In the present scheme of things small things that go ‘wrong’ might be considered to be trifling, and they are. I have this odd theory that things going wrong come in 3s. Once those three things have passed you can move along and get on with the day and hope that something productive might emerge.

Those that follow me here, and thanks if you do, will know that I’m a cartoonist and that makes me an artist. Over lockdown I have done a lot of landscapes, experimenting with media and different ways to make marks on paper. I’ve enjoyed doing them and I had every intention of putting them up on Artfinder for sale. That’s the originals of course, not prints.

So I thought it might be a good idea to log in to Artfinder to get my shop there up to date with the very latest in my oevre. That word, along with juxtaposition, being the sort of word that artists use. So there I go logging into art finder, only to find out that they’ve chucked me out. I’ve been curated! I’ve only sold a couple of drawings through it so they have hardly made me redundant, I was already redundant. That aside I was more than a bit miffed. Artists and Cartoonists or the mixture of the two as I might be described, have to get used to rejection, but it still makes it no more pleasant when you are rejected. Language was of the blue variety for a short while until a cup of tea calmed me.

I checked to see if my friend Ros had been curated too, and thank goodness she had n’t. But then she does better on it than I do. Take a look here.

If you feel like checking out her website then take a look here. Here lands my next of three things to go ‘wrong’. I put together Ros’s website for her through Moonfruit. I’ve been with them for years and at the outset I was almost evangelical on how good they were. Great customer relations and a good easy site to construct. They built it all on Adobe Flash. Now Adobe Flash as been retired and it’s thrown them into a whole lot of trouble.

Long story short: I am now unable to edit anything on her site and on the other ones I have with them. Customer support has been as been useless.

So that was two of my allowed things to go wrong, I needed the third to turn this all around and get on. Then here it comes over the hill. ‘Over the hill’ might be the operative words here. I was idly looking on google search and searched for myself, hoping to feel relevant. Plenty on there about me, all written by me! Then further down the page I come across an item on eBay. One of my original drawings for sale at a Buy it Now price of £13 pounds! Is someone likely to get a bargain? No they most certainly are not. It was a pile of doo doo and should have been binned back in the 70s when I did it.

Time to go away and feel sorry for myself? No, certainly not. Someone had gone to the trouble of keeping that awful drawing for 40 plus years, I should feel better about myself. I’d reached problem number 3 and I could get on with things again

A trip to the plot was the best possible balm to a relatively bad day. An hour down there would be enough to make it all look much better.