I want this car!
Mon, Jun 2nd 2008, 14:14
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Suckle
Fri, Jun 20th 2008, 09:31
Suckle, the pig like creature, has cropped up in a number of drawings and strips I've done. He's a bit like an old friend now. Never done anything definitive with him though, he sort of floats around and I come back to him now and again. Here's one from a couple of years ago.
Woof!
Fri, Jun 20th 2008, 16:01
Here's a picture of Scarlet... my new border terrier puppy. We picked her up yesterday from Overseal in Derbyshire from a very nice and helpful breeder (and super featherweight boxer) called Stephen Chinnock. His dogs all seemed really happy and it was a really clean place which was in complete contrast to a place I went when I was a boy. We were looking for our first puppy (I was about 11) and we went to this place filled with poodles and children that smelled like concentrated urine. Thankfully little Scarlet's start in life has been somewhat less odorific.
What if we were in the Simpsons?
Thu, Sep 11th 2008, 22:56
What if we were suddenly transported into the world of Homer, Bart, Lisa and Marge?
Created using the SimpsonsMovie avatar generator. What fun!
Is your local restaurant disgusting?
Mon, Oct 6th 2008, 09:07
Ever wondered how clean the local chippie, Indian takeaway or Italian restaurant is? Find out with this handy website...
http://www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk/
I've been doing some amendments to the Esky e-learning Food Safety course and this was recommended by an Environmental Health Officer. My local Indian takeaway doesn't score very well at all. Ugh!
A Spooky Story from M.R. James
Fri, Jan 9th 2009, 15:48
Here's an audio version of 19th Century Horror writer M.R. James' short story "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard". Spooky. Recorded as a bit of fun at the end of last year. (Format mp3)
Join our Facebook Group
Thu, Feb 12th 2009, 16:40
Are you on Facebook? Do you love us? Of course you do! Then join our Facebook Group. Go on!
F*#k 'em off!
Sun, Mar 15th 2009, 15:55
This weekend I attended a football match. This is only the second match I've ever been to in person. The first was Aston Villa versus Sunderland one miserable, cold rainy day about ten years ago (Villa won one nil with a goal from England defender Gareth Southgate, but it was a big yawn). This second was Wolves versus Charlton at Molynewinewinewinew stadium.
It is an interesting experience, from a culturally objective perspective. I'm not really that fussed about football. The only team I really 'support' is England. I can't get excited about league games. It all seems rather pointless. But hey 26,000 other people disagreed with me and turned up to watch top-of-the-Championship Wolves shakily beat off Charlton 2 - 1.
Or in the parlance of the fanatic who stood in front of me... they "F*#ked Them Off". The fan fanatic was every inch the classic image of a football nut. He was mid to late twenties, skinny and wiry, sported a dark blue nylon tracksuit, had close cropped hair with wet look gel and wore a signet ring that was large enough to blot out the sun.
He was compelling to watch. More compelling than the game in fact. We were in and amongst a relatively quiet bunch of spectators (who by the way were about 90% male), but he made up for it. Any chants within a five mile radius were immediately picked up by this guy. This would be accompanied by a new dangerous martial art, which I can only describe as the Wayward Fist of Dangerous Clapping. There's a lot of elbow action in this martial art.
It is almost as dangerous as another arm technique, which I hereby name the Flying V. The Flying V is only to be used in moments of extreme fan-based-stress or support. The ref cards one of your players. An opposition player falls badly to the ground. You get the picture. At this moment, you must leap in the air, or if seated, leap from your seat, throw your arms up and out into a V. This technique is guaranteed to ward off any evil spirits and possibly result in your nearest neighbours developing broken noses.
Another intriguing feature of the game is the 'advice' given by the fans to the players. Things like 'get it in the box' and 'get it in the middle'. Perhaps for variation they could have tried other helpful nuggets such as 'kick the ball' and 'score a goal'.
I'm reasonably sure that the professional footballers probably know more about tactics than John Bull stood in the stand. But who knows, perhaps this will start happening in other professions? Perhaps very soon I'll have David Beckham round at my house giving me useful hints on writing such as 'type some words' and 'make up a story'.
This wasn't the extent of the 'advice' though. Other helpful hints included 'skin him', 'cripple him', the unspecified 'get him' and the worrying 'kill him'. Fortunately the footballers decided, on balance, to just play football.
