Finished

A day for which the words anti-climax were invented.

Technically not finished until it’s cut off the board it’s been stretching on, but…pfffff. I still have to photograph, interleave with tracing paper, pack in brown paper, add a plastic envelope for full waterproof security, zip it into a portfolio and deliver it by hand to my editor in London, and then, and only then - it’s DONE.

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.

watercolour artwork from ‘Dr Purr’ TBP Bloomsbury 2027

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!

Yup. It really did say ‘om’. Not nom nom om, not om is where the heart is, just, simply, om.

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.

At least two of you will recognise what Dr Purr is playing. Share…

Say Mama what you doing

with them shears in yo’ hand?

Heading out to the back forty

what in tarnation’ve you got planned?

Say Mama you look madder’n a proud boy

you got murder on yo’ mind?

With yo’ needles and yo’ pattern

and yo’ features all unkind.

Say Boy, yo’ mind y’r’own bidniss

and me, I’ll jis’ mind mine.

And don’t yo’ call me Mama

Because it’s Cuttin’ Time.

1. ( sorry, blame the weird times we’re living through, and the fact that ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’ as some white man with power said last week)

2. For ‘a bit colanderish’ read ‘totally sieve-like’. Don’t give it anything you wouldn’t be happy to broadcast by megaphone outside the White House.