I’m not going to lie ; the above travesty in wrinkled Goretex isn’t going to win me any awards for best pitched tent of 2026. Saggy in all the wrong places, it looks as if it had been hastily erected by someone with zero experience of camping, stumbling around in the dark, possibly after necking several stiff drinks and finally deciding - ochhhh, it’ll do.

Instead of which, it took two elderly and seasoned campers the better part of fifteen minutes to unpack the groundsheet, find a level bit of ground, crawl around on protesting knees, arguing about the exact degree of tension required to attain groundsheet optimisation, whereupon one of us headed back to the main party and the other cursed her way around in the undergrowth, growing increasingly cross as the flysheet failed to pull the whole assemblage into a state where Brown Owl might award her a Brave Effort badge to add to her collection of badges signifying various milestones in a long and challenging life.1

I did, however, finally decide ‘Ochhhh, it’ll do,’ and stomped off to drink gin with my family.

Night the first: Beloved headed back to the comforts of home as darkness fell, sensible man that he is. I stayed on, deciding that the rare pleasure of two sleepovers with our grown children in a woodland setting was worth the considerable discomforts of having to spend two nights under canvas. We huddled round the woodburner in the cabin, drinking herbal tea to postpone the moment when we headed off in the chilly night to our separate tents. Needless to say, the herbal tea was a mistake.

Possibly you’re thinking the whole notion of camping was a mistake, given that despite it being late May, it was unseasonably cold and yet another rain shower was turning the whole tree canopy into a drippy assault course. We stood shivering at the standpipe, brushing teeth and trying to continue a conversation through mouthfuls of minty froth. To have running water onsite is an incredible luxury.

This is, after all, the same family we camped with for three whole nights on the shores of Loch Fyne twenty one years ago

where we endured deep gloom, horseflies, deer ticks, bracken over our heads

jellyfish, instant potato ( AVOID) and a boat which needed hauled up onshore every hour less it floated away and be lost forever in the same way six cans of beer, set to cool in the shallows, had vanished forever, much to our sons’ chagrin.

That long-ago campsite had no running water. We had to bring our own. Plus enough sachets of instant hot chocolate to placate outright mutiny on the part of our poor, innocent children who’d been sold the idea of camping as something entirely different from the midge-bitten, overcast skies, lost beer, burnt sausage-fest of their lived experience. But the family that camps together…

either murders each other in their tents or goes on to repeat the whole traumatic experience year in, year out as some self-flagellating form of family therapy.

The gin helps. Most of us drink it now that we’re older.

Anyhoo. Back to May 2026. The ancient shed surrounding the composting toilet had developed such a pronounced lean that it was almost impossible to exit without feeling one was on board the Titanic during it’s bow pointing starboards phase. Plus, spiders… So many spiders just waiting for the moment of peak personal vulnerability to brush their legs ( mandibles? eyeballs?) against whichever areas of human skin were available.

Floundering through my tent’s two zippered doors in the beam of a head torch, I wriggled and thrashed out of my boots, tucked them in the porch pockets, reversed into the inner sanctum and zipped myself in for the night. I had brought my pillow from home, ditto pyjamas. I’d sprinkled both of these home comforts in camomile oil in the hopes of aromatherapying myself into a coma. I had earbuds, some stunningly boring podcasts and audiobooks to seal the deal and if all else failed -

I’d downloaded some transcription software onto my phone and actually envisaged dictating a chapter of my adult novel, to myself, in the dark. The children’s tents were far out of earshot of their mother’s creative mutterings, were I to find myself sharing my tent with a muse2. I zipped into my four seasons bag, pulled the hood snug round my face and embraced the night. It was, at least at first, utterly idyllic.

Listening to the overhead pattering of rain through the trees and staying warm and dry. Being part of the night life in a wood yet separated from it by a layer of down, goretex and some effortfully inflated cells in a Thermolite air mattress is one of the best feelings. Smug and snug.

Outside, owls hooted, foxes barked, and the sound of distant traffic finally ceased around 11.45 p.m. I dozed, woke frequently, realised that I was in fact, cold. ( 4 seasons, huh? ) It was barely zero degrees outside, and yet I was too cold to sleep. I considered unzipping and pulling my discarded clothes back on but reasoned that such efforts would wake me up completely, whereas lying still and moaning to myself would probably return me to a fitful and twitching slumber. Until the herbal tea demanded release from the confines of me.

So I unzipped a. the bag, b. the inner sanctum, c.the flysheet and stumbled out to find a tree. Sorry, tree. Repeated the whole palaver in reverse and then lay awake and shivering until 4.15 a.m whereupon I decided to head home for a shower. A hot shower.

Needless to say, the subsequent night under canvas was spent wearing a merino mid layer long sleeve top and leggings. I was toasty warm but utterly unable to sleep. The audiobooks and podcasts remained unopened, the novel unwritten but oh - the thinks you can think…

Sheesh.

It’s been a week.

Just about every digital thing that could go wrong, did so. The error messages and 404s and 500 internal system errors and ‘oops, our bad’ proliferated like you would not believe.

I tried to be Zen about it, and failed. On the fifth and final attempt to get my whatsisname to speak to my thingumabob, each and every attempt requiring me to input my name, address, birth date, star sign, allergies, coffee preferences and a slew of password-acceptable numbers, letters, special characters, Dingbats, hieroglyphics and strings of Java code, I lost the plot completely and went out to kick the e-car. Hard.

In other news, I’ve just handed in my end of financial year accounts to Messrs Persnickety and Bean-Counters Plc and am feeling the gloom descend. How exactly are creatives meant to ride this one out? And here is where social media is, for me, utterly unhelpful. I know that to every nail, everything looks like a hammer, but I swear the internet is full of joyously busy, successful, up-to-their-eyes-in-work illustrators and writers. Which is very cheerful to see, lovely to behold and makes me feel…

Well, it certainly makes me feel something.

Unfortunately, while I can easily distract myself from such feelings during the day, at night, in the dark, inside my head, I wake up and panic about a future that is totally unknown ( but I try to know it) unguessable ( but I second-guess it) and unpredictable ( but I peer into a glass darkly, and see foreshadowings, reflections of past eras and a whole list of potential scenarios, NONE of which will probably happen, but most of which are grimmer than Grimm)

But that’s anxiety for you. It knows where I live. It shows up when I’m at a low ebb, drains my batteries of joy and informs me that I’m just not very good at adulting.

And yes, I have had therapy. Loads of it.

On a happier note:

We had a stupendously successful increase in Green MSPs here in the Lothians after Thursday’s Holyrood Election Being part of that story has been utterly life-affirming and simultaneously jaw-droppingly , gob-smackingly, eye-openingly…let’s just go with educational, shall we?

There is much work to be done.

I’m being very brief here because my batteries are depleted and I know I need to recharge. Which in our current state of fiscal AAAAARGHHHH1 means going camping. In Scotland. About five miles up the road. Yes, under canvas. While you read this, snug in your house with a roof, possibly tucked up in bed, or on a comfy sofa, or in the middle of breakfast, or lunch or whatever, I will be wrangling with a tiny toothpaste tube of a tent, a deflated thermarest mat, a definitely-they-lied-damnably 4-seasons sleeping bag and, if last year’s camping was anything to go by, absolutely zero hours of sleep whatsoever.

Which should give me hours and hours to contemplate my anxiety menu and make a selection from the neuroses on offer. Slainte, y’all. See you next week xxx

Let’s dive straight back in, shall we? This edition of Bonus Content is the follow-up to last week’s newsletter which was all about the why of my book, The Trouble with Dragons. This edition is about the how.

So. How. Trying to write a picturebook about the impending catastrophe of the climate crisis is a tough call. I don’t know how other artists have managed to pull it off but I felt obliged to frame the subject in a way that wouldn’t cause children to have nightmares while simultaneously remaining truthful to the increasingly uncompromising bleakness of the IPCC’s predictions.

And that was then. That was back in 2007. Nineteen years ago.

Since then…

For once, I have no words.

Look. Here’s an infinitesimal fraction of what we’re losing.

And I’m 100 percent sure that you, just like me, have many similar images of the natural world tucked away inside your camera, your phone, your hard drive, your holiday photo album and anywhere you cache your treasures. Just in case they are lost forever. Just so that you have a record of how the world used to look. The world of the Before Times.

Before we went 100% Dragon.

So. How to explain the grave peril we were in without causing alarm? Back when I began the process of dreaming up this book, my first thought was utterly irreverent. Probably because my response to terror is frequently to try and de-escalate by using humour as a kind of fire extinguisher. Hence:

Santa Claus up to his knees in melting ice with an obliging polar bear holding his hat. Because in a warming world, Santa’s icy homestead would have melted into a giant puddle. There. That’ll get the message across. If the grown-ups keep on burning fossil fuels, there’ll be no Christmas, in fact, there won’t even be a lump of coal in your stocking.

Santa and his polar bear companion did put in a cameo appearance in the book but thankfully, I didn’t pursue this lame idea any further. Instead, I tried to gather every single thing I’d read and understood about the climate crisis and write about it in as factual and non-sensational a form as possible. With one proviso: there was no way I was going to sugar-coat the real danger that we were facing.

The whole point of making the book was to get children on side. To alert them sufficiently to the existential threat that we were facing and to engage their considerable powers of persuasion1 in the effort to get the grown-ups to pay attention and change their ways before…2

As you can probably imagine, I struggled with how to write the truth without spreading fear. How to sound the alarm whilst at the same time saying don’t panic. I went backwards and forwards and round and round, which is to say I wrote and scored out and rewrote. I did this on repeat.

I went for long walks. I muttered stanzas to myself, like some crazy lady of the woods. I tried it this way( prose), that way ( rhymes) and finally, I found a way in.

Which was - what if I didn’t write the book with humans as the creators and victims of the climate crisis? What if I substituted a race of mythical creatures? A bunch of fire-breathing beasts who were causing the world to burn, mythical beings whose actions had turned their hitherto perfect planet into a burning hellscape? That wouldn’t be nearly as frightening, would it? I could lay out the case for what was coming to our planet if we didn’t mend our ways… but at a complete remove.

Thus ; it wasn’t us (who were burning down the house and were about to suffer the consequences) it was the dragons.

Phew! Those pesky dragons, eh?

However, less you think I diluted the message, on the very last page of the book, the narrator addresses the reader directly.

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.

The image on this, the book’s final page is a dragon parent reading a bedtime story to their child.

And just to hammer the point home, the dragon child is pointing to the most frightening picture I’ve ever painted from the actual The Trouble with Dragons book.

‘Ask it if it thinks that this story is true.’

In my reading on the subject, I had stumbled across references to the existence of methane clathrates. These are deep frozen, vast bubbles of methane which are beginning to bubble up from their centuries old storage in the (now melting) permafrost. Methane being a greenhouse gas several factors of awful beyond dear old CO2 . Apparently, there’s enough methane in cold storage to drive global temperatures far beyond a pissy 2 degrees of warming. In fact, this was my vision of a world with 6 degrees of warming, which is probably the kind of world where most of the methane clathrates have entered our atmosphere.

Those dragons, eh?

Anyhoo. I’m sorry. You came here for lighthearted stories from the world of children’s publishing and what do you get? A message from The Dark Side. In my own defence, can I just say that my current lack of jollity has probably got a lot to do with the conversations I’ve been having with the electorate on their doorsteps? Conversations that make me want to go and stand under that beautiful spider’s web and tear my hair out. To stand in a forest and howl like a wolf. To lie in the moss and beg forgiveness from our beautiful biosphere. Forgiveness for not making it our number one priority to halt the ongoing destruction of our exquisitely beautiful home planet.

Like - what the hell are we thinking of? Why are we simply going about our lives while our only house is on fire?

You know the drill. You’ve read your Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, Jill Lepore etc. You love David Attenborough’s life-affirming documentaries. You know exactly what the score is. And possibly, like me, you’re peering into your fridge and wondering what the heck to make with one withered aubergine and a pack of on-its-dates halloumi? Wondering if you can fit in yoga into your ridiculously crammed schedule? Wondering why you feel exhausted every time you poke at your little black rectangle of doom? Wondering why you are drawn to being constantly informed about the endless ongoing wars and genocides and biosphere emmiseration against the backdrop of a climate that is clearly letting us know that This Cannot Continue.

Hmmmm.

The actual dedication for The Trouble with Dragons is

  For my children
with love and hope

While I still think we can turn this one around, I’m beyond tired. I’m doing my best to get this message out there, but I cannot do it on my own. If any of this has struck a chord with you, then please~

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And finally, look, here’s one of the billions of reasons why all of this matters -

I think it’s fair to say that if we love something, we’ll do our best to protect it.

Our home planet deserves nothing less than our deepest love. Every atom, every creature, every single living thing.

Chopping down the very last tree ever to grow on planet Earth? Well, that’s a pretty uncompromising start to this week’s newsletter, let alone a picture book.

First things first: hello, constant reader. Hello, occasional reader. Hello, new reader. Hello to this invisible community of hearts and minds out there on the Net. Thankyou for your willingness to spend a little time with me here.

Like you, I’m somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff to read, had I but world enough and time. Which none of us do, not now. Which is one of the reasons I appreciate your attention when I send out this weekly newsletter and you generously take the time to read it. Together we’ll imagine a better world into being, one picturebook, one newsletter at a time.

Onwards!

Like many picture books, the idea behind The Trouble With Dragons began with a conversation. As an artist, I’m frequently oblivious to the arrival of an idea, mainly because at the exact moment of its appearance, I’m usually too busy running my mouth in conversation with another human. It’s not until afterwards, sometimes several years afterwards, that the seed of the idea takes root. I can see where ideas come from in my rear-view mirror, but at the time….pffffff. My idiot brain is too busy making connections and filtering noise to notice.

Anyhoo. Back in the innocent days before climate change had seeped into the global consciousness to a meaningful extent1, I was appearing at the Wigtown Book Festival in Dumfries and Galloway. This was several years before I conceived of a children’s book about climate change that didn’t greenwash the whole matter, or end happily ever after with a mass uptake of low energy lightbulbs. Such concerns hadn’t really suggested themselves to me as subject matter for a picturebook for small children. Not then, I hasten to add.

Our Book Festival accommodation was in a very upscale B&B, with breakfasts served at a large communal table. I was applying myself to a rare delight - a cooked breakfast with the full range of grilled and fried beasts and veg, when fellow author Mark Lynas arrived with his wife and infant and, having settled them at the table, gazed out of the window and groaned.

‘Not another 4x4,’ he said, ‘Why would anyone want to drive one of those things ?’

I turned a rosier shade of nitrates than my bacon and whispered that actually, it, um, ahhhh, cough, er, was my 4X4…

Mark didn’t immediately beat me to death with a vegan sausage, nor did he belabour the point regarding my appalling choice of transport, but the unspoken implication of what the heck were you even thinking of, woman? hung in the air like a bad smell. I felt outed as a planet-trashing, Chelsea-tractor-driving heathen. Come to think of it, I was a planet-trashing, Chelsea-tractor-driving heathen. Oh, ghodddddddd…. Suddenly, I wished that I still smoked. The urge to absent myself from breakfast and go have a fag in the carpark was pretty compelling.

