do not adjust your set

and please fasten your seatbelts...we are currently experiencing some e-turbulence. Why the heck I'm incapable of uploading trimmed and perfect photos to exactly the spot on my blog where I want them to go, as opposed to where some insane logic-gate deep inside the Blogger interface has decreed they will go, I'll never know, but for what it's worth - I'm so sorry you have to endure my technical ineptitude. Yes, I know there are two versions of the same picture. And yes, I know it relates to something at the end of this post. God. I'm having a bad electrical goods day, okay? Pass the axe, Eugene. My brand-new and wondrous studio subwoofer's gone on the fritz, as have the household amp and cd player and all of this is making me think that last week's rolling power outages have killed a lot of our electrical equipment, despite things being plugged in via surge protectors. Is this part of a new future in which we slowly and agonizingly wean ourselves off all things electric? And if so, why couldn't it have been boring stuff like the vacuum cleaner and the iron rather than the sodding hi-fi? Urrrrgh. Or might it be that Mercury is in retrograde and that's what's wrong? Peace and love and pass the healing crystals, man.

Tomorrow, the vatman cometh, and due to the hi-fi pox or Mercury-induced vapour fits I won't be able to send deep sub-woofy vibrations up through the soles of his feet as he pores over my vat records. Muttering blackly to himself as he inputs stuff into his calculator and frowns. Meaningfully. What a fun job that must be. NOT.

And what a humourless bunch Customs and Excise are. What fun we shall both have tomorrow when he nit-picks through the last three years of numbers I have diligently crunched on the government's behalf and I sit nearby, on standby in case he wants to interrogate me as to why I thought that three bags of Smarties, a Chris Stout CD and a cajun chicken wrap were vat-able expenses. I have to be there while he disembowels my business. I imagine I'll not be concentrating properly on my wee black and white illustrations for Witch Baby. Not with The Suit Of Menace muttering in a corner of my studio. 

God. Why me, lord? Why two 'random'  investigations within three years? I don't know a single other author who's had to go through this and those fellow writers with whom I've raised the thorny question now appear to regard me as a contagious vatplague carrier. 

Popular, I ain't. 

Anyway. by way of light relief, here's last week's work - an illustration of one of Amnesty International's  Declaration of Human Rights. It's a children's book to be published in December to raise funds for Amnesty by selling the book and also by a charity auction of all the artwork from the book. My page was the declaration about being able to think what you like, say what you think and share those thoughts with other people. Which is a great idea if you can get away with it, but in my experience, is tantamount to career suicide in certain circles. My lips are sealed. Mmmmhmmm, wild horses, mffle pflffle.