baby, it's cold outside

So, I've been awol, huh?

It's been a while, honey, but hey, don't go all huffy on me. Sure, I still love you.I'm here now, I've done gone and showed up, so that must count for something.

Where the hell do I think I've been? I've been busy with...er...life? Work? Stopped work on Midwinter's day just in time to come down with The Mother of all Rhinoviruses.  Wow - I mean we're talking one complete box of balsam tissues per diem. Heavvvvvy. Damp, too. Loud on the sneezing front, and the endless snurking made people edge away from me as they tried to politely pretend they hadn't noticed that I was dissolving in front of them. Horrible, horrible, thoughts filled my head in what little space wasn't already filled up with phlegm. At certain times of the day, I had to stop myself from tearing my nose off and hurling it into a corner of the room( there - that'll teach you to run like that). We threw a Midwinter's Night dinner party and as soon as the last guest tripped happily out of our front door, the Plague descended.  Happy Christmas - couldn't taste, couldn't sleep, could barely see through streaming rheumy eyes. Oh, what fun. NOT.

So. You don't want to hear my pathetic excuses? You're going all frosty on me? You're doing that ice-maiden thing and clipping the ends off your sentences. I can hardly hear you - what's that you're squeezing out through your gritted teeth?Your mouth goes all pinched and mean, hon. Try and be a little more understanding.  No knitting? Well, er, no. I did try and finish the dolly from helly, but honestly, hand sewing every ferking strand of her hair onto her dear little bald head was more than I could take. Look, I tried. And the individual dragon bags for all family members - well, I did finish those. Those were good. Even if everyone thought I'd bought the bags and then stuck the picture on to them. Jeez. All that effort. 

But it's all over now.Eldest daughter has been and come back from California to visit her seriously ill paternal grandmother. She left, in tears, on Boxing Day. I dropped her off and wept all my way home. I missed her like a hole in my life all the way through the holidays, and that can't have been any fun for the rest of my family. I may have said this before, but it's hell, living with the aftermath of a Dee Eye Vee Oh Arse. However, that was then, this is now, and now, I'm so happy she's back home safe. 

It's a brand New Year. We've had snow, we've had gales, we've had waaaaaay more Christmas cake than could ever be considered good for us, and we're now into the January Repentence, big-time. No money, no waistline, no sunshine....

And just before I stopped for Christmas, I had a phone call from those nice folks at Customs & Excise to announce their intention of conducting a VAT inspection at my studio. To which, the only reply has to be a resounding fuuuuuuuckittty fuck fuck. Our longstanding acccountant has just retired, and we have to acquaint a new, untried accountant with the weirdness that is GlioriCorp a.k.a Artists-Without-A- Clue-About -How -To -Fill -In -A Tax -Return. So, up there at the sharp end with the number crunchers from Hades, is, ulp, me. Oh, ghoddddddddd.

Meanwhile, artwork for 'The Trouble with Dragons' is finished. It looks as good as anything I've ever done. No, that's not right. It's the best thing I've ever done. It is the sum of everything I've ever wanted to say about our place here on planet Earth. The artwork makes me cry, and that's never happened before. 

She piddles, she fins

Or something like that. She does both in between bouts of full-on dragoning, but she also wakes up in the wee small hours with a feeling that she ought to get up and Get On With It. Like why am I lying around in bed, pray? Don't I realise that there's stuff needing made?

Had a brief foray into The World of Seasonal Commerce last week. Tooled round various children's toyshops, growing more bleak and unseasonal as the minutes rolled past. All around lay pink plastic, batteries, fake pets rolling over and playing dead, more batteries, muzak, cheesey songs with tone-deaf celebs exhorting us to feel guilty for our affluence, long queues managed by idiots who plainly enjoy the power of going as s..l..o..w..l..y.. as they can get away with before a sudden stampede of enraged shoppers club them to death with the latest Harpy Otter Deathmask with Light-up Gonads ( takes 37 AA batteries, not included) and people looking utterly miserable... 

