I’ve just been doing some drawings for a client who is the son of a previous client and friend. So it’s good to keep connections. My new young client is in SEO and helps companies increase visits to their websites. He seems to know all about these things and has been heling me to get more visits to another project of mine: looks good on the wall

Apparently putting links in like the one above help with generating visits, so feel free to click on it!

Anyhow back to the drawing above. It’s simple enough really and it follows the brief. It’s the sort of brief that I have had dozens of times over my career. MD sitting at his desk celebrating rocketing sales figures. Of course these days he would be celebrating with a cup of coffee ( or is that organic green tea? ), but in the old days he would have had a massive cigar filling his massive office with a cloud of winning smoke as well as a bottle of champers on ice and a very comely secretary sitting on the desk. Things have changed, but he’s still a bloke in the picture and there’s not a lot of signs of a female executives bursting through the glass ceiling. Now there’s a visual.

Back to my other project :did you notice another little link there in an unashamed attempt at guiding you to where you ought to go? It’s about blank walls. I have a thing about them and think they should be suitably adorned and together with a group of excellent artists I have devised a scheme to get their work on such walls. I love working with them, as a freelancer working from home this can be a solitary business at times and it’s great to see what all these artists produce, and to help them get their work out there, as well as having the social contact. Just to give you an idea of the sort of thing that you can see on there here are some sample parts of their images.

Needless to say there are links to their pages from their names, and lots more information on how you can go and buy their excellent works. I’m hoping to be having a large cup of coffee from my executive suite in front of a chart of booming figures quite soon. ” Deidre? Put the champers on ice please.”

Graham Brace

Elisabeth Le Vierge

Al Blethyn

Sally Williams

We have a facebook page  as well if you feel like a trip over there, if you do then please like it for us. Remember it will help rid the world of blank walls.

My Aunty Winnie was a cakemaker and a true Northerner. Whenever we moved house which was frequent, she’d turn up on the doorstep of the new house with a meat and potato pie. Her meat and potato pies were legendary, and delicious. Her husband, my Uncle Jack was a quiet kind of chap who would utter hardly a word. He’d had a career as a shop manager. Not a supermarket, they did not exist at the time, just a small grocery store. Whenever they came for tea, which was not that often, Jack would sit in the corner sucking on a pipe and saying very little. Winnie made up for it, chatting about everything and her conversation would be interspersed with ” Jack says: ”  followed by his pearls of wisdom. We never got them from the horse’s mouth. My father whispered to me one time, ” Jack must do all his talking at home, says nothing here”. My father and him got on in a way, never actually saying anything to each other probably helped. Jack was a conciencous objector during the War so it was probably just as well that he kept quiet, as my father had had a trip through Normandy, France and Belgium that he’d not anticiptated when he joined.

My mother, whose cooking I loved and miss to this day, used to bake when Jack and Winnie were expected. Usually something quite simple like a jam sponge, and Winnie’s accolade was always the same. “Oh Dorothy, this is lovely” she’d say, then the ulitmate accolade: ” Just like bought”. My mother took it as a compliment which it was.

Recently I’ve had a conversation with my daughter about cakes. She, like me, loves the industrial cakes one can buy from the supermarket. The ones that say on the packaging: “Just like you’ve baked at home!” They aren’t but it’s odd that the two of us like them so much with their vivid yellow sponge and exact depth of of ‘buttercream’ and jam. They are nowhere near as good as the ones my mother made, but they do taste “Just like bought”.

This is Vicky Sponge

She’s one of my series of drawings of people with apt names, for more go and take a look at my site here  As usual, thanks for dropping by my site and listening.

I don’t watch a lot of telly but just finished watching Race across the World. Now I know one has to suspend belief to a degree, after all who’s doing the filming? But this was very good telly. Only downside was the winners were from Yorkshire, but you can’t have everything. If you get the chance watch it.

I’m not sure of the randomness of algorithms but this is the result of shopping online.

A simple task of looking and then ordering a doorbell brings up this suggestion and confirms that the computer is not always right. We have, like any self respecting middle class family, a comfortable supply of what we naturally call  “bathroom tissue”. What we do not have is a handy fire extinguisher, the other suggestion, which was the obvious result of checking out the toilet rolls.