However…

Mark, it transpired, was appearing at Wigtown to raise awareness of his book ‘High Tide: How climate crisis is engulfing our planet’ and was giving a talk that very morning. Did I want to come?

Which was the pivotal morning when I woke up out of my idiot dream of endless growth on a finite planet and saw for myself what anthropogenic climate warming actually meant. What it had done and would continue to do to the lives of frontline humans affected by its inexorable progress. Mark showed slides, beginning with the (now positively historic) Google Earth image of our spinning planet just before the camera tracks into wherever on our blue green home we wish to visit. At the time (autumn 2005) this ability to spin the globe, and zoom in on anywhere form of digital legerdemain was pretty close to witchcraft. Wow. What a cool home planet, though. I was mesmerised.

Mark homed in on the Cordillera Blanca in the Peruvian Andes, where b/w photos taken by his father of a vast pristine glacier were replaced by colour photos taken 25 years later by Lynas Jr, showing with devastating clarity where the glacier had retreated back up into the mountains, leaving behind a rocky grey rubble-sludge of icemelt and loss. Twenty five years was all it took to melt millions of cubic feet of ancient ice, some of which had been laid down long before we were born.

Mark then spun the globe away from Peru to zoom in on Yang Pangong in Inner Mongolia where an entire village was being slowly buried in sand. Every sandstorm brought the desert closer and closer, as climate-driven desertification ruined lives, destroyed familial bonds and eradicated a whole community along with its ancestral lands and networks of support. There was a wavy line of sand cutting the village in two, the still-inhabited side barely hanging on, its one remaining citizen’s window full of the view of the dusty pink sand-shrouded sepulchre of the buried past and a vision of what the future held.

During the post-talk Q&A, people spoke of Bangladesh where rising oceans had drowned thousands, irreversibly salinated arable lands and where the planet’s most vulnerable citizens were paying the bill for the excesses we practised here in the wealthy Northern Hemisphere. We spoke of Tuvalu, where an entire inhabited archipelago is slowly vanishing beneath the sea, and Alaska where melting ice and loss of permafrost is causing lakes to vanish, polar bears to starve, methane clathrates to bubble up from the permafrost and is bringing about the total destruction of the indigenous population’s ability to live off their land.

I could hardly breathe. It was real. The planet was warming up. We were bringing about massive climate changes. For all my love of drawing endearingly floofy bunnies and uxorial bears and raising children with gentleness and writing reassuring books etc etc I was doing real harm to people I’d never met.

Can I just pause here? Can we take a moment to appreciate how books can literally change lives? How a brilliantly-curated book festival can disseminate and amplify a vitally important signal in a way that the internet cannot? People meeting face-to-face and discussing books and ideas and futures can change the world. No wonder the darker reaches of the establishment go after the writers, journalists and artists first. Words and images have real valence. Never feel you’re too small to make a difference.

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So, for a while, nothing much happened. Although I came home ( drove home in my filthy, sports utility, ongoing carbon crime scene vehicle) outwardly unchanged, you’d never have known that inside my head I was undergoing something of a systems reboot. I mean, I’d known that climate change was a thing, but given my choice of transport and the fact that at the time, we were running two houses, both with oil-fired Agas, one with the added carbon overload of oil-fired central heating, clearly I hadn’t really engaged with the realities of what I was actually doing. I hadn't made the connection between my activities and the consequent fallout on the other side of the planet.

However, post-Mark Lynas, post-Wigtown, I couldn’t unthink my newfound knowledge. As Confucius said2 ‘ No mirror returns to stone’ and I couldn’t live with myself while blithely carrying on with my carbon-guzzling ways, no matter how much I might have wished I could return to stony ignorance.

So. We ditched the suv. We turned off one of the Agas - what a heroic sacrifice, and I slowly began to change my wicked ways. A market downturn helped. We sold the second house. We shrank our carbon budget. We tried to make up for lost time. And I wrote a book.

Of all the books I’ve written, this one was the most uncompromising. It didn’t have a happy ending. It was (and still is) a call to arms. It is a klaxon for the planet. It is a five alarm fire writ large. I wrote it because I realised that the grown-ups ( myself included) were not really listening to the science. They were wilfully stoppering up their ears to the hard and unpalatable facts that stated clearly that we could not continue mining and burning fossil fuels without permanently altering our climate. They were waving that bad smell away by recycling their Waitrose hummus pots and buying low energy light bulbs. They were planting trees every time they took a flight. They were greenwashing away their guilt and terror and basically resorting to squinching their eyes tightly shut to make it all go back to how it used to be.

If only it were that simple…

I suspected that the grown-ups would never listen until it was far too late. And as a parent, I realised that the only possible hope we had of giving credence to the science and actually being forced into doing something was if our children, our beloved children, our planet-inheriting innocent children demanded that we did so.

I reckoned that if the kids really knew how we were squandering their future, how we were ruining the world that they would inherit…

well, I think they’d have something to say on the subject.

Next week, I’ll write about the artwork, and why I deliberately chose dragons as a vector for understanding climate change, and where I began to paint the illustrations, and how the book was received post-publication. It’s still in print. You can read it for yourself, should you wish to. But for now, I have doors to knock on, conversations to initiate, leaflets to deliver and in a few day’s time, an election to participate in as if my life depended on it. As if all our lives depend upon it.

But for now, can I leave you with three quotes? One from Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, one from the last spread of Gliori’s The Trouble with Dragons and the last, from Kornfield’s Buddha’s Little Instruction Book.

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

(Note: I tried to find Qing Lake, Yang Pangon, Inner Mongolia on Google Earth. Guess what? It’s gone. Deserts of vast eternity.)

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.

(Also - fun fact: when I discovered the 'linked/extinct' rhyme, I was delighted)

and finally - 

The trouble is, you think you have time.

Sharing coffee and Bologna Book Fair stories with fellow-author Viv French this week, our conversation turned to Book Tours of Yore.

Ah. The book tour. Remember those?

A brief recap. You write a book. By the grace of all that is late-stage 21stC capitalism, a publisher takes a punt on it. Somewhere in the boardrooms of your publisher’s extensive real estate in central London/New York/Sydney/Berlin/Uzbekistan, a senior publishing executive utters the fatal words ‘ Will they tour?’ which in essence means, ‘Is this writer pleasant and comely of appearance, can they spik nice in joint-up sentncs, and will they bring in lots of sales?’

If the answer to these questions is several degrees warmer than ‘Mmmmm, maybe?’ then the decision is made to throw money at the entire project and get you out on tour with your book. And thus, a publicist is employed to design a tour schedule that will take in several key accounts, one book festival, a handful of deep-pocketed private schools and the odd social conscience-salving library/state school. Plus one tightly choreographed dinner with press, literary festival organisers and upper management of large bookstore chains.

The book tour is an advertising campaign, a beauty pageant and a charm offensive rolled into one. It is also one of the single most gruelling literary endeavours known to humankind. It becomes even more challenging when it is organised by one’s overseas publishers. Oh, boy. Ask me how I know…

Anyhoo. Put two seasoned veterans of 20th and 21stC publishing in a room with sufficient coffee and time, and the conversation will eventually turn to ‘what was the worst tour you ever did?’ 1 At which point, sleeves are rolled up, hands are clasped across a table and a game of harm-wrestling commences.

I’m not going to lie ; I’m used to winning these things hands down. I have the stories and the scars. To be fair, they date from 1999-2010 at which point events in my personal life required me to stay close to home, where I’ve mostly remained ever since. Consequently, I have no idea of the current state of play for writers on tour in this decade, so let us hope matters have improved somewhat. Do let us all know in the comments. Or if it’s too incendiary, drop me a line on my website. I can keep secrets.

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Anyhoo, having issued the above by way of disclaimer, gather round, my darlings, and let me tell you tales of the Before Times. Oh, sorry, one last button before we begin~

So. Here are three examples of moments where I found myself seriously questioning my life choices. Like, why the heck didn’t I train as a neurosurgeon? Intellectually gruelling as that must be, it possibly couldn’t hold a candle to the horrors of the Book Tour From Hell.

Example 1: The quivering blood clot.

Shaftwick & Proster Publishers Plc Inc2 had contracted for a week’s tour, but that didn’t include a clause requiring any of it to be pleasant. Picture this: a sticky week in London in high summer, I was out on tour with a succession of junior publicists, a scant fortnight after the 7/7 London bombings. I stayed in three different ‘hotels’. Each plumbed the depths of what a landlord could get away with inside a building where people paid money to hire a bed and a sort-of bathroom behind a door with a lock.

Basic? Very. We’re talking sticky carpets in the malodorous entrance/reception. We’re- oh… Hang on. That was the hotel where they initially took some of the injured victims of the Tavistock Square bus bombing. And laid them on the floor while they received emergency medical aid. I was standing in the middle of a terrible and very recent ( two weeks recent) piece of British history. Needless to say, I don’t remember that night at all. I do remember asking the morning’s publicist to enquire higher up the food chain whether I could move to a different hotel for the following night?

And thus it came to pass. That evening, I stayed in what looked like a run-down block of flats. My room was on the top floor, which is a location I would never choose, were it up to me to choose anything. Which it clearly wasn’t, given the deep frown and hostile affect of the receptionist/concierge/janitor/wtf. Anyhoo. The room was cleanish and adequate and the windows were painted shut. Firmly. Airless and very, very hot.

I broiled, quietly. I fell asleep, miraculously.

I woke in hot darkness to a fire alarm which sounded as if it was located inside my pillow. I listened for doors slamming? Nothing. Voices? Again, nothing. Evidence of other human beings leaving their rooms? Nope. All I could hear was the alarm. Then it stopped. Still nothing. I picked up the phone and dialled ‘9’. A voice snapped ‘WHAT?’ and I bleated something about what to do about the alarm? The fire? The exits? to which the reply was ‘IZ MIZTEK,’ and the voice hung up. I stayed awake until morning when I met my new publicist and begged to be reassigned to another ‘hotel’.

At the end of a long and exhausting day, on little sleep and no food, I checked in to another, oh, why sugar-coat it, shithole. My room on the third floor was a high ceilinged 6x15 cell. One single bed with a flesh-coloured candlewick bedspread. Candlewick? In the 21stC? How quaint. How homely. How - AAAAARGHHHHHH! WHAT FRESH HELL?

Sitting, glistening with every evidence of being freshly-laid on the bedspread was a blood clot the size of a fist. I’d say it was quivering, but I’d be wrong. It was I who quivered.

Eventually I bundled the whole thing up and placed it outside my door. I made it through to the end of the tour, but I don’t publish with S&P Plc Inc any more.

And here, we shall draw a line.

Example two: Dump & Burn

On an extended tour in Oz and NZ, we deplaned in Brisbane for two days of events in Australian schools. My very young Australian publicist travelled with me, had been travelling with me, and was going to continue travelling with me until she handed me over to her New Zealand colleague. So far, so good. In a taxi from the airport to the hotel, the driver informed us that we’d arrived on the night where we would experience the amazing spectacle of “Dump and Burn”. Publicist and I stared at each other. Say, what?

What we learned:

The now outmoded3 Dump and Burn protocol consisted of an F111 fighter jet coming in low over the river that runs through the centre of Brisbane and as it swooped down it dumped its surplus jet fuel in a massive gushing stream along the river and at the same time fired up its afterburners to set the whole thing ablaze in a public display of… of… help me out here - how in heaven’s name can you come up with an adequate description for such a wanton act of 21st century human idiocy?

Certainly put a quietness upon me. The publicist ushered us into a mahoosive skyscraper (with a view of the flames), where my room was on the 24th floor. Post 9/11 my tolerance for rooms higher than the mezzanine was precisely zero. Post 9/11, the sight of airplanes coming in low and fast into metropolitan areas gave me serious pause for thought, not to mention an incipient panic attack. Which explains why the first thing I did in the privacy of my room was to sit on my bed and have a quick weep.

The room was corporate bland. Its windows were never designed to open. The a/c was set to Antarctica. The hotel wifi didn’t work. The publicist suggested we went out for a spot of retail and then supper. Retail consisted of my trailing behind her as she went in search of the perfect white high-heeled shoes. Supper was pizza. Much later, I headed out alone to find an Internet cafe and joined throngs of gamers in a dark and sketchy corner of Brisbane where I emailed Beloved in a state of utter dislocated panic. But on the other side of the world, he was busy doing the school run and my timed slot expired in the Internet cafe…

So I returned to my hotel eyrie through streets that smelled of burned hydrocarbons. And got up the next morning and did my job.

Example three: Economic freefall to the sound of alarms.

I’d been asked to write an article about how to live a low carbon life in advance of publication of my book ‘The Trouble with Dragons’, so I was banging out a first draft on a train to London when I was interrupted by a breaking newsfeed filled with traders shouting on the floor of the LSE, Lehmann Bros leaving buildings with all their stuff in cardboard boxes, banks crumpling like tide-washed sandcastles and general financial meltdowns kicking off all across the globe.

Having no skin in the game nor money in the bank, I kept calm and tapped on. For me at this time, the fact that the world was melting ( still is) seemed like the most important crisis we needed to address ( still is) and my children’s book was my small attempt to sound the alarm. I’m going to write a PictureBook Backstory next week about The Trouble With Dragons, but for now it’s enough to know that I was on a mission which felt as close to existential as I’d ever skated in the world of children’s publishing.4

Sheesh. What a lot of footnotes. Apologies.

Anyhoo. Met up with favourite publicist and off we went, touring. First stop, Harrods bookshop book cupboard where I signed many, many first editions for wealthy readers who bought their books alongside their civet-excreted coffee beans, Wagyu beef and countless other tokens of material wealth in a shop not renowned for its Value lines, Everyday Prices or BOGOFs. Then on to a series of private schools where parental black SUVs circled the pick-up zone like a Mafia cortège for a truly Grande Parmigiano and where their children are named after cars and ancestors. Then on to dinner and finally, bed. I think we were on the sixth floor.

I watched the news. It spoke of investors in crisis. Of ordinary people in long queues outside UK banks, trying to remove all their savings at once. It didn’t mention that we were a whisker away from closing all the cashpoints and a complete collapse of the banking system, but I believe we came perilously close. Unknowing, I went to bed.

The fire alarm went off for the first time at 1-ish. Not the kind of alarm you could pull a pillow over your head and ignore. I grabbed a coat, shoes and laptop and headed out to join a throng of sleepy hotel guests sensibly filing down the fire escape stairs to the car park. It was very cold outside. The talk was all about banks and money, not incipient immolation or frostbite. After ten minutes, we were all instructed to return to our rooms.

This exact scenario was repeated three more times before breakfast. Each time, with mounting bad grace, we dressed, went outside, waited and then returned to our rooms. Each time, there appeared to be no fire whatsoever.

