some of our snooker-playing colleagues are planning an adventure.

Canoeing, drinking and shooting? I think I've seen that movie. What was it called again? Deliverance, that was it.

I finally got round to signing the petition against age-banding on children's books. This is such a crazy idea and well done to those, like Philip Pullman, who have led the attack against it. If you want to see a more reasoned argument against it go to the website and have a look. If you are an interested party then sign up.

I hate flies

More football today - playing and watching. It was actually sunny today. And hot! What's going on? It was almost as if it was summer.

The house is full of flies. England borrows all kinds of ideas and fads from the States, but for some reason we have overlooked the screen door concept. Here we just open the doors and let every flying insect in the vicinity into the house for supper. And I hate flies.

I found myself looking at Brad Holland's website over the weekend - I was recommending him to John Clark. I don't like everything he does, by a long way, and he possibly takes himself a little too seriously, but he knocks the spots off his countless imitators and he really does have something special about him. I can't think of many illustrators in this country capable of that kind of gravitas.

Maybe illustrators here don't take themselves seriously enough.

David Beckham and Doctor Who

Played football with my son today. It gave us a chance to try out his new football - given a gift after a visit with his school to the David Beckham Soccer Academy earlier in the week.

We watched a bit of the crazy opening ceremony for Euro 2008 - why oh why do the host nations feel they have to present some tacky performance based on visual cliches about their country? It is always rubbish - but rarely rubbish enough enough to be be funny for more than a couple of minutes.

Then we watched Doctorr Who which has been pretty awful this season. That said - this one wasn't bad (though it had far too much Scooby Doo running about and the music is always too loud). It had some good scares - my son actually jumped off the sofa at one point - and there was a bit of depth to the idea (helped by it being spread over two weeks).

And if anyone from the BBC is reading this Blog - I WOULD LOVE TO WRITE FOR DOCTOR WHO!

Don't buy a house

I went to the studio today and did some more work on my paintings. They are at a very frustrating phase - they look good enough that there is something to spoil, but not good enough to leave them alone and call them finished.

My book is all there now - in that it has a beginning, middle and an end - but it has holes and thin patches. It needs some fine tuning.

I went for a drink the other night with John Clark at The Eagle pub here in Cambridge, where RAF pilots used to drink during the WWII and sign their names with lighters on the ceiling - as you do. We talked about work - paid and unpaid. We talked a lot about illustration and freelancing. It was odd to talk about it as it was something I worked so hard at not long ago, and now barely do at all. And it feels weird not to do it sometimes. It feels weird not to draw for a living.

There was a great headline on the New Statesman today - Don't Buy a House! The advice was not to buy a house for the foreseeable future as house prices are set to tumble. And as we are renting and have sold our old house, we ought to be laughing - maniacally, stroking a Persian cat.

But oh how I long to get my stuff out of storage and to have a shower and to have a cutlery drawer where the knob doesn't come off in your hand. Renting is rubbish.

Yo ho ho

And a bottle of Duchy's Original Lemon Refresher

We took my son and three friends to see an adaptation of Treasure Island at the Cambridge Arts Theatre last night. It was adapted and performed by the Birmingham Stage Company and it was great. I read Treasure Island recently to my son and so the story was very fresh in our minds.


I haven't been to the theatre for ages and I was struck by how magical the experience is. It is a wonderful antidote to the pretended realism of TV and cinema. Theatre does not attempt realism. It is a much more complex art form than simply trying to show a version of reality. We can see the actors walking on and off stage and pretending to fall in the sea when there is no sea there and we know that the set that was a ship a minute ago is now doubling as the stockade, but we still get caught up in the story all the same, whilst simultaneously enjoying the wit and invention of how it is being delivered. It all seems very modern, when of course it is nothing of the sort.


And the kids loved it. They enjoyed the story and the action, but they also enjoyed the way it was presented. Their favourite bit was when Blind Pew is run over by a horse. There was no horse of course, and his death was shown by the sky behind him turning blood red to the sound of horse's hooves, a collision, a scream. It was little more than a silhouette and sound effects, but it clearly worked.

Writing is strange

A bit of a disrupted day, one way and another. I haven't been to my studio for over a week now, so I am looking forward to doing that this week. Maybe my paintings are better than I remember them being. It's always possible.


My new book is all there now, but it has a few thin bits and a few holes. Writing is a strange process. A book grows bit by bit - word by word - page by page - chapter by chapter. But if it is going to be anything more than that, there comes a point where it needs to become a whole. This is a mysterious process, a little like painting (or at least it seems so to me).


There comes a point where it just feels right - it feels finished.

Family reunion

My wife and son returned to Cambridge yesterday and I was forced to concede that I had not - strictly speaking - finished my book.

I had written most of it.

Well a lot of it.