Then there's the language. For the most part I thought the language at the Wolves game was much more tame than the one I attended at Villa Park some years ago. However, this time I learned a great new phrase which was 'F*#k 'em off!' occasionally clarified by 'F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Our fan fanatic loved this one, and would repeat it over and over, standing in full Flying V stance, while swaying his whole torso back and forth like some fundamentalist zealot. 'F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Part of me couldn't help but wonder if this was an instruction meant in the same vein as 'get it in the middle' - an instruction to be taken literally. Surely this fine young gentlemen wasn't asking his squad to literally bugger the Charlton eleven until they were outside the boundaries of the pitch? Maybe. Maybe not.
Even more intriguing was the fact that the fanatic had brought his girlfriend with him. She was actually rather pretty, in itself rather surprising considering the look he was working. Even more confounding was the way she looked at him after one of his blue bouts of rant-chant, body-swaying... as if to say, 'Yes. This is the man for me.'
All in all, it was an entertaining experience. There's more I could write about the problems of freezing feet, pretending to be enthusiastic about a team you don't give two hoots about, and chants meant to bully fellow supporters into standing up, but let's just let those lie.
I have to say my favourtie thing of the whole match was the pre-match and half-time entertainment which was about 30 kids from a primary school playing Taiko drums. It was both simultaneously cute and threatening. Imagine the urchins in Oliver suddenly coming together to do the haka and you have the correct mental picture.
Marvel at these Superheroes
Fri, Apr 24th 2009, 08:57
This is a rather fun website from Marvel... create your own superhero. I've taken some inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle to create mine.
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Some holiday pictures
Mon, Jun 1st 2009, 10:53
A couple of watercolours I did while chilling out in Cornwall. Never been a big one on painting but I quite like these.
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Fantastically wrong perspective
Wed, Jun 3rd 2009, 12:06
Saw this picture at a recent visit to Launceston Castle.
I love the fact the boat is small but manages to contain a massive army disapearing into the distance. Brilliant!
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Recycle Cartridges for Eden Project
Thu, Jun 25th 2009, 08:00
Not sure what to do with your inkjet cartridges once they're spent? Take a look at this initiative to raise cash for the Eden Project.
Who's the new Who
Thu, Oct 30th 2008, 13:13
David Tennant steps down as the doctor. Who will be his replacement?
The Imperfection of Memory
Wed, Jul 15th 2009, 08:40
I’m thirty four next month. I don’t know if I’ve somehow invisibly moved into a subtly different phase or time in my life but I notice that I’ve become occasionally preoccupied by memory and its imperfections.
I don’t know if it’s something particular to men rather than women, but I seem to have forgotten all kinds of things about my own life. Sometimes my wife will remind me of a place or a person and I will barely recall the situation if at all. In my twenties I used to think about my school days a lot. Now I hardly think about them. Some memories, particularly the most exciting and adventurous ones – like the times I travelled for months through Eastern Europe and then later to Australia and New Zealand – they can seem as though they happened to another person; like something I saw in a film.
I don’t keep a diary. The nearest thing to it is this blog. There doesn’t seem much point as most days would be fairly banal and much like all other days from a ‘what I did point of view’. Perhaps ‘what I felt’ might be more interesting, but still, there wouldn’t be so much variation on the micro day to day, week to week level.
I have very occasionally kept a diary – usually when I’ve been travelling – and that only serves to demonstrate the unreliability of memory. There are incidents and meetings recorded in there which make me go, ‘how could I have forgotten that!’
Arguably the fact that once reminded I do remember them means that my memory hasn’t so much lost the information as forgotten where to find it. But without the diary to locate it, what other great incidents from my life have been lost in the library of my brain?
I suspect the fact that we lose or misplace our memories, or that they fade in detail like an old picture must be a natural mechanism. If I remembered everything about my past in livid detail I suppose it might start to overwhelm the here and now. Embarrassing moments would forever be just as embarrassing to remember as they were to live through. But equally, joyous moments are always slightly fading away too.
What I hope and suspect is that the subconscious hangs on to all this material in some way. Perhaps it makes me aware of who I am without having to refer to every remembered, or half-remembered, or stored-but-forgotten detail?
I suppose what worries me is that losing a memory is almost like losing a part of your life. It’s a kind of death. If you don’t remember something, then it’s almost like it never happened. A part of living is lost and through that process a part of you dies. Combined with a heightened awareness of mortality with aging parents and grandparents it creates a rather unsettling phenomenon.
I also wonder if memory malfunction is something to do with activity. In my twenties I had a lot less life to remember and probably had a lot more time to think about old times and reassess them. In that way, I was constantly warming up old memories. With an ever increasing (internal) pressure to “achieve” something as many 30 and 40 something’s feel, I perhaps live a lot more in the here and now, and actually quite a lot in the what-might-be, that I don’t think about the past as much.