Next day passed in a sleep-deprived blur. That night, we moved to a different hotel. Where another fire alarm went off just before dawn. This time we filed out onto the street. This time, there was no chat whatsoever. Thankfully, we were scheduled to do an event at the Cheltenham Book Festival so didn’t have to spend another alarming night in the same hotel. We took the train, booked into another hotel and did the event with no hitches or tech snafus or feral members of the audience interrupting proceedings.5 So far, so good, right?

Until, signing books for a queue of parents and small children while my publicist had nipped off to grab us both some much-needed coffee, a vaguely familiar face appeared at the head of the queue. I don’t recall if she was carrying a book or not because she introduced herself and almost immediately delivered the news that a man I still held so very dear, a lost love, a close friend who I’d lost touch with (but had been actively seeking) had died. Didn’t I know?

No. No, I didn’t know.

So sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, she said as she vanished from sight. Actually, at this point, everything was vanishing from sight. My vision was blurring beyond any hope of continuing to sign books, spik nice in joint-up sentncs and considering that my face was now arranging itself in a passing fair facsimile of Munch’s ‘The Scream’, I probably wasn’t going to bring in any sales with my pleasing and comely appearance.

At which point my excellent publicist arrived and Dealt With It.

I don’t know how she dealt with it, but all I can recall was a seamless transfer into a taxi and being whisked off to a very small countryside pub, where after ingesting I have no idea what, I recovered some measure of equilibrium. I will always be grateful to excellent publicist for her utter professionalism, tact and kindness. On every single tour we shared, but especially this one. Legend of a woman.

And on we went.

The point of all this? I have no idea. Nostalgia for a lost world? Gratitude for the difference a good publicist can make to taking part in an unpredictable series of events in uncharted locations? The weirdness of flipping from the solitary life of a working writer to the social whirl of a book-launching author on tour? Probably that. It was weird. I love meeting other writers, love an enthusiastic audience, am quite partial to some aspects of hotel food ( breakfasts!!!), enjoy the buzz of random conversations with strangers but…

I love being at home best. Small, quiet days. Time to think. The measured tick of the kitchen clock. The love of a Beloved. The cupboard love of a Golden Retriever. The Resigned Accommodation of a Guinea Pig. Home is where my art is.

Before we speak of illustrations and being creative in Trying Times, allow me to wang on about what’s filling my diary with what we call in Scotland ‘yuftaes’. As in ‘you have tae’. Things on a to-do list. Foremost of which is doing pre-election leafleting on behalf of the Scottish Green Party. 1

I was out today, on one of those perfect April mornings where the temperature flips wildly between the Arctic and Tropics. One of those excursions where I discovered that the handknitted2 jumper I chose to wear was either slightly chilly or borderline suffocating. To thermo-regulate, when the sun vanished behind a cloud, I marched speedily from door to door, and slowed to a crawl when it emerged at full blast. I could have removed the jumper, but I’d just have had to put it back on again, and I had many garden gates and squeaky latches to navigate and doors and letterboxes to visit.

But what a variety of doors and letterboxes! So many miniature doorstep dioramas! Such a hodgepodge of cultural artefacts signalling the interests, status, demographic and cultural affiliations of the homeowner hiding inside3. Mind you, the car parked in the driveway was a tell too. As was the wide-open garage door, with untold wealth (in material terms) displayed inside. The home gym. The ride-on mower. The bikes. The meticulously stored collection of items that might come in handy, items that occupy that liminal space between no longer useful and charity shop, the same phylum of items that our no-longer resident rat population found so irresistibly toothsome. But that was a previous story and we’re not on rats, we’re on cultural artefacts as signifiers of all kinds of things.

As a writer, I absolutely love this aspect of campaigning. I get to make up stories about the families behind the doors, I gather inspiration for illustrations, I meet lots of cats and get to play Danger Digits with a wide variety of dogs who lie in wait for my unwary hand trying to poke a floppy card through their remarkably resistant letterbox. If its vicious springs don’t bite me, or if the resistant carpet fringe of draught-proofing doesn’t reduce my leaflet to a crumpled offering, the dog behind the door will have a go at turning my fingers to sushi.

But people are out and about, and smiling, and very cheery when they realise what I’m doing, and even the Lost To Us Ones who are never in a million years going to vote for a green agenda are friendly and occasionally even go so far as to wish me good luck. Amazing. People are truly amazing. I wouldn’t be campaigning if I didn’t believe this.

Anyhoo. Work. It’s been somewhat distracting this week, what with one thing and another. Knowing that my artwork for Dr Purr is currently at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and is hopefully ( oh, make it SO) winning hearts and foreign rights and future readers as I wait here in Scotland, gnawing the remainder of my fingers ( post-letterbox action) and wondering if a small gin might ease the panic. Possibly not at breakfast, Debi. Do get a grip.

But it is existential, the anxiety is real and if Dr Purr knew how impurrtant her success is to her creator, well, she’d prescribe a hot bath, a slice of fruit cake and a good book.

We still have Christmas cake left, I prefer showers to baths ( except I can’t relax in the shower to enjoy a New Yorker like Dr Purr) and I am currently reading Mary Oliver’s ‘Upstream’ and Nigel Slater’s ‘A Thousand Feasts’. Comfort reading, much?

And to hell with it - a gin at supper time is still allowed, no?

As for work - I’m in a holding pattern for two projects, which essentially means they’ve stalled. Whether they get rolling again or not depends on how Dr Purr fares at Bologna. Oh, go on, just a small top-up, then.

In the meantime, I’m baking loads of bread,

slowly drawing a comic,

and doing my best to avoid having to faff around on my website in order to set up an online shop for my work. Procrastination is the flavour of the week. Procrastination with a side order of anxiety and Yuftae sprinkles. However, our current fiscal uncertainty is a great motivator, so I will pull on my big girl pants and do the website shop right now. However, if by having doing so4, I increase traffic from the multitudes of online book engagement promoter ai-enhanced accounts, I may have to move to Betelgeuse. Their random emails full of praise for my books which then shade into why I’m so obscure and overlooked and not getting the engagement I ‘deserve’? Oh, boy. Not a winning strategy at all. How do I make them cease and desist? I mean look at this:

And on and on. I’ve had loads of these. Pointing out how essentially, I’ve failed. By the metrics of late-stage capitalism, yes, I guess they might have a point but…

But I am more alive now than I’ve ever been. I share home and hearth with a Beloved man. We have raised the best people I know from infancy to adulthood. I am truly present in my morning walks with birdsong and otters. I am blissed out by opening my studio door ( thankyou Vicente!) and seeing all the piles of creative possibilities waiting for me. I am a domestic goddess on the bread front. I have made books that are read to small people at bedtime and bring comfort to both readers and read-to. I am still exploring what I can make with brush and pen and paint and paper. Fewer than 2000 Instagram followers doesn’t really matter a damn. What really matters is the love I share ( and receive) by what I do, how I live and what I bring to the global table.

Namaste, y’all. Feel that sun on our faces, listen to the birdsong, and, as ever -

I went to bed one night this week suspecting that due to activities across the Pond, the world might be brought to an untimely end by the following morning. Despite this, I instantly fell fast asleep and spent the night cradled in deep, velvety darkness.

And woke to birdsong. Blackbirds greeting the new day.

The birds aren’t aware of the front page news. They don’t doomscroll. Their day-to-day creative flow isn’t constantly interrupted by thoughts of incipient annihilation, except when the sparrowhawk glides into view. At present, the birds are celebrating an early spring by loudly proclaiming their availability for egg making. I suspect that all those excitable trills and rallentandos are variations on a theme of, ‘Me, myself, I have the best DNA, sport the most colossal cojones to ever grace a downy undercarriage, display the most effective nest-building technique, sing the best songs and also am a qualified worm-provider, insect-gatherer, champion nest-protector and all-round, number one, five star ur-bird this side of the Lammermuirs, so how about it, doll?’

Out with the dog this morning, Beloved and I spotted two rooks musically engaged in the creation of little rooklets. Yesterday, walking high in the hills above the Whiteadder Reservoir, I spotted two lizards inextricably intertwined on a sunny bank, trying to pretend to be a twisted twiglet. Buds are breaking, the hawthorn is bridal in the extreme-

and everywhere in this little corner of planet Earth, the natural world is showing us exactly how to live during extraordinary times.

So. Life. I promised you behind-the-scenes of the life of an illustrator, and that’s what we’re doing this week. Much as I’d love to say that I do it all for free, I don’t. My art is a business, and as such, it has to generate income. Royalty statements ( a twice yearly occurrence) have just landed with a...a what? A thud? No, that implies heft. A squeak? No, that was me, upon opening said statements. I’d say they landed with the paper equivalent of a whimper - or perhaps that’s just me?1 Here at GlioriSchloss, we are, for this coming six months at least, fiscally constrained. There will be no wanton extravagances, no heedless largesse and definitely no unnecessary expenditure.

Which is fine. We have always lived from one royalty period to the next, ever since I embarked on the precarious path of being a full-time freelance illustrator. There have been some decidedly sketchy periods in years gone by, when we lived very, very quietly, gathered driftwood to fuel the stove and developed several outstanding recipes for lentils. I keep telling myself that there have always been fat years and lean years in the creative industries. I hope we’ll always need books, just as I hope my books will continue to find their place in children’s hearts and homes across the planet.

But money is such a dull subject, even when the lack of it has the capacity to bring on a nasty case of creative paralysis. It’s hard to achieve the perfect flow state when your thoughts keep drifting back to the balance sheet. However, let’s move on. Better days will come, right?

If nothing else, it has prompted me to start building a shop over on my website. Soon, should you wish to support my outrageous lentil habit, you will be able to do so by either commissioning or purchasing original artwork straight from the source.

But first, I absolutely need to drag my gaze away from onscreen menus, newsfeed, emails and all that stuff and apply myself to do what I do best ; making pictures and telling stories.

I’m applying some of what I learned during Jane Porter’s excellent comics class, and teaching myself how to draw long-form comics without any digital whatchamacallits. I did download Canva, couldn’t get along with it, vaguely considered Procreate but then I remembered how much I hate screens

and how allergic I am to menus ( unless they have Basque cheesecake in the pudding bit), and decided to go totally analogue for the time being. Which means, when I make a mistake….

But it’s such a joy to sit at the source and draw and write and dream and tell myself awful jokes, all to a background of birdsong reminding me that this, this weaving of words and pictures is the best job in the world.

Let’s move. Pack a bag with photos of loved ones, other precious things, a keep cup to keep your tea hot, a pair of insulated gloves, a spare pair of socks and pants and, if you play one, and it’s portable, a musical instrument. Some paint brushes, a Swiss army knife, a Lifestraw, a couple of energy bars and let’s go.

Where? To a gentler world. To a burrow or a nest. To a cave or an islet. To somewhere like the home above, where 16 beings share a very small space with every evidence of cooperation and enjoyment. They have a well-stocked larder, a deep circular bathtub with feet ( we used to stay in a holiday house in Argyll that had an ancient bath like this) books, magazines, sheet music and most importantly ; community.

They don’t have broadband. Or a television. That’s probably why they look so blissfully content. The world and its woes are not demanding their attention, engagement and clicks. It’s a low-anxiety environment, that burrow. Although, to be honest, the entire picture book where this image comes from is predicated on the deep anxieties and fears of the littlest rabbit of all, Pip.

That’s the bunny with the big red pencil. If you’re wondering why, in such a safe environment, a little bunny could possibly be prey to anxiety, consider that the same bunny has the haunted look of a writer who’s just opened their royalty statement and is wondering how the hell they’re going to live off one carrot and a dandelion root till October.

He’s facing you, staring at you with a worried rabbit-caught-in-headlights look writ large on his little face. Poor little fellow, totally unaware of the fate some random illustrator has cooked up for him in the name of nursery entertainment… Talking of which-

OMG. They’re having pizza for tea! Mushroom and tomato pizza, hand-stretched homemade dough. Bet it’s sourdough. Was there ever a better pizza base? I’m writing this at teatime - can you tell? And the bunnies have a small studio for painting, and a music room to banish accommodate your bagpipe playing burrow-mates when they need to practise their pibrochs.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a pibroch. Our youngest played The Nine Days Piobaireachd by William Sweeney (on a clarinet) for their final performance for a Music postgrad. It was such a stunning piece of music, played so beautifully that I was moved to tears. Big, splashy, salty tears. If I was better at this stuff, I’d include a link, or embed an audio file or… but truly I have the tech skills of one of the bunnies in the illustrations above.

( pause while I scrabble around on assorted online tutorials, swearing in a fashion that’d get me booted out of any respectable burrow)

And now, I’m immensely pleased to say, you can find the Piobaireachd right here. In this iteration, it’s played by Joanna Nicholson on clarinet with accompaniment by Matthew Whiteside: playing together as Electric Clarinet. It’s well worth a listen.

It’s very on point right now because it was written to commemorate the nine days of the 1926 General Strike which has its centenary on May 4th-12th 2026. And it turns out I can out-tech a rabbit. Go me.

Comfort. Companionship. Conversation. Co-operation. We need each other more than ever now. We need hands and paws to hold in the night. We need to share skills, not silo ourselves in little single-family-occupancy burrows. We need music to remind us that we can become stardust, become golden.

We need to get ourselves back, if not to the Garden, at least to a place of greater understanding and informed stewardship of the beautiful planet we all share.

Our home is in peril. At times this knowledge makes me so breathless with terror that I can hardly function, and then I remember that I am not alone. Then I remember that I can virtually reset my Fret-o-Meter back to its factory settings by walking among trees. By lying on my back and looking up at the sky. By listening to birdsong. And by campaigning, canvassing, talking to people and taking small actions towards making that gentler, kinder world a real possibility, and not just a reassuring story we tell our children.

Very exciting, the stirrings. For me, they come as little electric bursts of - what if? which are followed by the filter of - don’t be ridiculous, woman or really? how on earth would that work? or let’s see what happens when you sit down and try to put that baby into words.

So that’s where I’m at. Trying to put ‘that baby into words’. Sheesh. There has to be a more elegant way of expressing the creative process. But for now, it’ll have to do.

So, in the interests of documenting the process, my days of trying to turn a formless idea-cluster into something more coherent go something like:

Wake at 5.00 a.m ( nope, me either) greet the day with mumbled salutations to Beloved, Vaila and Pippin, drink a mandatory glass of water then chase that ( back in bed) with coffee, a podcast and a little light recreational knitting, mainly because I can’t doomscroll with my hands full of woolly puzzlement. Thank heavens. Also - I consider knitting to be a mental health supplement. Hard recommend. The podcasts are many and varied1 but are a continual source of ideas and connections to the wider world. Yes, I know, a podcast isn’t a real connection, but at 5 a.m., most of my real connections are fast asleep and wouldn’t appreciate me demanding conversation, entertainment and a daily digest of The Culture + Thoughts On The Ongoing Outrage. Like the late, great Ian Drury on steroids minus the sex. Wake up and make BLANK WTF with me. Hence podcasts. Till 6.45-ish whereupon I need to move or else I’ll seize up.

