stormy weather, the movie

With one of those bits of divine serendipity, when we celebrated my handing in of the artwork for 'Stormy Weather', it just happened to be one of the filthiest days ever on the West coast of Scotland. So - your intrepid blogger here ( also known as She Who Doesn't Get Out Much) decided to go out and get live footage of just how wet it was. The waves came up over the sea wall, crossed the street and, as you can see, half-drowned innocent pedestrians.

What the video doesn't convey is the smell of the entire sewage system of Tighnabruaich backing up, swirling all about and being hurled back into the centre of the village. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case, it saves you from a billion bacteria. We went home and stood, fully clothed, under the shower.

But hey. It was, as they say in movies, Real.

what is worse than not being a nerd?

I have Mel to thank for this. Thankyou Mel. According to the Nerdtest, I'm officially' not nerdy, but definitely not hip'.

Not hip? Bloody hell. Something has gone hideously, horribly wrong. Gasp. I was so sure that having spent the better part of this evening trying to master the intricacies of uploading my own clips onto YouTube, I would have skated easily into the category of the mother of all Dweeby Nerds, but no. And then, sniff, to discover that I'm not even hip? Did I die one night in my sleep? Is there an alternative universe in which I am Forever Hip, while in this one, like Dorian Gray's portrait, I am doomed to crumble and wither into a carpet-slippered, Horlicksian nightmare of bedpans and wrinkled sagginess?

Er. Seeing as how I'm fast approaching a Significant Birthday, I'd actually rather you didn't answer that. I stood on the bathroom scales this morning and could barely hold back my shrieks of dismay. How much?That's what happens when there's not enough light to go round. I make a heroic attempt to achieve the inner glow that cometh only from the combustion of carbohydrates and alcohol. All through the dark days of November and December I kept telling myself that all the running I was doing was bound to keep the flubber under control, but five minutes before the end of my wee Winter Run, I felt each and every extra gramme I'd acquired, and all of them weighed twice what they normally did.

Until I can come to grips with how to upload video, I won't be able to share the true horror of the red blob that barely made it past the finish line, but hey - I DID DO IT. So what if I finished 1,345th out of 1,890? The most salient bit of my last sentence was the bit about finishing, not the placing or the time it took. I still pinch myself, two weeks on, reminding myself that I achieved my little goal. Proof positive that little by little, and bit by bit, if we persevere, we can achieve things that we once believed to be impossible.

As America is now discovering. A new day, and a far more hopeful feeling in the air. And as if to underline that audaciously hopeful young man's message, all around are the first shy buds of the new year. Bring on the new.

A marked lack of lumens

Lordy, but is it just me that thinks the days are getting darker, not lighter? Seems like we wake in darkness, the sun drags itself above the horizon, effortfully hauls itself up to the treeline and then, exhausted by such Herculean efforts, sinks back over the rim of the land once more with a barely disguised snore.

All I can say is thank heavens I've finished all illustrations for Stormy Weather ahead of its impossible deadline. Trying to paint pale watercolour washes in these kind of light levels would be an exercise in severe eye strain, three helical daylight bulbs notwithstanding. No. Stormy Weather the artwork is tucked in a plastic slip, zipped into a portfolio and awaiting transport with me down to London. Handing it over to Bloomsbury in three days time which is hugely exciting, but slightly overshadowed by the imminence of the Great Winter Run which is - gasp - tomorrow.

To which the only proper comment is YEEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH, what the hell possessed me to sign up for it?

My dear children yawn and sigh and roll their dear little red eyes so far backwards in their heads I swear they'll cause their eyeballs to slip down the back of their mocking little throats, but for Mummy, it is a Very Big Adventure, this going for a run-thing. They are deeply unimpressed, and only the littlest one can be persuaded to haul ass out of her bed on a Saturday morning and tool into chilly Edinburgh along with her loyal Daddy to come and watch Mummy be very embarrassing,turn very pink, and, alas, probably come in very almost probably last. Speed not being one of the things I seem to be able to get the hang of, no matter how much I train. Speed, breathing, elegance and, let's not forget, discovering an inner ability to glide uphill without sounding like I'm about to blow all gaskets.