This is turn makes me wonder if this ambition and busyness causes a narrowing of viewpoint, expectations, imagination and indeed personality. Or is it vital to choose a single point and head towards it to achieve something, even if the cost is your own memory and personal foundation? It doesn’t sound like a good thing now I come to write it. Though perhaps I'm being a little dramatic. I do that from time to time.
My wife works with students, and while they can often be frustrating for their lack of commitment, she says they can be energising because of their openness, hopefulness and belief in themselves.
This morning, while I was waking up, my subconscious was trying to remind me of the time when my brain ‘felt’ like that.
It wasn’t so much a memory of an event, as a memory of being; a memory of how it feels to have so much possibility ahead of you. I hope that’s a memory I never lose.
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Holiday pics
Sun, Aug 16th 2009, 17:30
We've had a short break and now it's full steam ahead with 'The Moon Bird' - more news soon.
In the meantime here's some pics from my holiday.
Holiday snaps
Mon, Aug 17th 2009, 09:17
Following on from Greg's post holiday pictures, here's a photo from my holiday in Cornwall. This is Sennen Cove near Land's End.
The Brothers McLeod diet
Mon, Aug 31st 2009, 15:41
A pint of Doombar and a giant banana, hmmmmmm tasty!
Studio pic
Tue, Sep 1st 2009, 20:52
Something I did for the studio which we've used for a lot of our sound mixes.
Camping. Is it the devil's work?
Thu, Sep 10th 2009, 09:18
It's time to break free of the constraints of the modern world. Leave your home behind and go anywhere. Live anywhere. Sleep anywhere. Yes, camping is a world of freedom where the only boundaries to unconfined joy are your imagination.
Except for the rain of course. And the paltry washing facilities on site. And the fact that it's impossible to gets your clothes dry once they're wet. And the snoring from the next tent. And the forty lads having a party just along the way. Not to mention the toilet block where you can have a shower in a cubicle next to someone having a poo.
I really do try to like camping. There are times when I almost convince myself it's fun. It feels a bit like hiding. The bouncy blow up mattress seems cosy at first. The gadgets are appealing - special fork spoon knife things, gas burners, torches, Swiss Army knives. I tried to like it when I camped my way around New Zealand with my wife in the southern hemisphere summer of 2004 (which was the same temperature as our northern hemisphere winter). I tried to like it again this summer when we went to Cornwall. Sometimes I succeeded in liking it. But mostly... I failed.
Camping is rubbish for the simple logic in my mind that going on a holiday should be more luxurious than the place you call home. If I leave my home for a week or two weeks to pamper myself I shouldn't have to downsize my living accomodation by a factor of 500 so that I can barely stand up, have to share my living space with a legion of spiders, and be caught between temperature extremes so pernicious that I need to bring half of my wardrobe to cope.
Camping might be made more inviting if it wasn't for campsites themselves. I will say that Sennen Cove campsite was very nice on this most recent trip, but even there they only had one washing machine for an entire campsite which required a dawn raid by my wife and I at opening time to secure our slot. There they had also recognised that showers and toilets should not be housed in the same room. It's fine in your own house to have a room where the shower and the toilet are together, but that's because you don't expect someone to come in and relieve themselves while you're working up a lather (or maybe you do, you filthy grotesque).
The other problem with camping is rain. I am a fair weather camper. It's not that I mind rain particularly. I used to like walking in the rain when I was a teenager, mooning about feeling moody. I enjoyed the rain when I sat in some hot springs pools in Hamner Springs. I remember being quite excited about the lashings of rain that accompanied a spectacular storm in France. However, rain + tent = misery. It's a simple and fixed equation.
There's no roaring fire to warm yourself by. There's no central heating to flush the water from your clothes. There's no escape from the dreary, dreary pitter patter that is amplified into a incesant motorised thudding on the canvas. In New Zealand they did at least have the decency to admit that their weather was as bad as ours, and so many campsites have drying rooms where you can hang up your clothes and expect them to dry out in reasonable time. In the UK campsites are generally very basic in my experience, begrudging any optional extra they can provide. They would rather the wet clothes clung to your skin until you are converted by some strange osmosis into part human, part salamander.
So what's the first thing we did on returning from our camping holiday this year? We went to Thomson and booked a holiday to Kefalonia for next year. And no, we won't be camping... although I did camp in Greece many moons ago. Now they have the weather for camping!
Here's a poem I wrote on hoilday all about camping which I think demonstrates my conflicted views on the matter...
CAMPSITE
Regimented tents
Relaxed
Flap
Pitter patter rain
Inside a cloud
Hot-water-bottle dog
Swelter sun stifle
Warm beer
Barbecues
Pegs poles zip ziiiip
Guy ropes (why Guy?)
