Darkness Falls, Part One

Safe home after the rigours of amusing six hundred children in tents, I have allowed myself a few hours to sift through the Sunday papers and came across this delight in the Observer.

On being asked how he will spend the hours of darkness forecast for Britain in the forthcoming winter of powercuts, financial doom and rising unemployment, Donald Macleod, principal of the Free Church School in Edinburgh replied,
'Now that we've run out of coal, gas, oil and old newspapers, we should have a nationwide network of wind turbines and nuclear power. Sadly, we don't, because they either spoiled someone's view or offend someone's principles. So the short answer is that I'll wring necks.'

Visions of our rapidly emptying oil tank being scaled by a commando force of rampant ministers, all hopped up to the gills with righteous god-given indignation. Great, huh? That's all we need. Ranks of dog-collared thugs patrolling our streets, some of them drunk on communion wine, others simply fuelled on belief that their Way is the Only One. Oh, fun times ahead, people.

The line drawing of Daisy and her Inner Demon is one of the 143 black and white illustrations I finished last week for the inside of Witch Baby and me at School ( publishing in January 09). I took approximately half an hour off to celebrate this completion with a cup of coffee, and then began my next project - a picture book called Stormy Weather. Strangely prescient, what? One wonders what, if anything will be left of Western capitalism when it is published in October 2009. It is a lovely book - I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in the doing of it. All the pencil roughs are done, so the months between now and the hand-in date in January will be spent painting watercolour artwork for every double page spread. That is, when I'm not out in tents, or at book festivals or, like next week, on tour with The Trouble With Dragons.

The tour is a week of events up and down the length of Britain, travelling by train, armed with a powerpoint thing on a usb data stick, some pens and missionary zeal ( though not of the same order as Donald Macleod's) I'm hoping to add my voice to the rising clamour regarding the urgent need for us to do something to reduce our carbon output. I'm fighting a rearguard action by attempting to engage as many children as I possibly can in the course of a week, in the hope that they will go back home and pester their loving parents into taking action.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world appears to have taken their eye off the ball entirely - obsessing about money, mortgages and the identity of the next new and sparkly leader to replace the older models who have failed us. Deckchairs? Titanic, anyone?

Hotel du Cac

I'm in downtown Newton Stewart in a somewhat unprepossessing Nameless Hotel* ( big sign outside beside the dumpster in the litter-strewn car-park telling all and sundry that the Nameless is under new management - doesn't that just make your heart sink?) and as I checked in, I noticed a sheet of laminated A4 stuck to the reception desk ( probably with the effluvia of guests gone by) bearing the fateful words

Binky and Charlene invite you and your colleagues to celebrate our Grand Opening Night. Dress informal. Party starts at 9.00 p.m.

That, my dears, is tomorrow night. Tomorrow brings two events each with 250 children, followed by the firework opening of the Wigtown Book Festival, followed by what I fervently hoped was dinner and an early night before getting up on Saturday morning to do another event in a tent and then driving 189 miles back home.

Instead...Oh. My. God. The part of me that is forever teenage wishes I'd bought my fiddle and had the cojones to drink several large shots and then join in with the Nameless Opening Party, and another part of me ( the crusty old fart) envisages a night of stomping downstairs in my PJs to demand a little bit of consideration for those of us blah de blah de blah zzzz.

Problem is - I forgot my PJs. Just how steely are my cojones, anyhoo? Have I got what it takes to stomp downstairs in the altogether and demand a little hush? Somehow, I suspect I wouldn't have to be too strident. The Shock and Awe caused by my naked arrival in the public bar would ensure that silence fell with an all-too audible thud. Eughhhhhhhh. Doesn't bear thinking about. Ladies of my age are invisible, mostly, and if rash enough to bare anything, are the subject of public ridicule.

So. Earplugs it will have to be. But the Nameless is too raw to be called a hotel. My room was recently painted - yesterday? This afternoon? The fumes are evil. I have no table to work at, no wardrobe, no drawers, no chair - just a bed with a stack of puffy pilloids which will ensure that I sleep for approximately ten minutes before waking in the Human Pretzel Position. I am shortly going to venture downstairs to brave the dining room, driven more by a desperate need for G&T rather than any appetite, since the paint fumes appear to have put paid to that. Have I unwittingly stumbled upon the secret of effortless weight loss? I'm trying to find the positive in this situation, but heck, it's a bit of an upward struggle.

Back later with an update from your own correspondent in Newton Stewart.
*I wouldn't dare name it while I'm staying in it. I choose life.

bring on the revolution

Of course, I don't really mean that, given that my recurring dystopian nightmare is of a revolution of baseball bat-wielding visigoths coming to raid our broad bean patch. Or whatever current horror my wakeful subconscious cares to throw at me in the wee small hours. Mind you, the content of each evening's ten o'clock news has been nightmare enough - this was definitely a week for giving thanks for being poor enough to possess no spare capital whatsoever, especially since we bank with what used to be called ( until Wednesday) the Bank of Scotland.