Coming back home with a few bags of toys I barely had time to do a quick Witch Baby cover rough and then rush back out again to go to the Society of Authors' Winter Party. Jeez.  Being self-employed and in straightened circumstances means that days which pass without earning diddly-squat are days on the debit side of the Great Ledger Book. If these kind of days aren't spent doing something worthwhile like spending time with one's children, walking on a beach or climbing a hill, then they are wasted days. Wasted. Spending a day shopping is not good for my soul.

And the food at the Winter Party was the wrong side of atrocious. Next year I should offer to do the catering - I'd probably make more in one evening than I do in a whole year of selling books. Plus I had a robust discussion with a right-wing fund manager who spent most of the coffee and mints course proving what a fine fellow he was, and how he knew better than the IPCC about the likely outcome of runaway climate change. My pet subject, hijacked by a fuckwit? Oh, joy.

Let's draw a veil over that, shall we?

The knitted dolly in cotton glace for my youngest daughter is progressing nicely. Two legs, two arms, a pair of pants and half a torso are done and dusted. Must go do some more. The youngest daughter is the same child for whom I knitted the jumper at the top of this post. Amazingly, she still loves it. Amazingly, it's still in one piece. 

I knit and fiddle not

Not that I'm slacking, but the action on my dragon book has ramped up a tad, and of an evening when I would normally hit the keypad and start to blog for Caledonia, I've been collapsing on a sofa with a chunk of Green & Black's white chocolate in my mitt. This is having predictably disastrous consequences for my complexion and waistline, one of which is expanding while t'other is maculating, or peccabling or whatever you call it when someone old enough to be a grandmother starts developing zits on her chin due to chocolate excesses.

The knitting urge has collapsed temporarily due to the deep tedium of knitting a seemingly endless and boring man's sleeve in unrelenting Jaeger dark green dk wool. I say unrelenting because the eventual recipient of this sleeve ( at current rate, in the year 2097) was not wooed by the beauty of Kaffe Fasset's little circles pattern and opted for the plain jumper sans ornament, sans teeth, sans everything. 

Today I came to the conclusion that what I need is a hideously tight deadline to knit to, and not to knit the sodding sodding sleeve any more. So. It's tucked away on its turbo pins and I'm already beginning to hyperventilate with the sheer excitement of doing Something Else and doing it in time for Christmas. Today I phoned John lewis in Edinburgh and begged them to go out back and hunt for some glace cotton so that I can knit a doll for my littlest daughter. John Lewis being what it is ( a family-owned concern which has hauled itself into the 21st C while still clinging to some rather 20th C practices in the middle of achieving vast commercial success)  I was patched through to a slightly breathless lady of, I'm guessing, middle years, who puffed into the stockroom, clanged around with a set of metal stepladders, and found two balls of the right stuff for me to be able to begin a New Thing.

The yarn will come in the post, but in the meantime, I'm embroiled in making gaberdine and grosgrain bags for the extended family's presents. Every year we give each other home-made things - advent candle wreaths, jars of mincemeat, stollens, knitted hats and shawls and assorted things that show We Care, but Are Inept.

Sort of thing. The gaberdine bags came about after trawling the web one night and finding myself on the compelling site dedicated to Modbury, the town in England that eschewed the use of any plastic carrier bags, and showed the reasons why you might want to join their campaign. Rather than bore the arse off everyone with proseletising zeal, I thought it would be better to make carrier bags of such outstanding durability and uber-chic that none of my family would ever want to be seen with a plastic bag ever again. That was before I discovered how damn hard it is to make uber-chic anything. (q.v previous years' attempts at hats, shawls, etc.)  This, or these ( as in the bags) as well as the dragon book are why I haven't knitted or fiddled for a wee while. The bags (all seven of them) are nearly all sewn together and awaiting decoration.  Not being a natural seamstress, the air around my sewing machine is still blue, although nothing like as bad as the air surrounding my kitchen the year I made home-made hampers for all family members. 