Sometimes, at this juncture I’ll pack a small rucksack with a spoon, a flask with some hastily slung together Dishoom porridge2 and a sketchbook and take myself down to the riverside for a brief commune with whatever I find down there. Occasionally, and miraculously, this might be an otter. More frequently I meet dog walkers, ducks and the odd egret. I think about the day ahead. Think about what work I’m going to do. Think about how utterly shit I am at drawing. Prove that to myself.

Eat porridge and stare into space. Grumpily. Try again.

Sometimes I stay home and join an online yoga practice, or stay home and divide the early morning between starting a sourdough, writing this here Substack and doing some of the many household tasks on repeat cycle. Wash, cook, clean, sort, prep, locate, damn, locate, nope, not there either, LOCATE dammit, where the heck have I put - insert missing item -

far too many irrecoverable minutes tick past…

-abandon search. Go for shower. Grumpily.

Ahem. I am happy. I don’t need readers or newsletters or drawings to go well to boost my feels. Give me a goodly length of green vegetation, preferably Timothy Hay, and I’m a happy piglet. In my nearly seven years on this planet, I have observed that you humans have a lot to learn about the pursuit of happiness. The things you think you need to attain happiness are…well, they’re not where it’s at. Although if my supply of greenery dries up due to your lack of human diplomacy and surfeit of sheer political idiocy which have created this current crisis, well, let’s just say - you don’t want to see me when I’m pissed off. Oh, boy. Don’t make me come over there and chitter and rumblestrut at you. Just. Sort. It. Out. Pronto.

Capisce?

FYI: chittering and rumblestrutting are real Guinea Pig things. Don’t ask me how I know.

Anyhoo. The life domestic. The predictable quotidian forms the bedrock of my ability to make stuff up. Alongside many others in the creative sector, I need a stable foundation from which to launch flights of fantasy, invent worlds and dream up characters and landscapes from the fabric of my imagination. Currently, I’m finding it quite the challenge to do this against a backdrop of… waves in general direction of Outside, Over There. There was already quite enough going on in the wider world to engage my anxiety circuits and tip my fret-o-meter into the red without this deliberate car-crash-shading-into-Oilmageddon brewing in a place I’ve never been.

-A photo on the internet of an abandoned apartment in Tehran showing a portable baby bath in the middle of a living room. A gentle domestic moment, interrupted by war.

-An ambulance, part of a fleet of ageing vehicles deployed by the UK’s struggling health sector, turned into black ruins. A potential life-saver destroyed by war’s spin-off.

-A less-than human president-adjacent cartel wilfully manipulating the course of the war, gaming it in order to increase their clan’s personal wealth in crypto share value. War metastasised into wealth.

I sat this week with a PhD student, being interviewed and talking about ( amongst many other things) my book ‘A Cat Called Waverley’. Ostensibly about homelessness, but really, at its heart, a book about the human cost of wars waged for profit. Because all wars are about assets. Who has them, who wants them and what all interested parties are prepared to sacrifice to gain them.

We are always the sacrifice. All of us.

Whoaaaa. That got pretty dark. Let’s move on, shall we?

So, tasks done, I put my challenged limbs through a series of tortures exercises designed to make everything hurt even more than it did already improve my muscle strength and general flexibility. I rarely make it through to the end of these things without the cloud of despair swallowing me up into its grey and clammy embrace. Been doing these manoeuvres, or varietals thereof every single day since mid-August and yes, there has been some improvement, but nothing that’s enabled me to resume life as I knew it before I fell down a mountainside. While running.

Yes. Hell mend me indeed. Wish Hell would get a move on , though…

Then it’s time to do the bidding of my Imperial Cavey Overlord.

I only live to serve, my Liege.

Quite. Do get on with it, Slave. Nom, nom, nom.

Kneeling, because his accommodations are below worktop height, I reverently hand-pick his royal excretions from the padded mats and Timothy hay which serve as flooring in his home. (FYI, I’m positive that floor coverings handwoven by artisans from finest cashmere and strewn with saffron stamens would be cheaper) I bear the hay-strewn mats outside to shake over the compost bin and return them to their appointed place.

What does a Guinea pig have to do round here to get room service? Hurry it up, wench.

I strew fresh hay, launder water bottles, replace kibble and make myself scarce. A contented chomping sound comes from under the hay, as Pippin climbs inside3 his breakfast and has at it.

Finally, I eat something, if I haven’t already had porridge by the riverside. A bowl of muesli ( what, more bloody oats?) and fruit ( last year’s cheap apricots, poached and frozen, blueberries because I want to live long and prosper enough to find out what happens next) and some coconut yoghurt ( well, that’s going South if the oil - etc etc)

It’s delicious. I love breakfast. As a born again non-smoker, breakfast has become a ritual of almost religious significance in the daily routine. Back in the day, I’d wake up, roll over, grope blindly for tobacco and papers, make a roll-up, poke it between my lips, ignite it and draw deeply of its poison with every evidence of enjoyment. And all of this before I got out of bed.

EWWWWWWWWWWW. Gross. But I finally grew some brains, so that’s all right. I hope…

Of course, the observant reader will have noted that all of this activity serves as busywork to postpone the moment when I sit down at a blank page. Not because I don’t enjoy writing, or dreaming up ideas, or teasing the muse out of hiding, but it’s just that the first hour is so damn hard. Priming the pump. Laying the groundwork. Making, failing, making, failing, failing better, trying to step aside and let the work arise without me getting in the way.

It’s exactly like meditating. In that I have to allow the endless chatter to subside without attaching a narrative or a judgement to the process. To become a conduit. To push myself away from the shore and into the flow without doing. The ocean, the sea of stories, is endless, ebbing and flowing, breathing in and out in a tidal push-pull. The process of writing, is for me, exactly like swimming out beyond the place where the waves break, swimming out to where the waves are still every bit as strong as the ones which crash over my head and pull me under, pushing past that terrifying and powerful break line out to calmer, deeper waters where the swell is beneath me, where I can feel the energy but not be consumed by it.

Does this even make sense? Anyway. That. I do exactly that until I’m far from shore, wallowing around in foamy words, not even aware that I’m a separate thing from the process, buoyed up by the energy of the story, writing, by hand, scrawling as fast as I can, part of something so joyous and life-affirming that I crave it, need it, love it and wish that I could access it far more often than I actually do.

Trust me, this blissful flow state doesn’t happen with anything approaching reliability. It doesn’t adhere to any timetable that I can find. Although mornings snatched from the list of domestic tasks are better than groggy post-lunch brain fogs. Late afternoons when it’s nearly time to stop and engage with matters domestic, those are good times too. Infuriatingly, it’s those periods when I’m time-constrained by domestic obligations that are the most fruitful, creatively speaking. And if I cast off from matters domestic and allow myself an uninterrupted space to create? Nada. Blank page. Tide goes so far out it’s just a shiny line on the far horizon.

I’m always late for coffee/lunch/afternoon tea. When the flow state is switched on, it’s gives me a very odd feeling of dislocation to wrench myself out of it and back into Real Life. It bends time - hours telescope into minutes, whole mornings pass in a blink. And it’s fragile.

Distant barking, loud motorbikes, cornet-tooting tambourine-jiggling cats, the infuriating ‘ping’ when I’ve forgotten to mute my phone ; all of these can break the spell.

Because it is a spell. It is a magic thing. I have no idea where it comes from, I’m just profoundly grateful that it does, when it does.

I’ll return to Mr Bear and his dodgy puns shortly, but for now….

Less you accuse me of fiddling while the world burns, may I just say in my own defence that my poor fiddle hasn’t been out of its case for a fortnight. I know… Not good at all. Could do better.

But srsly? I’ve taken to keeping my Little Black Rectangle of Doom firmly muted and face down, so that I don’t get the little tugs of you need to see this and breaking news/breaking hearts/breaking promises that are so much part of our interconnected world in this period of human history. Ignoring my LBRoD has been extra difficult this week not only due to the existential crises in Iran/Gaza/Ukraine but on a far, far lesser note, due to having to engage with the fun world of online car sales. About which - let’s not go there. Closely followed by all the necessary online form-filling for car insurance, registration, warranties etc. And then a spot of HMRC Government Gateway form filling round and round the online garden concrete wasteland, chased by bureaucrats. With SO MANY EFFING PASSWORDS. For US readers, this is our top-heavy, full of senseless forms, way of life, here in the UK. What a colossal waste of energy.

I also spent time writing a letter to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, regarding the ongoing Bartz v Anthropic Proposed Class Action Settlement currently wending its way through the American justice system. Joy! More forms.

As one of the many claimants against Anthropic, I am apparently entitled to some financial redress from the $1.5 billion settlement fund ( allegedly $3000 per book) after having my copyrighted works used without my knowledge or permission to train their LLM, Claude. This is the same Claude currently in use by the the US Military, in fact, Claude is the only AI in use for classified missions in Iran. Where, I assume, employing some degree of AI guidance, the US murdered 165 little girls at a school in Minab.

Claude, the large language model created by Anthropic, has the stolen work of many writers swilling around in its neural network (the “brain” of this child-killing system). The same Anthropic that, under the covert “Operation Panama” bought millions of secondhand copyrighted books, sliced their spines off and fed them into a colossal data scanner to ‘train’ their murderous model. Look it all up on Wiki. Go down the Anthropic/Palantir rabbit hole if your stomach can take it. The web of connections with Anthropic at the centre represents a who’s-who of all that is grievously wrong with our world.

Writing about this makes me feel nauseous. Consequently, I want nothing to do with the settlement. Any money from the US court’s decision is blood money. I’m profoundly grateful to the original authors who went through heaven knows how many legal hoops to bring Anthropic’s colossal theft to the attention of the justice system, but I can’t accept any money from such a source. And I know - I could don a haz-mat suit and pass the money on to a charity, but… I have a gut feeling that to do so is the moral equivalent of greenwashing. And due to the fact that I was frantically trying to make a deadline ( and thus earn a living from my copyrighted books, past, present and future) I missed the court deadline to withdraw my works from the action. I’m not claiming some moral high ground or throwing shade on my fellow-claimants, nor am I so wealthy that I can turn my back on pennies from heaven, but…these are not heaven-sent coins. It’s bad enough that I burn oil, tap this out on a laptop made by a Trump-appeasing corporation and occasionally have recourse to a bacon roll1, but I don’t want to compound matters by adding blood money to the list.

So. Back to Mr Bear. A quick refresh -

Here are four little board books I made to celebrate the arrival of our Baby Bear, AKA Broad Bean. I can clearly recall sitting, melting in my studio in a heatwave2, painting watercolour artwork for these little books while their real-life subject had an afternoon nap. Painting and remembering doing the same to celebrate the arrival of Baby Bear’s big sister, two years beforehand. It felt like a balance: four board books for big sister, four board books for the little one. And in between? Some spectacularly bad behaviour.

To explain. Ex-husband had set up home with a new partner. New partner had full run of their household which comprised ex-husband, new partner’s only son, my youngest son ( Baby Bear’s big brother) and my daughter, Small Bear( Baby Bear’s big sister). Regrettably, new partner was not full of the milk of human kindness, but appeared to have battery acid running in her veins. Or vitriol. Or something so viciously caustic that it ought to have been kept well away from small children. Baby Bear’s big brother and Small Bear spent half of their time in this toxic household, and the remainder with Beloved and I. How did I know it was toxic? Because my two children reported back when they needed to check with me that my ex-husband’s new partner’s behaviour was wrong.

Clear? I know. It’s a messy explanation total word salad and you’ve probablydecided to read something less confusing like, say, the online instructions for recalibrating your heat pump. But if you’re still with me as I limp and hobble through this treacherous terrain, thankyou.

Anyhoo. Vicious new partner dripped acid into Small Bear’s shell-like at every given opportunity. Vicious new partner made it very difficult for me to connect with Small Bear while she was at her Dad’s. ‘Oh, she’s in the bath, I’ll get her to ring you back,’ being the favourite ploy. Unsurprisingly, there never was a return call and when I rang back, they’d disconnected the phone. Over and over again. If I complained, she hung up on me. And there was always the fear of what hideous revenge she’d wreak on my poor little daughter. Worst of all, there was no legal recourse. I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. And on top of that, when I raised the subject with my ex, he’d stonewall me.

I’m mentioning this because, in the middle of all the vitriol and bad behaviour and upset, one night, Small Bear, tucked up in bed with a book and her mummy, piped up with the following bombshell:

‘Vicious new partner said3that you love Baby Bear more than me because she ( VNP) has counted up all the dedications in your books and she says you’ve made more for Baby Bear than meeeeeeee-’ cue heart-rending sobbing. The fact that a three year old could pronounce and remember the word ‘dedication’ was a small miracle that passed me by in the tide of red rage that swept across my consciousness. Had vicious new partner been close by, I’d’ve definitely had a go.

Just as well that we were over a hundred miles away on the West coast of Scotland at the time. And fyi, biatch, you were wrong.

I’ve tried to fill my books with love and light, reassurance and validation, kindness and the odd bit of snark4. I’m trying to write about life as I wish it was, rather than how it actually is. Going by the maxim of ‘if you build it, it will come’, kind of idea. Maybe this is akin to wooo manifestation, but it feels right. I write about families that have lumps and bumps but basically hang together. I wrote about such families even when my own birth family was light years away from this ideal. I wrote about hanging together families when the family I’d thought I was building came apart at the seams. I’m still writing about families because… they’re fascinating. And because I’m now part of one. With lumps and bumps and bits that fit oddly, but the whole assemblage hangs together in its own strange and wonderful way.

My most recent book, in the publishing pipeline for next year, is set in the fictitious village of Hushnow. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to live there. To swim in the village pond with the mermaid. To buy battenburg cakes at the bakery. To browse books in the library. To have all those day-to-day interactions with other beings instead of the silo-ed off existence I’m currently undergoing as I wade through endless interactions with forms and bots and bureaucracy online. But most of all, to have good neighbours and good friends, who are all happy to pitch in when needed and celebrate when things go lumpily, bumpily according to plan.

Been a total clusterf**k this week. In the personal sphere, the wider family orbit and the world at large. It’s all kicking off, as they say.

I’m not about to dwell on the darker areas of the news cycle. We can access that kind of content on many wildly opinionated platforms, should we desire to do so. If, however, like me, you’re exhausted and saddened by Life Inc, allow me to offer a spot of light relief. That is, after all, my day job.

Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Imagine a place full of trees, with a river running through it. Dappled light. That Mediterranean scent of pine resin and the faintest of faint wafts of the perfume of spring birches. Water making gloop-bloop splashy sounds as it meanders downstream. Think Moominvalley. Think Hushnow. Think…Mr Bear’s Home Turf.

