round and round and round and round

Perhaps it's not too clever an idea to read the news online at guardian.co.uk before posting to this blog. Tends to colour what I want to write about.So- for once I'm not going to wiffle on about the disastrous political shenanigans going on in all our names over in Poland. Nor am I going to bore y'all to tears about the paucity of moral fibre that has led to us all saying yea to a vastly expensive bail out of the US car manufacturers. Not to mention the Merkel-led suck-up to the German automobile makers , but we're not, not NOT going to go on about that.

No.

That way lies madness. And spiralling around in ever-decreasing circles is not what I want or need right now. Right now, here is my wish-list for this festive season.
1. A posse of endearingly fey elves to do my bidding. Ooooh yes. Left a bit, right a bit, mmmmmm, don't stop.
2. A personal shopper to go and fetch what is on everyone else's lists so that I won't have to go and engage with the madness that is Edinburgh retail.
3. A pop-up masseur to iron out the wrinkled bits and a miraculous re-elasticization of my aged skin combined with a targeted weight loss in all the right places.
4. A heeeeuge and hitherto undiscovered royalty cheque to materialize in tomorrow's post.
5. A clear and present idea for the text for my next picture book.
6. A sudden ability to bow my fiddle like a diva, and a gift for being able to play Shetland reels at full speed rather than my feeble dead s..l...o...w efforts at present.
7. Oh, yeah. World peace, massive and mysterious reduction in the ppm of carbon in the atmosphere and Love for all.

LOVE is all there ever was.. Nothing else matters. Happy pre- Solstice to one and all.

my Inner Slug

Flat, I am. More like crepe woman if that didn't have older-lady with wrinkly neck connotations. However, the morning mirror informs me that I am heading for, nay am in the joyous territory of the crepey neck, so we'll drop that subject because there's nothing I can do to stem the march of time across my person.

Should celebrate it, really. But, ungrateful wretch that I am, I tend to look in the mirror and mutter 'eughhhh' rather than anything more encouraging.

Perhaps it's the lack of light that makes me feel as if I'm spread too thinly across the surface of my life. Light finally makes it feasible to go for a run along the little single track road outside my house at 7.50 a.m. and disappears entirely round about 4.30 p.m. which makes for an awful lot of time spent in darkness* wondering why I feel so sluggish and dull. The discipline of going running in the morning is a good thing, and lifts my mood to the point where I feel like a goddess - but only for an hour or so until my Inner Slug reasserts itself.

I finished the artwork for Stormy Weatheryesterday, but far from feeling triumphant and full of joy at completing a set of beautiful illustrations for what I hope will be a profoundly reassuring lullaby, I feel numb. This is because all work and no play makes Debi a boring old fart, but sadly, still an impecunious one. From various sources I hear that there are no copies of any book I've made to be had in any of the high street chain bookstores in Edinburgh. For Edinburgh, this gloom-laden illustrator extrapolates The World. How the heck am I supposed to make a living if my books aren't actually in the shops? At the time of year when people actually buy the bloody things? How are any of us, apart from the top layer of bestselling authors, supposed to put bread on the table if our wares cannot be found in the marketplace?

No - don't answer that. I'll answer it for you. One of the places that books actually can be found is through a deep discount merchant who out of the goodness of his own heart, brings a huge variety of books into workplaces around the UK and piled high, sells them so cheaply that the creators of said books do not make much more than 1% of the cover price. The cover price which is massively discounted. Why would anyone ever want to go into a bookshop when they can buy insanely cheap books at work or online through the ironically titled bookstore named after a tribe of one-breasted women? Roll up, log on, who'll buy my luvverly books? Cheap, cheap, cheap.

I feel like one of those little birds that plucks the down from her own breast to keep her chicks warm.

But hopefully some utterly misunderstood, as yet undiscovered Caledonian biomechanism will register that we are almost at the lowest point of the year, and, accordingly, will swing the nation's cheerometers over into the black once we pass the solstice. Till then, I'm clinging on, white knuckled, gritted of tooth and totally fed up with this endless year's sodding treadmill which has me unable to step off, unable to admire the view, unable to do anything other than turn, turn, turn...

*15hours and 20 minutes ecksherly