God. What a laff that wasn't. To this day, I only have to mouth the word 'hamper' and my entire family begin to twitch.  They were hampers born of the long dark teatime of the cook's soul. They were hampers of such byzantine effort and complexity that the hampees ( I know, there is no such word) looked more haunted than delighted at the gift. Hampers contained bottles of creme de cassis, corked and sealed and labelled with illustrated labels; pickled pears; a tiny decorated bag of organic hand-made cantuccini; jars of marmalade, blackcurrant jelly and green tomato chutney; stollen and if that wasn't enough to make your eyes cross,  everything was arranged in baskets inside of which were nests  made from the shreddings out of my studio document shredder. 

What the hell was I thinking of?  

Haunted by the spectre of dyspepsias to come, the hampees accepted these monsters with cries of polite terror. Oh - you shouldn't've. Too right. Heavens, what a lot of trouble you've gone to. Alas, yes.  Whatever, never, never again. My family made me swear an oath upon my sacred cantuccini recipie. I will never make hampers for Christmas ever again. Gaberdine bags are a breeze by comparison. 

Well, maybe a bit stronger than a breeze. Let's say a force five.

www stands for

world without wildlife.

This is what I was raving about in yesterday's blog. It's only part of a much wider double page spread. All the dragons are surveying their drowned world, and this chap ( or chap-ess) has just chopped down the last tree.

What a laff, eh? Whoever said children's picture books were 'light' didn't know what she or he was talking about. This is such a sad book, with such a tough message and in my heart of hearts I am beginning to wonder if it's all too late. Then i take hold of myself by the scruff of the neck and Get On With...hoping.

The soundtrack to paint this picture was Joni Mitchell's latest album ,'Shine', and the title track in particular. It's a perfect 'fit'.

whisper it - I'm so proud mk 2

Apparently one is not allowed to use the words 'Stitch and bitch' without seeking permission from the originator of the phrase. People have been sued for heaven's sake.

So. Ahem. Without seeking permission from camp-Stoller or whatever, the knitters of Shetland have sensibly gone ahead and retitled the group ' Makkin' and Yakkin''.The Makkin' was always the dialect name for knitting, and yakkin' speaks for itself, so to speak.

So there. My baby grows up and changes her name. Sounds about right to me. Soon she'll start staying out all night, smoking and having underage sex, but me, I'm a tolerant parent. I'll try my best to celebrate her independence, her determination to do it all Her Own Way, her desire to march to the beat of her own drum, but inside ( sniff) I'll always remember that first rainy, dark night when she was born in an upstairs room in the HQ of Shetland Arts.

Talking of which, Donald Anderson from Shetland Arts phoned yesterday to check that I'd had all the relevant bits of paper that I need in order to be paid my writer's stipend for the residency, and in conversation he mentioned that there was snow on Ronas Hill. This, dear reader was almost enough to make me beg, cajole or even bludgeon my entire family into putting our house on the market and moving to Shetland toot sweet. Snow? What might that be, pray?

I remember snow. I remember big snow - serious snow - fourteen foot snowdrifts, endless ski-able hills outside my door, snow that lay for the entirety of Christmas and beyond, snow that inspired my eldest child to build a snow dinosaur that stood taller than me, and longer than our family car. Snow that was playpark, menace, inspiration and danger all rolled into one. Snow that nearly killed my baby daughter and me one cold March day when my car went into an uncontrollable speedy slither and launched itself straight onto the prongs of an oncoming snowplough. Snow that appeared in so many of my picture books from Back Then that I can almost document from those illustrations when, exactly the snow stopped falling in our county.

Snow that makes you glad to be inside. Snow falling when you're tucked up under a warm quilt. Snow that hushes the roads, stop traffic and turns our world into a landscape straight out of Breughel. Snow on ronas hill had the effect of making me desperately homesick for an island that I only know in part.