Anyhoo. Writing and illustrating an ongoing series of picture books across many years and changes of editors, publishing styles, governments, global events and personal and family events is…well, let’s just say it’s quite the journey. Especially when you’re making books for very small people, which means you can’t have Mr Bear running off to the Misty Hills with Mrs Grizzle-Bear, leaving two devastated families and an enormous question mark about exactly did happen that night in the Bat Cave. No. Absolutely not. As regards the substance of all those Mr Bear mss, some degree of consistency in the narrative arc was mandatory, and ‘issues’ had to be child-centred and age-appropriate, even if you, the creator of this world were undergoing a meltdown, a family crisis, a financial cataclysm or all your baby bears had grown up and left home.

In short, I just had to grin and bear it (sorry).

First up in the post-Mr-Bear-To-the-Rescue saga: Where’s my Baby Bear?

Bear in mind ( oh, lord, somebody stop me) that I’d never made a lift-the-flap book before and I’d left my purpose-built studio behind along with my marriage, so essentially I was making this book on a kitchen table, not, alas on a draftsman’s table where it’s easier to line up overlays and check that flaps will match their backgrounds and that the fold will work and all the many protocols an illustrator has to observe in order to construct sheets of artwork for a book where some of the flaps are layered, one on top of the other. See below -

Normally, or so my editor told me afterwards, an illustrator is assigned a paper engineer to help with the construction of lift-the-flap and pop-up books. Not this illustrator. God knows why…

It was fun firing up my hitherto unused synaptic pathways though. Getting my head round the difficulty of flaps that, by my own design, had separate images printed on both sides, and thus had to line up when closed and open.

The pram and newspaper examples didn’t have this problem. But several other pages did. To explain -

When the lace curtain is open, the top arch of the window had to be ‘visible’ through it. The curtain pole had to line up on the page and the flap. The plant in the pink pot, Mrs Bear’s left paw and the teacups on the tray had to be ‘visible’ through the lace curtain when the curtain was closed, but also when it was open. Just recounting this now makes me want to go and lie down in a darkened room. Unsurprisingly, my brain was fully engaged in figuring out all of this stuff for the entire duration of making of this book. Which was fortunate because it certainly beat the heck out of worrying about how the ongoing separation-heading-to-divorce war of attrition was impacting my children. In my new post-marriage life, I’d finally moved into Beloved’s small house and we were attempting to squish two adults and three, occasionally four children into what social workers quaintly term a blended family.

The fourth child, technically an adult, was showing first signs of the drug dependence which would eventually claim him (and all of us as we watched helplessly) for the better part of a decade: utterly terrifying. The other three were bickering and fighting over territory and parental attention: totally understandable. We made many trips to speak with their teachers and nursery nurses: ritually humiliating. Also made several visits to a lawyer: hideously expensive. And in the background, if not exactly fiddling while Rome smouldered, I was trying to make books all about happy bear families: optimistic? hypocritical? tone deaf? None of these. No. What I was doing then was exactly what we’re all doing right here and right now ; trying to carve out a life in the middle of Very Challenging Times.

Somehow we did. We made a family. And as a side project, I made several books. As I’ve said before, it’s impossible to stop Life Inc. from leaking out across whatever project you’re working on. Mainly because we’re human, and the process of living through time brings emotions to the surface and as artists, our emotions will always colour our work, even if we can only see those colours in our rearview mirrors.

So, the next life event that swept into our already eventful lives was the discovery of the impending arrival of the youngest member of our family. No prizes for guessing which Mr Bear book celebrated this occasion…

Well, of course I was going to write a new Mr Bear book about our new baby. Write what you know being a solid bit of advice regularly offered to would-be authors. So much, so obvious. But for me, looking back, it’s the small details, the expressions on the bear’s faces, the books scattered by their bedside, all of these easily overlooked things that add depth to my understanding of where we were at when Broad Bean1 landed.

I was an elderly multigravida ( obsolete term for a mummy who’s already delivered at least one baby and is over 35), the delivery did not go according to plan, and far from relaxing back home with our new infant, surrounded by flowers and oxytocin-fuelled contentment, we had a barely-established family to blend, two older children who were not in the least impressed at the arrival of a Small & Squeaky in their midst, and a deeply pissed-off toddler who alternated between loving her new sister to bits and wanting to get medieval on her Pamper-clad ass. Small & Squeaky was not a happy bunny for the first twelve weeks six months year fifteen months of her life, whereupon she flipped overnight into the smiliest, most contented toddler one could wish for. Breastfeeding did not go according to plan, there was an embouchure/nipple misalignment that left both participants in floods of tears and worst of all, there was outright hostility from my Dad, aggro from Beloved’s ex-wife and weaponised obduracy from my newly-partnered ex-husband. Happy Families - NOT.

So in the light of all of that, look at the expressions on Mr and Mrs Bear’s faces when their Baby Bear refuses to settle. Write what you know, indeed.

Note too, the flowers - wilting and going brown because Mr and Mrs Bear are too shattered to attend to anything other than their little Baby Bear and her siblings. And the books - ‘Solve your Bear’s Sleep Problems’, ‘Pregnancy and Bearbirth’, ‘Bearbirth for the over 35’s’. Oh lord…. And we used to have those pillowcases and that sheet, although not the lily duvet cover, alas. And the little pop of bright red below Mr Bear’s right paw? Red Dog. A beloved toy, given to our Baby Bear by her lovely midwife, and still treasured twenty-nine years and ten months later. Although somewhat chewed around the ears…

I think picture books are diaries, full of memories preserved in their full colours, pressed between the pages like flowers from the past. Our family’s library of picture books, read ragged and unconsciously memorised are repositories of some of the best moments we enjoyed with our children when they were Smalls. Our unbelievably precious and beloved little pyjama-clad people, snuggling up beside us, pointing to the illustrations, adding their own frequently surreal details to the stories, making the books their own.

Real books, written by real people living real lives, read by real people to their most beloved and precious children. Why anyone would countenance inserting an artificial intelligence into that most tender and human of relationships is beyond my comprehension. We are all the children who books built. We found ourselves in between the pages of the books we discovered in childhood and we need to share that miraculous discovery with each other. Passing it on. Sharing the passion.

I haz a serious hurty. Not a limping. When I rise from my Golden Retreevr slumbers, one of my three, two, five? fourlegs feels like it’s been chewed by teefs. I would like extra snac to compensate because clearly it’s all your fault, Hoom.

and one of us is seriously wondering if she can go offline/dark and thus avoid the eye of Sauron tracking her rebellious utterings. On reflection, these days it’s well-nigh impossible to be unsurveilled ; even out here in the Boonies, I’m tracked by a series of Ring doorbells monitoring me as I walk past on a single track lane. Admittedly, plotting the downfall of 21st C capitalism, but still…We are tracked from dawn to dusk and more.

Ahem. We’re not. We’ve gone properly Dark and are slowly becoming Tree. While we’re here though, one of us would like to say thankyou to their dedicated Slave for the regular morning graveside visits and convos. Much appreciated. It is peaceful down here in the dark waiting to be transformed into a being of bark and branches, but it’s also pretty quiet. The regular morning babble from a still-grieving Slave breaks the monotony and reminds us that all lives, no matter how small and brief, matter.

The moth image came from somewhere deep in my memory - the idea of a soul ( if you go in for such notions) as a moth or butterfly is nothing new, but surfaces in my thoughts from time to time, and very much did so the day after we buried Vesper-who-will-be-Tree. I took myself out for a walk and weep howl and met a moth, hovering at eye height, on a freezing cold morning when no sensible moth would normally venture forth.

And I may have been clutching at straws, but there was a huge comfort to be had in seeing this airborne avatar of a soul at a time when I’d just consigned a beloved guinea pig to the earth. To my raw sensibilities, the moth brought a message about the cyclical nature of birth and death and felt, briefly, like Vesper was part of everything, and that nothing essential had been lost.

Er… I miss my corporeal body, actually. That felt pretty blooming essential to me, at the time. And I miss Pippin, the big galoot.

To return to the Vesper-moth. Or my psychobabble surrounding my meeting with said insect. May we all meet golden moths, or energetic beings of light, and may they grant us wings to raise us from darkness into light. Because, right now, we are stumbling around in an ignorance as black as night. Boy, what a week.

You must mean - what a wheek.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Lying out here of an evening, under my counterpane of earth, I can’t actually see the spin of the stars, but I feel them just the same. The tidal pull of the full moon, the sun’s changing tempo of light and dark, and, if you’re so inclined, the momentous alignments and influences of the gas giants and other orbs that hang in our night sky. Once I’m completely Tree, I’ll begin to bud and unfurl and s..t…r…e…t…c…h upwards to meet the sky. I’ll become a creature of earth and air, existing between two worlds and merging with the atoms of both. This isn’t death in the traditional sense, it’s a rearrangement of particles into many differing but still coherent forms. Onwards!

The rest of this week has been spent reacquainting myself with my Lino cutting tools, sharpening them and then starting work on a little Maker’s Mark that I’ve tried ( and failed) to make before. This time, I swear, this time.

The idea is to carve it, print it, photograph it and sling it on here and also my website1 so that if you’d like to use it to point out the fact that you too have handmade your artwork, composition, artefact, or unspecified creative endeavour without the use of artificial intelligence. Although the last word in that much-used couplet is under review. Is it intelligent? I have no idea, all I know is that I do not want it to be part of my creative process. I’d love if it would do the bureaucratic grunt work and thus free me up to paint and draw and make art, but so far, I’ve managed to resist the siren-song of letting a bot loose in my affairs.

And the recent deal between open AI and the Shite House is terrifying. Surveillance central, anyone? Death dealing drones without human oversight? Oh boy. Dark times. Bring on the golden moths. May our thoughts take flight on the wings they bear. The light is in the ascendant, spring is here, hold onto Hope.

And talking of Hope… I’m heading out to poke green things through letterboxes. Not plants, or grasses but small leaflets on behalf of the Scottish Greens. May 7th is an important local election. I don’t know about you but I definitely do not want the same old, same old doing the same old not a whole lot again. And I most definitely do not want the frog-faced, pint-swilling hypocrite that rhymes with garage. That’s such a terrifying prospect, it made me finally nail my colours to the mast and join the Green Party. Twice. Once for the Green Party of England and Wales and once more for the Scottish Greens. Double greens! Broccoli and spinach. Join me. Join us. Hope, not fear.

Slainte, y’all. Hope no dogs take exception to me posting things through their doors…

I can’t recall the comic’s exact wording, despite having looked at it every day for at least a decade, but it contained the phrase ‘worry menu’ which referred to a list of unpalatable but highly relatable options on offer to the characters in the comic at their bedtimes.

I mention this because of the tendency for my brain to chew over lumpy bits in my worry menu when given the space and time to do so. The hours between 2.30 and 4.30 a.m. being a current favourite. Try as I might to grab the helm and steer my thoughts in a different direction, these days, the fret is real.

So, when entering the run-up to what should be happy anticipation of spending a week on the island of Mull with a group of musicians and dear friends, my worry menu consisted of:

Car. Bound to break down ( it has considerable form in this department, and had an entire Substack devoted to such matters last year) and if so, would strand me and youngest in the arse of the back of beyond with a stunning view but potentially no phone signal whatsoever.

Food. What to cook on the one night when it’s a team sport making food for 24 appetites and varying food allergies in a scattering of smallish kitchens randomly distributed across three ( sometimes four) buildings? Co-ordinating our team effort in order to produce one omnivorous main, one vegetarian main and one pudding delivered to the ravening hordes at a time where they’re sufficiently awash in gin to forgive our many transgressions against culinary perfection. Start worrying now.

The world and its woes. All join in. I won’t go into details, suffice to say that prior to departure for this blissful island retreat, I was in such a state of internet-fuelled panic that all I could think of was the scene in LOTR where the peril is so great that the irrevocable and terrifying command goes out to light the beacons.

Seriously. The news cycle had reached such a pitch of hysteria that this image would not leave my head until I bashed it out onto paper on our first night on Mull whereupon it finally faded into insignificance. Well, that’s not exactly what happened. What really happened was that it ( the existential fit of the screaming habdabs) kind of slid to one side and was replaced by the next panic in the queue/worry menu, namely the one regarding what I had finally decided to cook for my allocated night.

Food redux. Would it work? I’d never made it1 before. Would the unfamiliar kitchen prove to be a major roadblock in the progression from chopping board to plate? Would there be enough? Would it end up suffering the same grisly fate as the lamb tagine of yore?2 Would the knives be sharp enough to cut through 5.5 kilos of meat? Would I manage to overcome my pathetic squeamishness at the sight of all that flesh? Why the hell wasn’t I doing the vegetarian option? What time was it anyway?

Oh, splendid.

2.30 a.m. It’s WORRY TIME.

Waking in the wee small hours with a head full of meat thoughts was…well, it was so outwith my normal range of things to worry about that it was almost refreshing. If meat could be said to be refreshing. Which, probably, it couldn’t. So, after several hours of meaty ruminations in the darkness, I abluted and pitched up on our landlady’s doorstep along with a dozen hens and several kittens, and was handed what looked and weighed like half a cow. See above.

Can I briefly bleat say that we rarely eat meat at GlioriSchloss, but when cooking for large numbers, I find it far easier to choose to be the cooker of the beasts rather than the chopper of the vegetable mountain. Especially if the recipe has been road-tested by someone who did so literally in the field for a group of ravenous Italian hunters, down from the hill and clashing their few remaining teeth with anticipatory gusto.

Poor cow. But such an amazingly delicious cow. OMG. I’m going to re-bleat ( FFS, wrong noise, Gliori) excuses regarding my meat consumption and the importance of taking responsibility for greenhouse gases and how we’re practically vegetarians and tofu tofu bean tempeh etc, but OMG. MEAT. High class protein and then some.

Spent an entire morning with the help of several housemates grinding the insane quantity of black pepper that the recipe demanded, followed by prepping seven heads of garlic ( ‘doing the necessary paperwork’ as youngest wittily observed while I cursed and peeled and steadily worked my way through enough paperclad cloves to render us all in possession of a robust oral barricade across which no bug, bacillus, viral particle or even kiss would dare to stray) and then chopping my way through 5 kilos of impeccably raised Mull cow from a beast who had enjoyed the same views and weather and birdsong and seaspray and starry heavens and silence as we, the agents of its destruction had done.

Oh dear god. That was a sentence in need of an editor. Apologies. Blame it on the fact that I was on holiday and so relaxed I was literally horizontal, tapping the first part of this newsletter out in bed, first thing. Let’s have another picture.

…..

another picture?

…

A week later. Clearly, another picture was too much to ask. At which point I wrote myself last week’s permission slip and vanished offline for the remainder of the holiday. Offline. OMG. Who knew that it could be so simple? How did I manage to forget how much stress comes pre-loaded into my little black rectangle of doom? How constant access to the digital evidence of the woes of the world erodes joy?

While I acknowledge how useful it is to be able to summon help, taxis, dinner reservations and access some seriously entertaining and thought-provoking content, it’s also very good for the soul to return, even if only for a short time, to the days when we didn’t carry a pocket computer on our persons 24/7.

What utter joy. For most of a week, I didn’t look at email, social media, messages, nuttin’. Occasionally I’d feel the habitual ‘tug’ of obligation to check in with work or conversations, but it was astonishing how easily I resisted. I preferred Mull T.V.