Everyone says - get a grip, it's only 5k, but I have to point out that the first 1.5k are up a hill that is steeper than a steep thing. Yup. That steep. I can hear you sucking air. I knew you'd be impressed. Heck, I'm impressed, and I haven't even seen this hill myself. If I was a mad keen competitor, I would undoubtedly have already run the course twelve times over, but I don't want to win, I just don't want to make an absolute idiot of myself.

However, my inner Dammit-I-Want-To-Win demon may well rear its ghastly head tomorrow and give my feet wings, but somehow I doubt it. I suspect halfway up that hill I may just settle back into the gasping and clammy embrace of the Bloody-Hell-If-I-Get-Out-Of-This-Alive-I-Swear-I'll-Never-Do-Anything-So-Dumb-Ever-Again demon. This demon and I have met before on Scottish mountaintops when, confronted with a horrible, horrible vertiginous ridge, my legs turn to overcooked linguine and I begin to plea-bargain with a divine being that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. At which point, that demon surfaces. I'm told it hangs around A&E wards too...

Anyway. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? With luck, a healthy glow of cardiovascular virtue and that glorious feeling of a fear vanquished. And possibly, a photo to scare the children.

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

and home again

Another train, in the dark, heading North. Bjork on the earbuds and a feeling of a job well( ish) done. Two events with mixed age groups of children today - the little ones in the morning appeared to be half asleep, verging on comatose; the afternoon group was sparkier and waaaay more fun in terms of audience participation. Go figure. At times like this morning I wonder, as I stand up there drawing and drawing and talking non-stop to fill up the endless yawning silences, I wonder what the hell am I doing up here?

Is it me? Or is it them? Or is it just that the us isn't working? So, for my partners in non-creativity this morning, I have this to say - it didn't work out, did it? It may have been me, it may have been all of you ; but no, there were small pockets of resistance, some of you smiled shyly, but the rest of you looked as if you were hoping it would all be over soon so that you could get back to whatever it was you were doing before your thoughtless parents dragged you out of bed/away from the tv/the playstation and forced you into a car/bus/train to make sure you participated in a free but ticketed event at a book festival that is stunningly, brilliantly, wildly enthusiastically run by a team of unpaid volunteers. 

The key word in that last sentence was 'participated'. Dear children, for the majority of you this morning, your sum total contribution to this event was... to look bored. Bored, bored and beyond bored. I'm sorry that you felt that way. Certainly makes me wonder what I was doing wrong, or even if there is anything I can do to wake children up out of that kind of depressing torpor because whatever it takes, I sure didn't have it. Not this a.m. 

However, there were pockets of resistance. Not all of you looked like the flesh and blood embodiment of that well-worn teen look of 'yeah, whatever'. Not all of you made me wish I'd chosen a more rewarding occupation like manual sewage operative. Not every single one of you looked dead from the neck up. So....to the little boy and girl who made a big effort to make up for the embarassing shortfall in the audience involvement of this morning, a thousand thankyous. For smiling. For making an effort to join in. For connecting. Thankyou. 

 

natcherl born traveller, me

Bizzarely, I'm at my happiest writing-wise when I'm on a moving train. There's something about being rocked by the motion and locked in my own little applemac bubble. Works for me, every time. Which does rather nake me think that should I get another suicidal urge to write another beast of a novel, I'll probably have to acquire a railcard and spend a year travelling on the great iron road. Which is all very well if you're Paul Theroux with little in the way of family committments, but totally impossible if you're moi.

The only way it could work for me would be if I shuttled backwards and forwards between Dunbar and Edinburgh in the hours when I'm not having to do the school run. I think one of the true joys of travel is the fact of being surrounded by one's fellow citizens without any of them having any earthly idea of who you are. Sure, you can do some covert detective work and assess your fellow passengers by virtue of what they carry, but other than that, anonymity rules.

So - a combination of close physical proximity and the alone-ness of being utterly unknown. Seems to free up some synaptic pathways and allow the words to flow. And flow they must because I'm off to another book festival - this time the Northern Children's gala day in Newcastle whic is always good for meeting my colleagues and having a good moan. Writers can moan and moan and moan, but they tend to do it in flowery language, and even their most vitriolic outbursts are couched in wonderful prose, so tonight should be a blast. and it's always helpful to know that we're all in it, all of us wallowing round in the post-Potter aftermath. 

The wordyhurricane came, it flattened our little world and we're now picking ourselves up out of the wreckage. And, oh, the stories we could tell....