“Surrounded by Idiots”. It’s a book lent to me by my daughter in law whose high powered job is to look after people, not in a nursing sense, she’s big in Human Resources. Spends hours of her days talking on the telephone or via computer to people all over the world. The book is about people types and how they can be graded in colour, and on reading the first bit of it I started to understand exactly what it was talking about. It tells of a CEO of a large company who said he was surrounded by idiots, and meant it! He never thought better of any of the people around him than that. That would make him a solid red! Reading it brought back memories of my previous MD at the print company I worked for.

I always had the feeling that he thought all of us were idiots. Just a look in the eye, a sort of red eye perhaps. Possibly the least enthusiastic person in the factory, about anything. I think we all disappointed him, I’d put him down as a solid red but will need to finish the book to get a clearer picture.

I still have much of the book to read, but from my brief visit to it, my daughter in law and I agree that I am probably yellow. Enthusiastic but with a tendency to leave things undone, or unfinished. I was ok if I was briefed to finish something but if it was my own project, well I have loads of them unfinished filling up drawers. A book I was doing some years ago ( if it had been a commercial project might have taken me a couple of months to finish) took me eight years to finish! For crying out loud.

Getting back on the train after Christmas up in the north, with the “Idiot” book in my bag, and looking at the huge mass of people trying to get on the same train, I thought better of trying to read it . I had no wish to denigrate my fellow passengers.

Some years ago I bought another book that might also not be a good idea to read on the train. “How to be a Woman” by Guardian columnist Caitlin Moran was very popular some years back, and apparently has sold over million copies. I found it interesting and amusing and can recommend it, but perhaps if you are a man it might be sending out the wring signals if you read it on the train.

I’ve been writing and drawing these blogs for over ten years now. In the early days I posted more drawings and cartoon ideas, for a while I had the idea of seeing how many variations of ideas I could get from one simple idea. A pair of border guards in the snow ( Snow is so easy to draw! ) Like a lot of my ideas I thought this would catch on and bring me fame and adulation. No one took very much notice of it really, but it did strike the odd chord with enough people for me to carry on.Here’s one of them, there were quite a few more!

In the ten years I’ve posted over 1200 times, or so it tells me. So I plan to put together a book of what I think are the best ones. At the moment I’m thinking it might be a bit of a series of essays, if you can call these things that. The working titles of the book is: “Dandruff in my Cow Gum?”

When I worked with my good friend Graham back in the 70s we jabbered on about all sorts of stuff, and I recall that one afternoon we started thinking what we might call our autobiographies. I cannot recall any other titles but “Dandruff in my Cowgum?” sticks out. We both used a lot of Cow Gum at the time, heady rubber type glue that we used to stick together ad visuals ( this was even before spray mount: which is basically the same thing but with the added health risk of propellant! ). Cow gum came in a tin and one spread it carefully on the underside of the layout paper and on the card you wished to mount it to. Once the two sides of the paper and card came together the paper bonded very strongly to the card. It could be a tense moment, get the position wrong or if there were the slightest small floating airborne particle, and you’d have problems laying the paper flat. Floating airborne particles? Dandruff even.

So it became an idea for a book title.

Watch this space and I’ll see if I can get it done. I can see it in the bestsellers now.

Read it safely on a train.