And I did haul out a sketch book from time to time, and I did a little bit of not-too immersive knitting, but in the main, I spent an amazing week being 100% present in the company of friends who feel like a much-loved family. We played music, celebrated a significant birthday ( not mine), rejoiced in an unexpected marriage proposal, re-enacted some frankly bonkers scenes from the life of the birthday person, commemorated a sad anniversary, were blown away by the generosity and depth of love and friendship that wrapped around our little group, gleefully murdered each other with a variety of domestic trivia, had at least one vehicle towed off the island after a catastrophic malfunction, ( for once, not mine) welcomed new initiates into the lore of Clan McCrone, ate sublime oysters, learned new board games, played two specially composed tunes to celebrate six decades of birthdays and talked until we were hoarse.

And the beef?

Delicious. It passed eight hours at a gentle whisper in the company of rosemary, bay, garlic, a heck of a lot of black pepper and many litres of red wine, and transformed into exactly as good a plateful as you might wish for. We served it with homemade sourdough bruschetta, cavolo Nero and olive oil mash. Buon appetito!

More from Mull next week. For now, I’m still dealing with re-entry to Real Life in all its gliori.

As promised, having left last week’s newsletter on something of a cliffhanger - well, maybe a sand-dune hanger, or possibly even a pebble-hang- oh, do get on with it, Gliori. Anyhoo. That. I’m just going to jump straight back in to the backstory of my book Mr Bear to the Rescue. Here’s where I left it last week:

So. I try to keep my promises. Even though, as you’ll see in approximately two paragraphs, I am also capable of breaking a really big one, but only under duress. Oh dear. As the title says - bear with me here.

Back home from hospital for the second time, I was going through the motions. Not, I hasten to add, with my sweet baby girl, but her daddy and I were not in a good place. Hardly surprisingly. Just before I’d been blue-lighted into hospital first time round, husband had begun the first stages of his plan to move to the States. To be fair, this ‘plan’ had been a longstanding ambition, but one to which I was fundamentally opposed. Every time we visited his relatives Stateside, he’d end up hauling me round various plots of land with a view to buying a parcel of remote weeds in somewhere that looked like it might be called Butthole, New Awful. We made endless trips into the backcountry with a series of interchangeable and impossibly white-toothed blonde realtors who couldn’t believe their luck to be gifted with these two rubes. The sites were remote, down bumpy tracks, places where I knew I’d die of homesickness, if the bears didn’t get me first. Under the appraising gaze of the assorted realtors, husband grew unusually expansive and uncharacteristically uxorial, whereas I withdrew into stunned fury. Having no economic power save for the ability to bear children meant that what skin I may have had in the game was largely discounted. I was without agency and utterly aghast at having voluntarily got myself into this position.

We’d fought about moving/not moving for years. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how I could ever leave Scotland. The prospect of uprooting and moving to America filled me with deep dismay. And yet, three months into this pregnancy, husband started the process of selling our house for real, setting out towards a grim future where he’d go across to the USA first, leaving me behind to have the baby ( free healthcare in the UK, right?) and then I could pack the house, finalise the house sale and bring the kids across to join him wherever the hell he’d found a site to build a house.

Great plan, NOT. It’s one of those weird bits of if not exactly serendipity perhaps its feral step-brother, dumb coincidence, that gifted me with an obstetric malady that completely derailed husband’s relocation plan. I’ve never been so relieved to nearly die in childbirth as I was, back then. JOKE. But you know what I mean.

When I added this backstory to the lack of care I’d seen during my three months in hospital, you can understand why I was unable to avoid the unforgiving light now illuminating every facet of our relationship. Trust me, when the scales fall off your eyes, you can actually hear them shatter at your feet. I crept into a metaphysical safe and secret place inside my heart and guarded my thoughts. I no longer felt as if I had anything in common with the man I’d promised to love, honour and etcetera.

We co-existed in our little hilly, chilly cottage, but our lives were inexorably pulling apart. I subsumed my lack of meaningful connection into writing an adult novel which never saw the light of day and, more importantly, making four little board books inspired by my newborn daughter ( asleep in a basket beside me in my studio while I wrote and painted these for her )

and trying to re-knit the tattered fabric of my pre-hospital life. All of which took up a lot of my days but still left an aching hole where an adult relationship used to exist.

I was beyond lonely. We’d had some colossal fights, husband and I, ghastly, wounding events which displayed all of the fire and passion so sorely lacking in our day-to-day discourtesies. We were no longer a ‘we’ but had mentally, physically and intellectually disengaged.

Enter Mr Bear to the Rescue. God knows, I needed rescued. Things came to a head one night when husband said - we have to talk, and I thought we were about to finally have a meaningful and painful discussion about our marriage where we’d both acknowledge that it was moribund and either try to fix it or decide to part company. Instead, husband wanted to talk about his ailing business and how he’d come up with A Plan whereby I could help him stay afloat by a deeply dodgy bit of financial legerdemain. Essentially fraud.

At which point I held up my hands and said Whoah- hold the bus. I’m done here. We’re done here. Our marriage is over. I’m leaving. I can’t remember the exact words I used but I’ll never forget what he said in reply.

Not - oh no, don’t leave me. Not - but we’re married. Not - I’ll change. And most importantly, not - but what about the children?

He said, what about the house?

Meaning, are you going to demand half of the house? Let’s focus on what’s important here, wife. Are you going to take me to court and demand your share of the value of our chilly, hilly little misery-pit? Which is really mine, wife. You do understand that?

Three weeks later, I was gone. An even smaller, chillier, hillier little cottage had come up for rent on a nearby hill farm, and one day I packed up my drawing stuff, my children’s basic essentials, some cooking things, some clothes and I left. I had to tell my little son that I was leaving, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. He’d only just got his Mummin back from three unscheduled months in hospital, and here she was, a scant year and a bit later, vanishing over the horizon in yet another drama.

My dad and stepmother turned up at the cottage a few days later, no doubt alerted by husband’s cries of she’s left us, poor us, the faithless wretch, she’s run off with another man. Dad was full of uninformed rage. Get your coat, Deborah, you’re going back to your husband kind of bollocks. Stepmother pulled her face into a squinch and fired off the odd poisoned barb in support of her raging husband. It was beyond grim. And made all the worse by the presence of my children who’d been through a few mum-free days with their Dad and were coming to spend the next few days with me. We were, as a family, in complete freefall.

Here’s what I was painting during the first days after leaving.

It’s quite the subtext, isn’t it?

The new chilly little cottage was a bit of a nightmare when it came to trying to paint finished artwork. I’d left a purpose-built garden studio with running water and north light ( the watercolourist’s dream ) for a rickety picnic table perched at the top of a staircase, with my fax machine ( it was a long time ago, before email) balanced on top of a laundry hamper. At night, it was too cold to remain at the top of the stairs, so I decamped downstairs to the main room where there was an open fire but very little in the way of decent light.

But I had a deadline. Mr Bear to the Rescue artwork was due at the Bologna Book Fair, and I was on a tight schedule which hadn’t left any room for manoeuvre or, specifically, a marriage breakdown. So, I worked. When the children were with their dad, I worked flat out. When the children were with me, I didn’t. One day, driving my little daughter away from her dad’s ( ie our old house) I skidded on hard-packed snow on a downhill s-bend and found myself sliding full-tilt onto the business end of the oncoming snow plough. Two gigantic metal tusks impaled my car and brought it to a hissing, shrieking standstill. I can still see the face of the driver of the snow plough, frozen in a rictus of disbelief. I crawled into the back seat to comfort my sobbing baby daughter, safe ( thank heavens) in her car seat ( I couldn’t get out the driver’s door, it had completely buckled ) but understandably terrified by the loud bang and the violence of the impact. We huddled together, sobbing, noting absently that everything that had been in the back of the car - her sooky cup, her picturebooks, her Mummy Dolly, had all been flung forwards onto the dashboard and driver’s seat. The car was utterly destroyed, so much so that hours later, my g.p , heading into the hills to visit a dying patient, had stopped in the snow and got out to check if the driver’s seat was covered in gore.

When I stopped shaking, I phoned the only person I could think of to come and help. My very own Mr Bear, if you will. He arrived in an ancient Land Rover, a rusty, noisy, marvellous get-you-out-of-anything vehicle into which he tucked baby daughter and I, turned the heater on full bore, spoke to the traumatised snow plough driver, arranged insurance stuff and then drove us both back home.

He’d offered to look after us in his Bear House, but deadlines were deadlines. Back in my chilly, tiny cottage, I tended to baby daughter, waited till she finally went to bed that evening, and got on with painting the last spread needed for the Bologna Book Fair. Here, for your viewing pleasure, served with a side order of whiplash.

But look - the details in the corner. How many bees can you fit in a cafetière? And check out the matchbox. Burning the candle at both ends? Hell, yes.

Fortunately for me, a real Mr Bear had appeared in my life. My longstanding friendship with a fellow parent from our son’s nursery years was deepening into something that felt like coming home at last. Something that felt miraculously like the ‘and then they lived happily ever after’ conclusion to a bedtime story.

We began to build a life together. A life that has brought us to the present day, two elderly veterans of several decades of symbiosis, melding, intertwining, planting, harvesting and helping things grow. Beloved is a plantsman and the best human being I know. We’ve grown a family, Beloved and I. And now that our family have outgrown the nest, we are growing into our next stage, whatever that might entail. Truly, the happiest of happy ever afters.

This one’s for you, darling. I love you.

Anyhoo. Enough. Must learn to stop standing beside you as you look at my work, muttering apologies and gnawing my fingernails. That’s me by the way, not you, muttering and gnawing.

5.20 a.m after nothing like enough sleep. Anticipation of #hourlycomicsday2026

6.20 am. Will definitely redraw this because it perfectly expresses that stage between sleep and consciousness. And once conscious, knitting up my ravelled sleeve of care.

7.20 am.

8.20 a.m

9.20 am I’d had no idea just what a lot of brain processing power #hourlycomicsday2026 would require. Note my elegant footwear. Yup. Crocs.

10.20 a.m.

11.20 am Domesticity not my jam

12.20 pm. OMG. I was hungrier than I’ve been in years. What the heck? Clearly, sitting on my bum, drawing non-stop comics is energy intensive in a way that sitting on my bum drawing illustrations for a book isn’t. Weird…

13.20.

14.20. Future me can report that the bread turned out very well the next day.

15.20 p.m First time I’d stepped outside all day. Trying to post all of these drawings to Mastodon and Bluesky was too much screen time for a day that had promised to be very, very analogue. Being outside felt like balm for the frazzled consciousness. Our rickety old greenhouse is full of crap all winter long, then it gets a makeover in spring and suddenly green things are sprouting out of trays all over the place. No thanks to me, I hasten to add.

16.20 p.m Pippin eats better than we do.

17.20 p.m. Vaila stands sentinel over Pippin while he has floor time and snac. We used to let the piglets go free range but they were so awed by the vastness of the living room that they took to hiding under the bookcase, and where’s the enjoyment in that? In better weather, Pippin has an outside run where he can browse living grass, but in winter, Beloved hand cuts with scissors a small selection of our lawn. Greater love hath etc etc

19.00 p.m Not exactly hourly. Supper takes precedence over comics. And finally -

20.00 p.m. Too tired to read, watch, knit anything. Felt like I’d been hit by a truck tbh. But what a great communal drawing exercise. Would love to do it all over again next year. I love seeing what everyone else has done. Keep sharing.

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On a sliding scale from 0-10, with 0 being the equivalent of being in a state of Zen and 10 best described by a series of Dingbats interspersed with multiple WTAFs, how are you?

Me too. Currently hovering around 10 plus, tbh. Oh, boy. Me too with cherries on top. Just so we’re clear, I’m talking about cherries that are rancid, genetically modified to have no flavour other than despair, sprayed with teratogenic chemicals to hell and back and harvested by slave labour. Those cherries. You know, the ones they use to make the cherry icing on the shitcake.

Anyhoo. Having finally taken my head out of my fundament and returned to the life I had before the deadline ( September 2025-January 2026), I can now report that my p-doom is now in the high nineties and I’m struggling to maintain equilibrium in the post-truth, techno-fascistic, ongoing genocide plus drip-feed release of documents detailing the worst of human depravity on a scale I genuinely had no idea was possible, let alone was actually happening/happened.

And breathe. And breathe again. That’s it. Keep going.

So. I’m not here to rant - there’s quite a lot of ranting going around, should you wish to raise your blood pressure, marinade in cortisol and trash your telomeres. So, nope. That’s not my job. I’m a children’s book creator, illustrator, artist, writer, mother and currently devastated human being. In that capacity, my best shot at being the light I wish to see in this woeful world is to talk about community. About friendships. About finding common ground. Rather than do this in the form of interpretive dance, I choose words and pictures. Here we go -

A long time ago, possibly before some of you were born1, I was completing artwork for one of my first picture books. It was a sweet story called A Lion at Bedtime, inspired by my youngest son’s recurrent nightmare of imaginary lions sneaking into his bedroom at night. The night before I had to hand the artwork in, I was frantically burning the midnight oil to finish the first endpaper that would introduce the book. Can I just say here how much I love endpapers? They’re exactly like the moment the curtain goes up but before the actors take their places on stage. Those moments where you, the reader/audience, ‘reads’ the tableau and tells yourself a story about what you’re seeing.

Anyhoo. The endpaper.

Struck by the cosiness of the little badger’s tree root home, or at least the implied cosiness, given that my creative seedbed is very much Moominvalley melded with The Wind in the Willows’ Wild Wood, I found myself wondering what kind of home life might that little badger have? And could I tell their story?

Turns out I could. I handed in the artwork for ‘A Lion at Bedtime’ and after taking a day off, I wrote the story - ‘Mr Badger Babysits’, submitted it to Walker Books, got rejected, submitted it to Orchard Books and was invited down to London to discuss it with their (then) picturebook editor-in-chief, Francesca Dow.

So exciting! We had a publisher’s lunch, Francesca and I. At least, I did. Francesca picked at a strand of arugula and finally got down to business. We love your story! So charming! So droll! So many opportunities for glorious illustrations! Sales are so excited! Just one tiny detail -

Massaged into a state of rosy-tinted optimism, I barely twitched when the tiny detail slid under my skin and began to wreak havoc on what I’d fondly imagined to be My New Book Idea.

- we just thought that there wouldn’t be much interest in a badger character, especially with our overseas co-editions. The Americans don’t even have badgers, you know?

I managed a feeble riposte with ‘Wolverines! They have wolverines. They look pretty similar to badgers, I saw one…once. I…ahhh. Mmmm. Right. So, what were you thinking?’

Francesca had a beautiful smile. Probably still does, but our paths haven’t crossed for many years. She deployed it to devastating effect and carried on.

-we thought it would be perfect if you changed Mr Badger to Mr Bear. Much more appealing to all our co-edition territories and bears are just such a childhood favourite. Mr Bear Babysits would be a brilliant first book of yours for us.