Not that they were, of late, all that great. Actually, having banked with them since I was a student ( back in the mists of time when the Romans ruled Caledonia and we were about to invent the wheel) of late, I have noticed a certain aggression coupled with a kind of dumb-assed laissez faire bordering on insolence in my dealing with the bank. Or mayhap, I am simply getting old. No. I am getting old, no mayhaps about it, but still...

The thought that out there are some persons unknown who have actually made bucketloads of profit out of a concerted whispering campaign to drive down the bank's share price is pretty shocking, but unsurprising. It has to be said that there have been a heck of a lot of Porsche Cayenne 4WD's belching around the countryside of late, and they can't all be owned by footballers, can they?

Edinburgh is full of fund managers. Or perhaps mis-managers might be a better name. The few that I've had the misfortune to meet have been so utterly morally bankrupt and cocky that one has to conclude that death is too kind an ill-wish to wish for them. Leeches, parasites, human flotsam, visit upon them every plague and pestilence, may their parts wither to match their shrivelled souls, may their children grow to curse the day they issued from such foulness, may black boils sprout from between their eyes so that by their countenances do we know them....

Or, at the very least. let them have erectile dysfunction bigtime.

There, that ought to do it. Phwoarrrrr. Bet they're quaking in their boots, eh?

attention all shipping

The days are too full right now - every waking moment accounted for and spent either working, cooking or laying down the produce of the garden for consumption over the colder months. The freezer has bag upon bag of beans - broad and French, all blanched and tucked away for later. I've been oven-drying tomatoes to the point where my dreams are full of little red orbs, and now the apples have started falling off the trees and I'll have to start on them next. And then the pears will begin...and this weekend I ought to pick the blackcurrants and and and.

Work is pretty full-on too. I'm currently up to number 99 of a total of 143 of a set of b/w line illustrations for the second Witch Baby book. This entails getting up early and arriving, bleary-eyed at my drawing board at 7.30 a.m., whereupon, in between school runs and emails and phone calls, I've been cross-hatching away like...like...er, I have no idea what I'm like when I'm drawing in such a concentrated fashion - a desperate illustrator, I think. A demented draftswoman. Whatever. It's a whole new way of working for me. In fact the entire, once-familiar landscape of publishing seems to have shape-shifted into an unrecognizable terra incognito.Due to publishing schedules, the book I'm working on has to be done at a break-neck speed, which forces me to think very, very hard, stare mightily at what I'm doing and stops me from my usual serendipitous methodology whereby I used to drift, and dream and plitter around in a box of paints, doing a convincing impersonation of a ditzy lady watercolourist.

Not any more. Off with the floaty chiffons and billowy silks and on with the tailored twill and tweed. If you follow my drift. In fact shortly, if this pace continues much longer, it'll be off with the twill and tweed and on with the leather and rubber. With studs. And chains. Let's not forget the chains, eh?

In the middle of all this time-constrained nonsense, something had to slip, and sadly, it was the gym. I am, officially, a slob. This state of affairs is, I have to say, a temporary blip in an otherwise spotless record of cardiovascular virtue, but right now, there are not enough hours in the day.There's the 143 b/w illustrations followed by a ten day book tour with my dragon book, and then , oh, puhleaze, then I will try and squeeze my 5k running and occasional visits to the gym back into my days. The think I was not prepared to let go was playing the fiddle. Even if I'm cross-eyed with tiredness, I try and fit in an hour a day. Some days, I even like how I sound.

Summer flew past. Then it rained, I think. I didn't get out as much as I would have liked. Didn't swim nearly as often in Loch Fyne. There were shoals of jellyfish making me very wary of the water. Besides, most of the time I was working my socks off. One weekend off all summer. One. The rest of them I was working one or both days. I think I can say, hand on heart that I've never worked as hard in my life as I have done this year. Part of this is simple timetabling - the books have to be done for tight deadlines. But, the other part of this punishing workload is a simple lack of money. Publishers advances are reflecting the somewhat depressed market, or at least that's what I'm being told as I'm paid what I used to earn back at the beginning of the Nineties. Urrrrghhhhh. And just to crank the stress-factor up a notch or two, my trusty Mac went down last week, and not in a Lewinsky fashion either. It died on me, a long, long way from home. Up on the Hebridean island of Lewis, in fact. It stayed dead all that long and hideous weekend during which I did my best to not think about all the 'stuff' I had stored on its silent hard drive. So, after trying to fix it myself, I called in help, and help duly took it away for intensive care and reported back that it was officially a deadmac.

So. Newmac had to be bought with the moolah earmarked for something trivial like eating or the mortgage or some such frippery, and then, oh joy, newmac had to be toilet-trained, socialized, educated and is only now standing on its own two feet for long enough to demand 'when's tea?' and 'have you washed my socks yet?'. Don't know about you, but I think I'm living in the epicentre of a Chinese curse. You know - the one about 'may you live in interesting times'. Hmm. Interesting times are here. I'm living them.

out with my Baby

Well, that's that done. 'Witch Baby & Me' is now officially out there ; yet another book to join the hundreds of thousands of other books published every year. 