Caravans
Sharabangs
Multiroom, caterpillar, dome,
Even mushroom-shaped sometime homes
Motorhome
Soft air-filled blow up bed refilled with a whine
Coleman equipped
Sunloungers Superfluous
Moving on
Hot cell showers
Chemical unpleasant stench
Big skies
(Un)Satisfied
Characters that never moved
Wed, Sep 30th 2009, 07:23
It seems that I have a massive back catalogue of character designs that never found a home. Found these folk this morning tucked away on a hard drive.
Moutfits for Men
Tue, Oct 6th 2009, 11:25
Okay. Time for another rant!
Every industry has its uniform. In the TV media it’s the banal and bland combination of jeans with a blue suit jacket… usually with a chequered blue and white shirt. Sheesh. There are no doubt some of you reading this saying right now saying, well, at least I don’t have unruly hair, a stupid curly beard and those fashion victim Converse shoes eh, eh! Perhaps you’re right? But no. You’re not.
Jeans and a Jacket. No. The Media Outfit, or “Moutfit” as I call it says absolutely nothing. And that’s why it’s a uniform. Uniforms are a way of conforming, not standing out and not saying anything to offend anyone. Boo hiss!
But hang on… uniforms have a purpose. After all without uniforms the police would seem to be a bunch of patronising but frightening uncles with chiselled knuckles, nurses would be arrested for obscene activities involving surgical gloves and the Olympics would get really confusing in the relay races. But surely this rules don’t apply here! If you’re in broadcast media, surely you should be all about standing out and saying something special about who you are and what you do and what makes you different. No?
It’s not that I don’t think jeans and jacket can work. I have seen it work, possibly once out of about ten thousand times. I think the main problem comes in two places… firstly the jeans… and secondly… you guessed it… the jacket. The jeans are often those straight up and down jobs which make people’s legs look like blue tubes. The jackets seem often to be culled from a whole suit – the poor suit trousers discarded in favour of tough casual pantalons de Nîmes.
It’s like combining a main course and a dessert in the same meal. Beef and custard. Ice cream soup. Blackberry lasagne. Yuk.
But no I hear you cry. This is the outfit for the execs, the business leaders, the management of the media world. But no. I disagree. Even this lot need to think it out again. Get out those suit trousers. Reintroduce them to the suit jacket - yes - one made to work with the other. You’ll look much more high flying, cool, chic, and handsome. Just look at this picture of Daniel "Bond" Craig who is almost getting away with jeans et jacquet combo and then realise how much better he'd look if the jeans were matching suit trousers. I rest my case.
Oh... and buy some more interesting shoes for God’s sake.
The Drunks
Tue, Jan 19th 2010, 15:45
These guys are always on the street corner - one always has a different book, the other has a selection of caps.
Rant about the situation 'On The Ground'
Mon, Feb 15th 2010, 11:57
Has anyone else noticed lately that most of our news is happening 'On the ground'. "So what's happening on the ground?" "On the ground things look different." "We've been hearing from our man on the ground."
As opposed to what?
Our man in the clouds? Our woman in a tunnel? Our soldier hovering a few feet above the ground?
These words or phrases seem to crop up from time to time. During the floods of 2007/8 hundreds of houses had no water, and soon every other word on the news was 'Bowser'. And after the tragedy of 9/11 (or 11/9 as surely it must be) it was all anyone to do to stop themselves from saying 'Ground Zero' over and over and over again.
But now it's "On The Ground". There are people On The Ground in Afghanistan. There are civil servants On The Ground in Westminster. There were quite a lot of people On The Ground at the Copenhagen Screw-The-Earth Summit. They are probably also On The Ground in the International Space Station. There's stuff happening On The Ground on ships, in submarines and possibly even on some ground somewhere.
What's so special about being On The Ground? Surely most human activities apart from a few hinted at already qualify as being On The Ground? Walking. Eating. Sleeping. Having a poo. And most of these aren't that exciting enough to report on. But of course I'm being facetious (again) and On The Ground really means the place where something is actually happening as opposed to the place where it isn't (i.e. everywhere else... which may or may not be places with some 'ground' as well).
On the plus side it makes a change from being At The Coalface, On the Frontline or On The Shop Floor (presumably after an accident with a rogue tin of baked beans). And of course the ground is very useful for keeping one's feet on, and for hitting it in a running type way. Apparently.
In future rants... the BBC phrase 'Are you ACROSS this?' that is leaking out into public usage and the infuriating 'step up to the plate' which is used all over the UK when surely we should be 'stepping up to the crease' or maybe the non-metaphorical but perfectly functional 'taking responsibility'. Grrrrr!