I managed a not-so beautiful smile. A wobbly smile tinged with regret and dubious dental history. Not regret that I wasn’t going to make the book, though. Of course I was going to make the book. I just regretted ( and still do) not following that little badger down the lit tunnel to discover where he lived, how he lived, who his friends were and how on earth he managed to keep those appalling Grizzle-Bear cubs in check? Maybe that’s a story for another time and another publisher. Or maybe not. Anyhoo…

I comforted myself for the loss of badger integrity by the suspicion that cross-species babysitting would be a really tough gig. 2

So, by waving goodbye to Mr Badger, I found myself at the head of an ursine empire. Mr Bear Babysits was, as they say in publishing, well received, and was followed by Mr Bear’s Picnic in 1995. All was going so well. I was busy, enjoying immersing myself in the woodland world of Mr Bear and family, I’d just been across to the Bologna Book Fair for an amazing dinner hosted by Orchard for Mr Bear and it felt like everything work-wise was as perfect as it could possibly be. But back on the home front -

The dedication page on Mr Bear’s Picnic bears ( no pun intended) this image:

Here’s the chicken’s backstory. Home from the Bologna Book Fair, I woke up one night thinking what is wrong with this picture? Discovered I was slumbering in a bed full of blood ( no exaggeration - we had to burn the mattress) woke my husband ( er, apologies for interrupting your sleep but I appear to have nearly died beside you, sorry about the mess, could you call an ambulance?) and was blue-lighted in a neenaw from our extremely remote cottage in the Lammermuir hills into the centre of Edinburgh. At this point, I was five and a half months pregnant. And had planned a home birth, just like my previous delivery of our youngest son in 1987. So much for that plan. I didn’t emerge from hospital again until my baby daughter was a week old. Summer 1994, eh? What did you do with your summer?

I spent mine toggling between a high dependency ward and a prenatal problem pregnancy unit. I’m sure they both had catchier names but for now, let’s just go with HDW and PPPU. On the PPPU, I met many women, most of whom were midwives, auxiliaries, doctors, students and some of the best people I’d ever encountered. Hence my chicken dedication to all of them. I had a miserable week where I wrapped my head round the fact that not only was I not going to get the home birth I’d hoped for but I wasn’t allowed to go home until my baby was safely delivered. Which was a conclusion that was far from inevitable. We ( baby and I) were very high risk. Placenta previa grade 4, since you ask. At the end of the week, I was moved to a single bed ward. Which is as close to a private hospital experience as a pauper like me could ever hope for.

I set about nesting. I taped a tiny pair of newborn sized socks to the headrail of my hospital bed and resolved to fill them with a live infant. I asked if husband might be allowed to bring my drawing board and draftsman’s chair into my room until such times as I was allowed home. The consultant agreed. Husband staggered into the hospital with my long list of studio essentials. I set up a mini studio in a corner of the room and cracked on with Mr Bear’s Picnic. Every day, my obstetrician had a quick look at me then did careful ops of whatever artwork was on my drawing board. The midwives began to turn up for work bearing multiple copies of my previous books for me to sign. Work kept me happily oblivious to the precocity of the baby’s and my situation. I was scanned every week, monitored for an hour every other day. Ate hospital food and basically Got On With It.

Post from my publishers was rerouted by the Post Office from my home to the hospital because by then, husband was so fed up with my outrageous demands that he only put in an appearance on Fridays - to drop off our youngest son for playtime with Mummin and pick him up six hours later, and then, several lonely weeks in, when my father in-law arrived from the USA to help out, they all came to visit me on a Sunday and I was allowed out with them for one hour of freedom and brunch at a cafe which was a five minute walk from the hospital. Carrying a mobile phone in case I began to haemorrhage and needed nee-nawed back to safety. Husband was otherwise totally absent. When pressed, said he didn’t really want to have to come into Edinburgh more than once a week.

Right. Riiiiiight. Got the message.

Then came one Friday in high summer when, in advance of son, husband and father-in-law heading North for a week’s holiday, father-in-law arrived with a carrier bag bearing one pair of pants and a bra. The hospital didn’t do laundry for long-term patients. This scant quantity of scanties was intended to last me for a week? When I queried this lack of undergarments, t-shirts, pyjamas and maternity trousers and any shred of evidence that anyone actually gave a damn what I might need until my menfolk returned from vacation, my father-in-law shrugged and said that he was just delivering what his son had told him to deliver.

Doing as he was told. Riiiiiight. Message received and understood.

I phoned an illustrator friend and asked her for help. Within an hour she’d arrived with some spare underthings and a Next catalogue. And chocolate. And a shoulder to weep on. Once she’d calmed me down, we read the Next catalogue - what a treasure trove of muslin pyjamas and big girl pants. This was in a time before online shopping. Imagine! Paper catalogues! Phone-in orders! How very retro.

So, a few days later, I received a parcel by courier to my hospital bed. It cost a Queen’s ransom, but this sister was doing it for herself with a little help from her friends. I continued with my mission ; to fill those two tiny socks taped to my headrail. And finish the artwork for Mr Bear’s Picnic. Both of which, miraculously, I did.

Returning to our little house in the Lammermuir months later with my newborn baby girl, I thought I was home and dry. Five days in, at lunch with my mother-in-law who’d flown across from Arizona to replace father-in-law and spend quality time with her first grand-daughter, I had another catastrophic haemorrhage. Another neenaw back into Edinburgh and a terrifying four days in the HDU, wired up to a variety of machines, receiving multiple transfusions and receiving short visits from the midwives I’d only just said goodbye to the previous week. This time they were crying. That’s how I knew I was in trouble.

That, and when I turned my head to one side and saw my reflection in the stainless steel side of the machine helping me breathe, I discovered that my skin was blue. Blue! Not my best look…

Anyhoo. The artwork for Mr Bear’s Picnicmade its way to the printer in China, and the NHS worked miracles to return me to the land of the living. I didn’t make it back to the drawing board for a few months. Unsurprisingly. Just getting through a day entailed Herculean efforts. But my baby daughter needed fed, the house needed some minimal input, food required cooking and youngest son needed reassured that his Mummin wasn’t about to vanish again.

But…

I know, this is beyond aggravating, but comfort yourself with the fact that I’m not putting the next bit behind a bloody paywall. Or even just a paywall. However, I am putting it off till next week’s newsletter where the story will be continued. I promise.

For now, I have to limber up and do some drawing because on Sunday, I’m taking part in the international #hourlycomicsday which is definitely something of a marathon. Drawing one comic for every hour I’m awake is pretty immersive. I imagine it’ll make me speed up, drop any pretensions to perfection, flail around like a demented moth and yes, go to bed early. I’ll share the results on Bluesky @debigliori.bsky.social possibly also on Mastodon on @bearnecessities@theforkiverse.com ( this is not a link, and being very new to Mastodon, I have absolutely no idea how it works, so…manage your expectations) and if Mercury in conjunction with Betelgeuse doesn’t send all our telecommunications gibbering into the Void, also on my website.

What, you haven’t visited it yet? I salute you. Analogue is the future, but for now, I can be found at debigliori.com, shamelessly soliciting for work. In the Real World though, I’ll be oathing like a fishwife as I try and fail to use technology to my advantage.

See you next week xxx

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1

Yes, I am that old.

2

However, Alison Brown and I managed to pull off inter-species babysitting in Little Owl’s Babysitter. Pinny the babysitter is definitely not an owl. And Alison is some kind of genius. Her glorious illustration conveys the at-wits-end stage of babysitting a small and determined toddler. Oh, Pinny! We feel your pain.

This week was all about handing in the finished artwork for Dr Purr. By hand, because that’s the only method that my innate paranoia will allow me to entertain. Post? Courier? No thanks, I’m neurotic.

So up and down to London in a day by train. In the cheap seats because anything else required e-baying a kidney. Up at sparrowfart, into Waverley thanks to Beloved, onto the train, knit my New Thing and listen to an audiobook from Libro.fm ( Moderation by Elaine Castillo) Not exactly taxing compared to the months leading up to actually tucking artwork into a portfolio and playing postgirl. Nice work if you can get it. Nothing to do but admire the view and watch the UK speed past.

I had the best day with my editor and literary agent, made future plans, ate lunch, drank Nyetimber, handed over the Purrtfolio ( nope, there’s no stopping me now) and toasted Dr Purr’s future with two of the most lethal margaritas I’ve had in a long time. Slainte, y’all!

Hic!

Then back to King’s X for the train home. Nine hours in total of sitting on a train interspersed with three hours sitting in a restaurant followed by two hours perched on a bar stool made the consumption of industrial quantities of ibuprofen an absolute necessity. Hurty hip not too happy about its grand day out, but there’s not a lot you can do about that inside a speeding metal tube heading North. Up and down from Edinburgh to London and back again in a day is…brutal.

Standing at King’s Cross, peering up at the announcement boards for my Northbound train always makes me feel like such a country mouse. I’m a reluctant traveller, far happier with my stumpy taproot embedded in the soil of home than uprooted and Out There, in possession of that peculiar form of privileged 21st C freedom to cross seas and landmasses on a whim. A whim supported by a credit card, a passport and…sigh: a smartphone. And a charger. A set of spare underwear and a toothbrush. Glasses. Eyedrops. Medication. A sketchbook and pencils. Watercolours.

Oh for heaven’s sake.

I can’t even imagine what I might be looking for were I to book a Eurostar ticket and just head out into the Unknown. But let’s have a go, shall we?

I went to Venice two years ago at the end of a giddy three days at the Bologna Book Fair. Buoyed up by celebratory events for my newest book ‘Come What May’ and encouraged by my lovely editor, I spent a day having my mind blown by the indescribable beauty and age of Venice’s architecture and, sorry, vibe.

A day? For Venice? I desperately need to return. I’d love to stay downstream in a cheaper billet and take the train to Venice every morning and sit and draw. Oh. My. God. It wouldn’t make me a better artist but it would settle my soul, flood my cache of inspiration and remind me ( as if I needed the reminder) that ars longa, vita brevis. Venice is stunningly ancient and beautiful and elegiac and well worth the effort of crossing Yurp to access it. So that would be stop number one.

Then on to my grandparent’s village in Tuscany. Spend the night and see if there are glowworms in the shrubbery. See if the house my grandfather built is still intact. If the landscapes my father painted are still full of wildflowers. Go to Florence and lay some ghosts. Look at Ghiberti’s bronze gates, eat ice cream and discover the place for myself now that I’m older and out from under the parental cosh of fear and obligation and history. Inasmuch as we can ever leave that shenpa behind. That’d be stops two and three.

Then further south to Athens. Ferry from Piraeus to Crete. Bus from Heraklion to Agia Galini for a couple of days of immersing in memories and then letting them go. Swimming, basking, walking and eating loukoumades accompanied by small cups of grainy Arabic coffee. People-watching. Slowing right down in the heat. Eating stuffed peppers under the shade of vines and sketching the taverna owner’s family as they sit at a nearby table, preparing dinner and talking in a language that ebbs and flows in the heat.

The heat. Pressing me flat like a newly-laundered shirt. The cicadas. The frankly bonkers bin lorry with two external cab mounted speakers belting out bouzouki top ten hits. The multilayered smell unique to that particular Greek island, the impossible blue of the sky, the dust, the heat, the multicultural babble of many languages…I wonder if the old women in black ( in that heat?) leading their oregano-laden donkeys down from the hills still make that precipitous journey every morning? I wonder if the gap-toothed sardine fishermen still tie up in the harbour to offload their catch at sunrise? I hope so.

A couple of days wouldn’t be anything like enough. A month wouldn’t cut it. A lifetime? I’ll never know. The taproot, stumpy as it is, is hella strong. I guess that’s the nature of taproots. Allowing the part that’s above ground to grow and prosper, occasionally wave its branches around in a wind, but essentially, shelter in place.

Talking of such things: my good friend Milli Abrams made landfall this week after rowing solo 3000 miles across the Atlantic. Solo. Imagine. Forty-six days and nights at sea in a very small boat. On her own. Rowing. Being hideously seasick, having meltdowns, dealing with equipment snafus, spending Christmas and New Year alone, eating reconstituted dried food of wildly fluctuating tastiness or not, pooing in a bucket, making it through an eye infection that rendered her pretty much blind for a couple of days, navigating round mahoosive tankers in shipping lanes, avoiding marlin strikes, thunder and lightning, the constant threat of capsizing, waves that rose up like mountains ahead, behind, around, dragging oars through water with all the resistance of mashed potatoes, wind that howled across her deck, dousing her in salt water over and over again…and yet, out of the darkness came her tiny boat, rowing into safe harbour in Antigua, with Milli in neon pink, her smile brighter than the flares that signalled her crossing the finish line. Home from the Wild.

Out there in the Wild, sheltering in place isn’t an option. Putting yourself out there voluntarily, in the path of potential danger, stretching the boundaries of what you and those around you believe you’re capable of - that’s seriously empowering. Watching her epic journey ( she documented every day on Instagram) I’m inspired to pay more attention to the small internal voice of ‘what if?’ instead of shutting myself down in the interests of (sorry) not rocking the boat.

Rock the boat. Make a noise. Speak your truth. Call out injustice and never stop working towards a fairer world. I’m done with appeasement. I’ll offer honey to that dragon, but I want my demands met.

In a time where men feel emboldened by their leaders to regard women as brood mares, as lesser beings, as creatures so disposable that they feel free to murder them without fear of prosecution, I think it’s time to step up. To speak out for what I hesitate to call the sisterhood, since it includes everyone who is at risk from the hatecorps. I stand in support of a broad church of humans who are utterly aghast at the downwards direction of travel and would like to set a course for kinder waters. Humans who can agree to disagree over some of the small print but understand that unity is strength and wish to be part of that greater whole. A coalition of hearts and minds who are willing to find common ground and be that rising tide that lifts all boats.

There may well be dragons on the map, but there’s also treasure. Not gold, not power but the undeniable truth that we are all sailing on planet Earth together and it is up to us whether we capsize or remain afloat. In the Wild, nobody is near enough to come and rescue us, we simply have to do it ourselves.

Yet, despite the lack of fanfare, or the roar of the crowd at the FINISH line, let me absorb the absolute bliss of not having to rush into the studio every single morning. I’ll take my flask of hot breakfast down to the river and stand by the water’s edge, and simply enjoy date and banana porridge while I gaze dreamily at the sky. Without a timer running, tugging me back to take full advantage of those precious hours of winter daylight in the pursuit of good colour balance in my artwork. To allow whatever time I need to just be by the riverside, watching the water flow past. What a gift.

Also - and even more so - en route to the riverbank, about to climb the stile into the wild, I caught sight of movement on the opposite bank. A dog? No. An otter! A big dog otter, rolling around in the reeds, scratching an itch, revelling in his bendy body, perfectly aware that I was watching him, and me, drinking him in with my eyeballs and hardly daring to blink less I break the spell. I briefly considered trying to ease my phone out of my pocket to capture the moment, to prove what I saw, to post online…but thank heavens, I didn’t. I simply shared a moment with this creature from the Wild, this reminder of what’s really important. Which is now. The eternal present.

