I’m tempted to make all sorts of references to trumpeting the message and the like, but I’ll resist. I’m planning to put these as available on my Red Bubble site in due course and will put a zero mark up on them, so in keeping with my recent history I’ll be making no profit! Hopefully it might keep the T shirt people and the like busy and in business. Take a look over here. More designs to hopefully lift the spirits on here and there in the coming weeks.
Thanks for visiting. This is one place where you don’t need to stay away.
This is the final piece from my drawing video. I’m doing more of these because it makes me feel useful and keeps me off the streets.
For the techies out there the black and white line work is put into photoshop and faffed with a little, the text put in with this one using In design, much better as far as I’m concerned than putting photoshop text in there. ( Though I have to admit I’ve used it once or twice recently )
I’ve got more ideas on the drawing board using this sort of theme in an attempt to get people to keep away from each other. If you thought the British a little “stand offish” then think again, perhaps we ought to be.
The video was also uploaded to You Tube as well as on the blog before this one, you can find it here
Here’s the latest stage of yesterday’s drawing almost through to the final, thanks to the wonders of my old iPhone and Imovie. For those remotely interested I used the time lapse button on the movie bit of iPhone, I normally don’t draw quite as quickly as this. The final version will be posted later in the day here.You can also find this on You Tube just here
Keep clear, in every meaning of that phrase, and stay well.
I was at college in Manchester in the late 60s and I shared what was euphemistically called a flat with two of my college friends. It was so grim that I would not allow my father to enter. He asked when he gave me a lift back there and I said ” No” . He asked me in as careful and friendly way as possible ” What’s it like Paul?” I paused for a few minutes in the passenger seat of his Triumph car and eventually found a suitable word: “Spartan”. He could find no more words, so I comforted him with the addition: ” No worse than school though”
I’d been at school in Preston, where I was of sixty boarders. People like my parents, my father a policeman and my mother a teacher, had aspirations for myself and my brother and as they foresaw many house moves thought it wise to send us to a school where we could stay throughout our secondary years. Both my brother and I thought this a good idea and something of an adventure. He soon changed his mind and hated it, I seemed to like it with its dreadful food and the chance to learn how to smoke. So we spent 7 years in lockdown, with rationed food and surrounded by a police state. There were occasional epidemics when one or more boys would be confined to bed with evil spots that were easily passed on in the close confines, but the school was equipped with an elderly matron and her fragile sister, so nothing to worry about there then. They seemed to have a limitless supply of cascara ( a powerful laxative ) that they always said would: ” Do the trick”
It’s a credit to my parents that they did not kick off when both my brother and I chose to go to Art School when our respective lock downs ended.
So it was then that my father left me in Rusholme to settle into my new abode with my new found friends. We spent as little time as possible within the confines of this apartment and much more time in the college or the local pub, by the college.
It was in the middle of the night when all three of us were sleeping when we heard the most enormous crash. It was a car, no doubt being driven by someone who’d also visited a pub, and it had gone smack into a lamp post.
When we peered through the darkness we could see the occasional light coming on at a house right next to the car. From the top of the stairs that went up to the front door there emerged a large man still adjusting his dressing gown. He looked down at the sorry mess by the lamppost and cupping his hand to his mouth shouted out: ” Kettles on!”
We three looked at each other, and nodded, muttering in agreement: ” Well, that’s alright then” and repaired back to bed. After all a decent cup of tea will repair almost anything.
Trying something new here, this is a little video of me doing a recent drawing. I hope everyone out there is fit and well and keeping their distance so that they stay that way.
If this does not work please bear with me as I’m on a bit of a learning curve and have just gone into the first bend.
“Keep Calm and Carry on” and other such very British slogans have been popular. Some like: ” I’m going out, I may be a while”, famous last tight lipped words of Captain Oats on the ill fated but oddly glorious expedition to Antarctic is another. It’s a phrase I used to use when heading off to the supermarket to buy too much of something that we already had. No more of that then.
” Where on earth have you been?” after a football or rugby match when it was perfectly obvious from the circling beer fumes, is not in this lexicon, but it’s in mine. The usual muttered inaudible excuse to myself was” ” They played extra time”, an oblique reference to the only time we won the Football World Cup in 1966.
Another from then is the almost last words of the commentary at that match: ” They think it’s all over…!”
This is on the South Downs way, taken just over a year ago, and I’m putting it out there as a bit of a change from recent c word postings. We can’t get out there any more but the wildlife will hopefully thrive in what will be a peaceful time for them.
