The lure of a good cake

Poor Mr Wolf. So hungry, he's been reduced to eating his hat. And then the very cake he had his eye on has been nabbed by that teeny wee sprite thingy - it's enough to make a grown wolf weep. Furry tears. Tears of furry. Oh, shut up, Gliori.

Even though this picture only exists in black and white, its overload of shweet shtuff still has the power to make me want to make a dash for the cake tins, only I happen to know that they're empty. Well, not quite empty, but the birthday cake tucked inside one of them isn't mine, it belongs to Michael, and it would be morally wrong of me to sneak into the house while he's out and nibble bits of his cake. Even if I did bake it. With my own hands. Sandwiching it together with my own greengage jam. From Michael's trees. Ah.

Sigh. Kitchen morality... Keeps you thin but boring.

Anyhoo - on another note, finally taught myself Bethany's Waltz (by Shetland fiddler and composer Jenna Reid) which I've been meaning to do for ages. Lovely, lovely, lovely tune. To add to the tottering pile of tunes that all vie for attention inside my head, some faded from disuse, some bright and shiny due to being taken out and polished frequently, and some, like fingermangle*, needing me to sprout five extra fingers and a whole new brain ( but where to put the extra appurtenances? And would my family still want to know me post-sprouting? Somehow, I doubt it) in order to even come close to being able to play the damn tune. In this lifetime.

*Mak a Kishie Needle, Dye. Well, you did ask.

A very Scottish wolf

...and then, on the next page, it rains.

Introducing Mr Wolf. Mr Wolf and basket. What d'you mean 'real wolves don't have baskets?' Jeez - do you have a lot to learn about real wolves. Come and see me later and we'll complete your education. Suffice to say, there's no room for anything as prissy as an umbrella in that bijou little shopping basket, so Mr Wolf is going to get wet. Actually, there's no room for anything in there. Whisper it, but I think it's an accessory. And he hasn't got an i-phone. Probably hasn't heard of FurBook. Or Tweeter. And he hasn't straightened his fur. Or shaved his furry little - oh, that's quite enough of that, I think. An unreconstructed Celtic wolf, then.

Savage. A little bit of RRRRRrrrrrrrrrrufff. Mmmm.

Bless. I'll have a dozen, thanks.

Hack, cough, sheesh what a mess.

Dusty in here, or what? How long has it been? Two years? Oh my gorrrrd. How time flies when you're having a horrible time.

Right. First things first. A troll to evict. ExCUSE me. Just why exactly it had to post its illiterate yibblings in triplicate, I have no idea, but anyway, out. Bin. Forever cast into the Outer Darkness, but thanks for letting me know that I need to go back to Woodstock in my Prius. Oh wot laffs. And all for writing a book about climate change. Let's hope that particular troll gets a job insulating attics in the Nu Economy. With Itchwool. *

Next. Some redecoration. New pictures on the wall. From my new book called 'The Scariest Thing of All' and trust me, it's autobiographical. Oh, what a time we've had. Oh, the thinks you can think. In the middle of the night.

Anyhoo. Laters. Miles to go. Promises to keep and roughs for a new book to do and tunes to learn. The days are just packed.

*Troll beware - it has the documented side-effect of causing vascular torpor. But you've probably got that already. In spades. And other parts.

please, somebody, plug me in

I'm imagining a crash team breaking down the door and dashing inside to find me, wan and limp, flopped in a corner of my studio, index fingers still twitching feebly in a rictus-like attempt to air-type out one last post before I flatline.

One... last...post....say, didn't Ry Cooder sing that once? Or was it a meatball? Or have all the songs I've ever listened to while I work and work and work all run together into song-soup? And do I even care?

The crash team are distracted by the studio. I'm making landed-fish gaspy sounds and needing their immediate attention, but they're too busy pulling books off the shelf and exclaiming - wow - I had that when I was a kid. Jeez, did she write that too? Oh, my, I loved that one. Mum used to read me that at bedtime. And that one too. Just how many books has she written?

Seventy six...I gasp, but my voice is fainter than a line writ small in 8H pencil.

They peer down at me, and they all look so young, and far away. They don't read books made of paper now, d'you know? What I do, in the writing and illustrating of books on paper - well, that's kind of quaint and dinosaurish. I knew if I lived long enough this would happen. I have become a living curiosity. I still, dammit, prefer pens and paper to just about any other recording medium.

I'm lying there, gasping pathetically and hoping they might be able to use the USB slot at the back of my neck or the Firewire TM connection in my ear to connect me to the grid, otherwise my hard drive is going to dump all my remaining data onto the rug. Via my nostrils. And that won't be a good look.

Or maybe they'll use a Stryker saw to unzip me from sternum to pubes and peel me back to reveal a smaller, younger, fresher version of the me that is draped, like a strand of overcooked linguine, across the sofa that I used to take afternoon naps on, back when I was trying to write six linked novels in six years followed by four linked younger novels in three years topped off with five hundred line drawings in three months. Or was that three blinks? Or was it forty younger novels? Or.

I forget. Unsurprisingly, memory, then eyesight go first.

Maybe - and this is the kindest scenario of all - just maybe they'll unscrew me at the waist, and lift my top half off my bottom half, and inside, there'll be another me that looks just like the one that's been unscrewed. And inside that one, there'll be another, and another, and another, and another, right down to what, when our girls were little, we were pleased to call 'the bean'. The smallest matrushchka of all, the core dolly, the girl in the middle of the woman in the centre of the lady. The one where you can barely make out her features, since they were painted by an underpaid woman with a one eyelash brush. Core dolly. Babeheart. She is so very small, and so very well guarded. Was so very well guarded.