What a gift.

I too is gift. I have many dribbles to give, alongside much lugubrious staring as you roll around on the floor, not like any kind of otta, doing your Doga. I could show you a downward-facing dog that’d make you adopt me, Vaila, as your Doga grrrru. Wuff x

Indeed. The past months have been so full-on flat-out crammed with deadline concerns that poor Vaila has been reduced to determinedly claiming my attention by looming over me, staring soulfully into my eyes as I groan and squeak and thrash around on the carpet, trying to perform a series of vaguely yoga-based manoeuvres prescribed by a variety of physios in the hopes of returning my hip to some degree of its previous functionality.

Ha. If only.

Powered by nearly as much coffee as Dr Purr, some of it sent by my lovely editor to help fuel my days, I’ve been obsessed with painting the final artwork to the exclusion of all else. Standing in the chaos of my studio on the day I put the last brush-strokes to paper, I realised that I wasn’t off the hook yet. There was a mahoosive pile of unanswered business correspondence to tackle, some tax stuff needing sorted, a state of squalor in my studio that was verging on insanitary, viewed in the dazzle of low winter sunshine which also illuminated a teetering pile of undone tasks that required my immediate attention.

Moar caffeine, Doctor.

I think it’s fair to say that the now-met deadline has occupied a ridiculous amount of my headspace, even influencing my half-assed attempt at Christmas cake decoration, where I laid a sheet of supermarket pre-rolled fondant icing over my gorgeous home-made marzipan-swaddled, home-made cake ( the word I’m reaching for here is desecration) only because icing (ick, ick, ick) does help preserve the moisture content of a cake. I peel mine off every slice and chuck it in the bin because I truly loathe the stuff, but I can just about see the point of it. Sort of. Anyhoo - the pre-rolled icing had a huge crease line across it, and the cake was looking pretty lame, so I called on Dr Purr and my recent enthusiasm for yoga and lo - Purrcake!

The cake is delicious, and if previous editions are anything to go by, will last us until November when we’ll ( oh make it so) devour the last slice somewhere up a Scottish hill, as a reward for reaching the summit cairn.

For now, I’m upgrading some digital things, a mission statement that fills me with deep gloom. My laptop has done excellent service for the past 11 years but is no longer supported with updates and has a terrifying habit of deleting entire rows of text if I accidentally hit the backspace key. YIKES. So that’s about to be dragged kicking and screaming into the AI present day laptop hellscape. I may be some time. There will be many oaths. I’d far rather be making art, but I do need to give some attention to the business side of my practice. It’s also end of year tax return time - O JOY! Lhude sing goddamn. With a hey and a ho and a what the hell is this?

My grand unified theory of distraction AKA knitting isn’t working out so well either. Lhude sing goddamn. With a purl and a plain and a WTF is this? I have grievously blundered and will now have to - brace yourselves - perform open-scissor surgery on my knitted pants. Which were, I swear, bloody well finished last week. Finished…until I tried them on, walked a few steps towards the bathroom mirror and…they slid down my hips and fell to the floor. Lhude sing…oh, never mind.

Appears I’ve lost some weight or they’ve stretched or, the most likely scenario, the sheer weight of all those centimetres of knitted legs is enough to drag the whole darn thang down to the ground. At this point I’d love to insert a ghastly homespun country and Western song but I haven’t the bandwidth to dream one up. Sorry. 1

Okay. I lied. Apparently there’s enough juice left to make a stab ( cough) at a rinky-dink, twangy banjo-aka-deliverance song. But it is pretty (sorry) pants, so I’ve tucked it out of sight in the footnotes. Anyhoo - back to the collaps-O-pants where my solution is to make a far tighter waistband and graft it onto where I’m going to remove its predecessor. The important words here are graft and, gulp, remove. I’ll take photos. I’ll share the horror. You’ll probably be able to hear my sobs from wherever you are on planet Earth. I may be some time….

I made a few pots of lemon curd to use up the gorgeous Sicilian lemons that have been slowly shrivelling in a decidedly accusatory fashion in our fruit bowl since early December. And then, flushed with success, made a small batch of marmalade. Little jars of sunshine. I come over all tradwifey when I behold the filled jars of this, my brief and uncharacteristic foray into domesticity. Then I peer at the strange machine in the corner of our living room and wonder what the heck it could be until Beloved introduces us.

‘Hoover, meet Debi. Debi, this is Hoover. It sucks.’

And I’ve been slowly exiting digital platforms whose values are in league with The Darkness, but it’s a long and effortful process. Today I shifted from Spot/Iffy and moved all my playlists to Qobuz which treats its musicians far better royalty-wise and is European. Yes, I get the irony here. I’m writing this on a Macbook, designed in California and manufactured in China, but let me clean up one thing at a time. I also joined a closed group on Signal because What’s Crapp is a bit colanderish2 where privacy is concerned and joined a group on Mastodon just to see what using a federated server might be like.

But I’d rather be making art every hour of every day. I would be making more art were it not for the small detail of the world going off to acquire hand baskets from Helena.

I mean - WTAF? Every day, another outrage. Every day there’s a river of innocent blood pooling around the swollen cankles of that creature slouching towards - if not Bethlehem, definitely Gaza and Nuuk. And every day, I find more damming connections between what we buy or eat or listen to or watch and the bloodshed. We are all implicated to some degree or another. Dealing with trying to disentangle our household from as much of that horror as is feasible and still make some kind of living as an illustrator takes up a lot of time.

Oh, world. My thoughts and hopes and love go across the sea to friends in Denmark, with whom I swam in the Norwegian Sea a scant eight months ago. To friends in America. To colleagues and correspondents, cousins and compadres around the world. I can hardly believe the twists and curved balls and atrociously godawful narrative threads that are drawing us all, every breathing human, towards …

towards…

I have no idea what. None of us has a hotline to the future. All we have is each breath. Each moment. Each now. We’ve got this, whatever this is.

Many years ago, as a very amateur runner, I decided it was time to run my first race. Thinking that a challenge might be A Good Thing, I entered for the Great Winter Run in Edinburgh. Before you imagine epic feats of endurance, can I point out that this is a mere 5k that takes place in the early days of January, the route circling Edinburgh’s extinct volcano aka Arthur’s Seat. There’s a bit of up, a longer flat section, a bit of down then a shortish flat sprint to the finish line. 5K isn’t very long, but it was a good effort for a newbie.

The GWR weather plays a countermelody, sometimes lashing sleet, sometimes damp drizzle or enough ice underfoot to make for a wild hurple. The track is a two lane road, so nothing too technically challenging.

Ha.

I had put in months of training on local roads, had read all the motivational stuff I could get my paws on, knew it would be challenging, psyched myself up, ate the right amount of protein and carbs in the weeks running up to the event, carb-loaded the night before etc etc and turned up in plenty of time with my race number safety-pinned to my top layer in race-approved fashion.

It was cold. Actually, it was very cold. There were hundreds of us, jiggling around, warming up, chatting, our breath pooling in front of our pink noses, all of us gathered in pursuit of a common goal. The finish line for me, PBs for most of my fellow-runners, charitable donations for several runners in outrageous costumes, including a team of three doctors, with two carrying the third, who reclined Roman Emperor fashion on a stretcher and kept up a (sorry) running commentary. As his bearers ran.

To my dismay, they easily overtook me on the longer flat section. I’d already died several times on the first uphill bit, slowing to a fast lope rather than the lung-burning run I’d attempted at first. By the time I reached the longish flat, I was already digging deep. What the hell had possessed me to think I was ready for such cardiovascular endeavours, heaven alone knows. The doctors breezed past.

But determination to see the thing through to the end drove me onwards. I was overtaken by hundreds of runners, but by then, it no longer really registered. I was in the zone. What precise zone remained to be seen. Let’s just call it the Zone of Make It Stop, shall we? We were on the downhill now, thighs protesting, the familiar Edinburgh U’s halls of residence looming on the left, Arthur’s Seat piercing the gloomy January skies on our right. We had become one mass of flailing humans, focused on the now-visible FINISH banner.

And yet…FINISH was still bloody miles away. Aeons. Galaxies. And now there were crowds of people lining the route. Bearing witness. Yelling encouragement. They called our names because our names were writ large on our race numbers pinned to our backs.

There’s nothing like having your name yelled as you dig into your empty tank, use up all the fumes therein, dig deeper only to find there’s nothing left in there at all. You keep going though, you have to keep going…

I wet myself. I hope nobody noticed. I kept going. I remembered Paula Radcliffe squatting famously mid-race. I kept going. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I kept going. Inside my head was an abyss in the centre of which hung a giant pink inflatable question mark. Indeed. WTAF had possessed me to do this to myself? And why inflatable? I kept going…..

…….

I crossed the FINISH line. Oh. My. God. I crossed it. Damp at both ends ( I know. TMI) and two hours away from the absolute worst migraine of my entire life, but I didn’t know that then.

I’d finished.

Last year, I finally conquered a nemesis hill on my bike. Each of my two previous attempts to make it to the summit of this beast ended in my toppling off the bike and dying in a ditch. Both times, there was a witness to my failures. Both times I spent many a wasted hour berating myself for being such a wuss. But then, one day, after much psyching myself up, screwing my courage to the sticking point etc etc, I loaded up on carbs, downed a thoroughly nasty energy gel and went for it. Got a short way up, discovered I was in entirely the wrong gear and turned round, went back to the point in the route where I’d started to gear up to acquire the requisite velocity and I went for it.

I did it. Took four attempts in total, but the moment I finished that bad boy, I felt like a goddess. Once I could breathe, that is. And then I cycled home, washed my bike, oiled it and looked at the metrics on Strava and that was it. Over.

The socks that introduced this Substack? My first ever attempt at socks. Like the Great Winter Run, I thought that as an amateur knitter, it was probably time to learn the mysteries of heel-turning and sock creation. I chose a (to me) hideously difficult pattern from Laine’s ‘Art of the Sea’ which is a book of patterns inspired by the life and work of my favourite illustrator and writer, the legendary Tove Jansson. At one point in the making, you have to hold three different strands of yarn to achieve the designer’s vision of little houses. This, as any fule no, is a bit of a fingermangle. But I persevered, thinking of my friend, thinking of how cosy her feet will be, how she’ll open the parcel with the socks and -

and think ‘ WTAF are these? They don’t match, they’re full of mistakes, they’re lumpy and bumpy and-

and think, ‘I am beloved. My friend made these for me. Just for me because, like her, I love all things Tove Jansson, and besides, my feet get pretty damn icy in a Scottish winter.’

And I finished them, after ripping back too many times to count and finally conceding defeat in the two-perfect-matchy-matchy socks department. Just to underline my point, I made one sock with the sea washing up the toes, and the other with the original designer’s flowery meadow.

And, dear friend, if you’re reading this, it turns out that there’s only so much of a miracle that blocking can accomplish. These, your new socks, are very non-miraculous but as ever, made with much love.

Every single week for the last 65 weeks, each and every time I put my newest Substack newsletter to bed (AKA finish it), I am triumphant. And then I start thinking about the next one.

But - conversely. When I am close to the end of a really good book? A book I’ve been reading, not writing? That’s a very different relationship. I’m anticipating the ending, the loss of all those characters, the final wrapping-up and putting to bed of a story I’ve been totally immersed in? I’m devastated. I don’t want it ever to finish. May the FINISH banner be forever into the future. May it read UNFINISH.

And also - the same rules apply when I embark on a mahoosive knitting project. What utter immersive bliss to plan, choose the yarn, lay it all out, cast on and spend many, many hours in the happy anticipation of wearing whatever it is that I’m making. How soft, how gorgeous, how proud I’ll be that I managed to overcome the difficulties of new techniques, opaque instructions, wrong instructions, my own changes, hacks, tweaks to the pattern, and as I come close to the final few rows, I’m racing ahead, envisaging how great it’ll be and…

I finish.

I cast off, weave in the ends, try it on again ( I try my stuff on as I go along as much as possible) promise myself that it’ll look better when it’s blocked ( soaked in a little water bath, gently towelled dry and pinned out on blocking mats to air-dry for as long as it takes in the pursuit of evening out lumpy stitches, letting the yarn bloom and generally performing the magic that only a good block can do) and when I take it off the mats and try it on again… well. Oh, dear.

It’s finished. I’m no longer invested in it. I’ve spent so long staring at it, making it, dreaming it into being that I can no longer see it. It means nothing any more.

So. What am I saying?

Not all endings are created equal. Some are devastating, some are ho-hum, and some are absolutely necessary so that new beginnings can be begun. Which leads me to…

As you may recall if you’ve been with me for the past three and a half months, I’m coming to the end of a deadline for a picture book which has necessitated working every single day including all weekends since the start of October. With one week off for Christmas. I’m beyond tired. I’m punch-drunk. I’m an illustration zombie, digging deep to find happy colour combinations, skilful washes, intricate details and hang onto the absolute joy of painting under the pressure of time and - let’s not beat about the bush here - money.

I’m nearly finished. This final lap week has included one tooth extraction, one day working with no heat in the studio because finally I’m having a decent door installed to replace the door I needed pliers to unlock, the door that let in whole puddles worth of rain, the door the wasps ate shredded every summer, the door that was actually an internal door not an external door but I couldn’t face another fight with my ex-husband over his questionable build quality for my, his ex-wife’s, studio. Which I paid him for. Don’t get me started down that road. We’d never finish. Hell, they haven’t even woven the cloth for that particular FINISH banner yet.

The new door closes like the farm gate closed in Babe. Remember? Whoooshhhhhhh, click. The handle is kind to my hands. The acoustics inside my studio are quieter, denser. It feels like a refuge from the world outside.

The week is young. I’m sure there will be other hurdles to overcome, but from here I can see the FINISH line. I sincerely hope I don’t wet myself, but at 66, having birthed four children and helped raise a fifth, well - who knows what surprises my body has in store? Don’t answer that. For all my love of tarot and astrology, there are some things I’m better off not knowing.

Here, right now, with my beautiful new door keeping the weather out of my studio, with a drawing board in happy chromatic chaos, here is the run-up to the finish line. Join the imaginary cheering crowds. Witness the newly-acquired grey hair, the laughter lines, and the Purr-Picture-Progression, with most images representing one whole day in the studio. And bear in mind, I’m not done yet. Gasp. Digging deep.

I keep going…

And going…

And going…

and soon, very soon, the bunting will fly in full colour, Dr Purr and the Gingerbread Man with the mended head will take their seats at the table and we can laissez les bontemps roulez. Huzzah, she croaked, weakly.

Is that a plate of chocolate dipped langue de chats? Delicious. And are those Empire Biscuits our little Doctor is carrying? They definitely need renamed. All suggestions welcome.

For now, I’m off to soak my eyeballs in a vat of industrial strength optrex, and start thinking about next week’s newsletter. In which, I can confidently predict without the use of almanacs or tarot cards that several FINISH lines will be crossed.