In the meantime, I'm painting the dragons as if time is running out. The climate change illustrations reached their hideous climax with a spread in near black and white. A drowned world populated only by dragons and jellyfish. A volcano erupting in the distance makes the land look prehistoric, but it's not. It's our land with six degrees of warming. It's bleak and pitiless, but as a concession to the small children for whom this book will become night-time reading, I left out the methane hydrates and general apocalyptic vision of Mark Lynas's terrifying book 'Six Degrees. Our future on a hotter planet'.

If you have no idea what I'm wiffling on about, can I recommend that you read Mark's book? But hurry up - tick, tick, tick, there may not be as much time to change our wicked ways as we used to think there was.

I'm so proud

Yup. That's our baby. It takes its first unaided steps and staggers into its local library. Gosh. Such an intelligent child too. My only regret is that I won't be there to enjoy it, but hey, hope you like my poster. Right now I'm having a tension square, so it must be time to down tools and go drink coffee....

not chilled

First of November and I'm in a t-shirt, feeling the unseasonal heat. Outside, a confused ceanothus is putting out little blue flowers and some of the fruit trees, I swear, are budding. Oy veh, people. Do we mention the ten ton gorilla in the room or shall we just continue to pretend we don't have to change our Wicked Ways?

Make me good, lord, but not just yet. Let me just burn more carbon, eat the fruits of some thousands of airmiles and turn a blind eye to the slave labour that produced five pairs of socks for less than the cost of that lump of coal I'm about to throw on my home fire to keep it burning.

Cue the Carmina Burana in all its dramatic glory - as a soundtrack for my current mood, it's hard to beat.

So. I won't talk about the gorilla tonight. I won't mention the fact that I have a motheaten heap of warm sweaters, unworn for three years, waiting for the weather to turn cold. I won't speak about the possibility of going for a swim in the sea at the weekend, without courting frostbite. In November. I won't talk about the landslide currently blocking the road that rejoices in the name of Rest And Be Thankful but which should be renamed Can't Take Any More Precipitation So Am Turning Into A Mudslide In Protest.

Went back to the gym last week and revisited all that fun equipment designed for the express purpose of torturing one's flesh into some semblance of fittitude or full-on buffery. Not entirely sure that my flesh has got the message, given that it prefers to lie on benches groaning fitfully and revisiting every insult paid to its tender pillowyness. sudden and brutal rediscovery of stomach muscles was beyond painful. Every cough brought a squeak of dismay as newly awakened muscles shrieked in protest. The gym had been repainted, which was all a bit dazzling given that it was only six a.m. Why white? Why not a pleasant inside-of-eyelid maroon? Urrrgh.

Nothing much had changed. Everyone was the same shape they'd been when I left eight weeks ago. Some of them were more sun-tanned, some of them had recovered from injuries and were giving it big licks on the treadmill, some of them were pleasantly surprised to see me back again. It was every bit as soul-less and isolating an experience as it sounds. Just another place where I don't really fit in despite three years of trying to make conversation. Still, it gets results.

Went for my first longish run since my horrible foot injury in May. Michael and I went to Aberlady beach ( bird sanctuary, no dogs, no dog-poo but loads of birders/twitchers/ornithologists) and he walked very fast while I ran. and gasped. And sweated and heaved. A thousand deaths were died, including my i-pod which did its flaky lock-up nonsense, and since I had no breath for running, let alone looking down and futzing around with a bit of crap technology, I had to run for the first twenty minutes in silence. Yeeeeurggggghhh. I'm one of those pathetic runners that needs music or else I spend every second trying to bludgeon myself out of packing up and going home. Fun times. NOT. Then, miracle of miracles, the i-pod self-healed and suddenly there was thumpy music with big bass action and I was off in a cloud of kicked-up sand like the nasty bloke on those old Bullworker ads.

Phwoarrrrr. She lives. She runs. She whizzes past weird posses of twitchers stationed all along the beach with their bins and 'scopes hopefully not trained on Lesser Beetroot Wheezers, or Small Gasping Coldtits or that rare winter visitor to our shores, the Blissed-Out Earbud Waggler.