And then our puppy will nudge past the crash team and stick out her long, long tongue ( you would not believe how long that dog's tongue is) and, schloooop. I'd be gone.

putting my witch to bed

Can't quite believe I've finished the illustrations for Witch Baby and Me After Dark, and not only finished them, but parcelled them up and posted them to London. 

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow morning and automatically think - what am I going to draw today?- and the answer comes - the artwork for a new Mr Bear book, maybe then I'll believe I've done it. Or maybe when I see the hole on my drawing board where WB&MeAD used to be, I'll feel bereft, anti-climatic and flatter than a flat thing.

I tell you, though, WB&MeAD ( as she is known) was a labour of love. One hundred and eighty seven illustrations in all. One hundred and eighty seven? Somebody shut me up.

Here's one of them, fresh out the oven.

living in stupid times

Tonight we went out to see a small local screening of  'The Age of Stupid'. To be honest, I'm completely blown away by it - partly because most of the predictions on which this deeply disturbing prediction of future climate catastrophe is based have been shown to be too conservative and cautious in their scope. The IPCC have to go through a ton of peer-reviews, re-writes and general toning down ( the detail of which would make your average writer throw in the towel in disgust and go get a career in something less demanding like writing up experiments in quantum mechanics with a goose quill pen dipped in toffee )before they can publish anything relating to MMGW, and consequently their data is past its sell-by date before it even hits the shelves.

So - hard as it is to take on board, the future could well be even worse than the film showed? Gulp. The words toast, utterly are and we come to mind. Hosed, stuffed and completely fecked  can be substituted for toast should carbonized bread product seem like too gentle a description for the fate awaiting us. The film states categorically that unless we do something, and do it soon ( like get our carbon emissions way down by 2015 at the latest) we're heading for extinction - or as somebody said in the film, 'Mankind appears to be determinedly focussed on the little patch of sand upon which it is standing as a tsunami sweeps towards us'. 

Or, put differently

So, if you know a dragon

and most of us do

ask it if it thinks that this story is true

for if we can't see that our stories are linked

then sadly, like dragons

we'll soon be extinct.

D'you know what was the most terrifying thing about this film? Not the bald facts of the mess we're in. Nor the possibility that we may already have reached the tipping point beyond which we will be unable to prevent runaway climate catastrophe. Nor the exposure of a fraction of the ghastly underbelly of the oil industry with its tentacles reaching out across the globe to draw us all into a web of culpability for atrocities practised in the name of Big Oil. 

No. None of these was as frightening as the fact that only about twenty people bothered to come along and see 'The Age of Stupid.' If it is screened somewhere near you, please, try to go and see it. 

http://www.ageofstupid.net  will show where it is being screened. It's powerful, moving, funny, wise and, I think, the most important film I've seen for years.  Or you could just file it under 'forget'. Apathy is indeed a weapon of mass destruction. 

no hay fiesta, amigos

Once upon a time, I went to the Hay Festival, did my event, was presented with a white rose and, much later, the crate of champagne that is Hay's wondrous tax-free payment for services rendered. I stayed in Laura Ashley's old home - now a hotel of deep beeswax and buttonback leather luxury, and dined and breakfasted with authors far more famous and celebrated than myself. 

Two things stood out of that time - one was the morning I had breakfast with a mortally hungover author who was, for reasons that I shan't go into here, giving a wind-up paper bat its trial flight over her porridge bowl ( porridge - with a hangover? yeeeearrrrghhhh) while giving every indication that she was about to throw up into her linen napkin. 

The other thing was that after dinner the night before - also with famous authors and harrassed publicists - I sat down in a deep sofa - actually collapsed would be more accurate - and felt a chill breath all down my spine. This proved to be the zip of my dress giving way in its entirety, and effectively reducing my frock to something more like the kind of gown one slips into prior to serious surgery. Crossing the acreage of Aubusson on my way back to my room to effect a quick change was a journey I have no desire to repeat.

So why do I always feel like a geriatric version of the Little Matchgirl when Hay comes and goes and I'm not invited, again? Cool and hip festivals bring me out in hives, as a general rule. I've never felt cool or hip, and you can usually get a seat at any event I've ever done, right up until the doors close. Which is a nice way of saying that I rarely sell out. Any more. I did, once or twice, way back when, and once I'd stepped onto the podium and stopped shaking, I revelled in the buzz. My goodness - what a heady feeling it is to play to a packed auditorium. Whooooooo, it's not rock and roll, but it certainly comes close.

The de-zippered dress was never the same again, btw. Lacking the skills to insert a full-length zip in a linen dress, I employed a local seamstress to do the job for me. She, I am sorry to say, made a complete arse of the job, and the frock now languishes at the end of the wardrobe which is a scant black plastic bag's length away from being recycled.

However - the wind-up paper bat lives on. Two years ago, I found myself emailing the famous author and asking her if she would name her source of wind-up mammals. Being famous, and kind, she went one better - she sent me the remains of the same Bat at Hay Breakfast. Unfortunately, BaHB had suffered the ravages of time, and fell out of the envelope in its component parts. Undaunted ( I lie - I was deeply daunted, but not irrevocably so) I set about trying to find a substitute bat. Finally, after much purchasing of secondhand books on paper folding/ automata, I discovered a source of wind-up paper butterflies. Spent a merry week pulling the wings off the butterflies and trying to cut out and retro-fit all manner of black paper, plastic, tissue, cloth by way of substitute. In the end, after many, many doomed attempts, a high street retailer's January Sale plastic bags provided the perfect black plastic for my bat wings and the rest you can see for yourself on http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1417.html 

At least, I hope you can, but being about as technologically capable as the bowl of porridge that the original bat nearly ended up in, you may perhaps encounter some difficulty accessing the link. You may have to, gasp, manually input it, which I guess is several keystrokes too many. Suffice to say, the bat, and several of his brothers and sisters, puts in an appearance.