At the risk of sounding like a cynical old hack, I have to pause here and say a resounding - SO WHAT?

But there's always a part of me that counters with - I did my best, wrote the best book I could possibly write, tried to give it heart, leaven it with humour and illustrate it with the very best drawings I could draw, so THAT'S what. In the general scheme of things, yeah, so what, but in my little corner of the planet, if our children are the living arrows we fire into the fray, then our books are darts of light.

And besides, there are some truly groan-makingly terrible jokes between the covers of my Witch Baby, and watching childrens' faces light up as they get my dreadful jokes and seeing their faces dissolve into giggles - that's good too. I've also had a really, really good time, introducing new, young eight-year-old readers to my imaginary family and watch as they allow their imaginations to flesh out the characters that walk around inside my head - that's pretty close to flying, actually. Damn, I think my job is one of the best  jobs a person can do. As a session with children progresses, I feel less nervous ( let's not forget here, people, that launching a book is still public speaking, even if it is with children rather than adults, and I still find the first introductory ten minutes to be a nail-biting nightmare of stage-fright and terror. As would you, I promise. Unless you have cojones of steel.)and once  I stop feeling nervous, then I can begin to fly. And Witch Baby is an easy book to fly with. Which came as something of a joyful surprise.

So I've done three days in London, trucking hither and yon in the bowels of the Underground, emerging dripping ( it's not air-conditioned down there) eating out for every meal, drinking mojitos at night at the end of a long day, limping around in pointy shoes ( the downside of touring is the wardrobe crises from hell that I undergo - what to wear. Oh, what to wear?) and talking, talking, talking.

Now, on a crammed to capacity train heading back North I think I've had more than enough of not being home. I'm tired, my tolerance levels are well into the red zone due to the presence of a crew of rugger buggars who got on at Durham and have been steadily drinking their way North. Their crass, woman-baiting t-shirts, their loud shouty voices and awful porn mags, their burping, farting and swearing.... - I know I'm sitting here looking like a vengeful, mean old harpy, shrivelled and shrewish, but if I could hit the ejector switch and launch them all into hyperspace, trust me, i'd do it. Big, drunken loutsh thugs, trampling all over everyone's sensitivities and forcing their thick and oikish inanities down all our throats. Oh, ghoddddddd. 

where's my loving-kindnesss, then? 

Pfffffffff, as one of my characters would say. It hardly needs to be said that she is a witch, a Sister of Hiss and that like her two other sisters, she  must represent some less than generous facet of my personality - my Inner Bitch. A useful facet, at times, but not one that sees the light of day too often. 

mossy heart

Decided to take time out from Poo Central to do some work. On a Friday night? Jeez. How bad, exactly is Poo Central? It's not that bad, really, just a tad puppy obsessed. I have no room to complain, in truth, since 99.9% of the mopping-up operations are carried out by Michael, but there still is only so much obsessing over has she, does she, will she, oh, not again that one can take. I need to disengage for a wee while in order to regain a sense of proportion. I need to remember that this stage will not last the rest of our lives, right? There's only so much toilet-training an intelligent puppy can undergo before her dumb owners realize that, like a small baby, she is simply too small to understand what is being required of her.

Poor thing. If synaptic pathways could be willed into existence, she'd be sitting on the toilet like a human, demanding to have her bum wiped, but as it is....well. It's Friday night and I'd rather work late than stand in the rain, begging an infant dog to void her bowels on the grass rather than the carpet.

Yes, it's raining and yes, it's the first day of the children's summer holidays and yes, we're spending them in Scotland, more or less at home, except for one short week in August when we'll decamp to Wester Ross to sample a different kind of rain. Last summer, The Dreech, started just like this one. The Dreech just about finished us all off with its incessant chill and wetness. Another one of those we do not need. And should you wish to know, the plural of Dreech is Drek. With the 'R' rolled, as in Drrrrrek.

So. The mossy heart I found on Eshaness, on the day that Mary Blance and I were lost in fog. Sometimes you find exactly what you're looking for in the strangest of places. I went to Eshaness for the view and the majestic seas, and instead I found this bonsai heart- garden of moss and sea pinks, growing on salt-drenched rocks. Proving that love can flourish in the harshest of places.

roar of distant thunder

or was it a drum roll?

Ta daaaaaaa.

Introducing She Who Has No Name Yet. We have a history of this nameless thing. It's our understandable reluctance to slap on a label that may well be the wrong one. At least, that's our excuse. In keeping with our lovely Islay, we're looking for Scottish islands names. But with one proviso - whatever it is has to receive the majority vote from all of us who are going to share a house with this dear little puppy.

So far, Cara is a strong contender. Not only a Scottish island but also means 'dear one' in Italian.

Right, must go - poo detail awaits. Who'd've thought one so small had so much inside her?