And so Luke has learnt how to eat his toes! At five and a half months. He’s getting bigger every day, and very funny! Hey if he keeps putting his foot in his mouth, he might be President some day…

Drawn in his journal.

Which is the odd one out? Oh I love that game in “Have I got News For You”.

Answers on a postcard, in the meantime I will concoct a convoluted answer.

Images of London, for a project. Do not adjust your tv sets, this is black and white. No, I haven’t lost my coloured paints.

The old legend goes that if you vote in a republican president you will have global warming for forty years, or something. Drawn at lunchtime today in the Silo, with purple micron in the wh smith book. I will, I promise, go back to colourful ink and wash drawings soon.

I’ve started drawing and writing in my small wh smith book, some of what’s happening on the day, loose and unplanned, and usually at lunchtime. Today was July 14, Bastille Day; also today there began a strike of service workers on the UC campus. Having lived among the French (and the academia French at that) I know their own love of a good strike, no matter how small (one bus strike I experienced in Strasbourg lasted, bizarrely, 59 minutes). In fact I think was even technically on strike once, when Fac des Lettres librarians downed datestamps for the afternoon. It’s hard to remember.

My entry for Illustration Friday (I haven’t done one in a while), theme: Foggy. Yes, I had all these ideas of San Francisco or Prague or Strasbourg, of buildings half-immersed in grey, but I’ve been drawing so many buildings in grey lately that I wanted a change, and came across an old pic from an interesting evening in Belgium in late 1999.

This is my oldest friend, visiting me when I lived in Charleroi. We went, as always, to my local, La Cuve a Biere (an excellent and warm little place), and I got one of my favourite beers, Kwak (it comes in that funny shaped glass and is pretty strong, and tastes incredible). Tel did too. He liked it so much he downed it and ordered another. The Belgians on our table were surprised (and possibly nervous), for these sort of beers you have to enjoy, not chug down - for a beer like Kwak can be a bitch.

The room went foggy, the walls started spinning, the speaker above us started changing shape - at least that’s what Tel told me at the time. He suddenly got up, went into the bathroom, and pretty much didn’t come out for almost an hour. From what I heard, it was not pretty. When he emerged, we wisely decided not to get another, and walked home in the snow, not even stopping for a kebab. He has not so much as sipped a Kwak since. I can’t say I blame him.

This is faber-castell warm grey pen, with pilot varsity ink as the wash, on bristol paper. Yes, I’m trying something new for a change. I might illustrate other chapters of my life in strip form, if I get around to it.

smoggy davis

The first summer I spent in Davis was like no other I had ever experienced. Growing up in England meant bright sunny June days with cut grass in the park, orange ice lollies and bumblebees, followed by grey rainy June days with damp mud in the park, heinz tomato soup and wasps. It did not ever mean endless desert like weather coupled with the feeling that it may never be cool ever again anywhere in the world. That is what summer in the Central Valley is like, and that’s what it’s like now - only much worse.

We haven’t had rain here since, I don’t know, early February. Now I know I’ll have little sympathy from you rain-sodden English folk, but it’s pretty serious - it’s dryer than ever, which means a perfect recipe for fire - and boy are we on fire. There have been over a thousand fires raging across the state for the past couple of weeks now, most caused by dry lightning strikes, and since then the huge baking Central Valley has been blanketed with thick, nasty hazy smoke, that is going nowhere fast. You can feel it in your lungs, you can see it everywhere, the sunlight has a dull orange tint to it, the sunsets are spectacularly frightening. And now the temperatures are reaching those nasty July heights again, hitting 110 degrees Fahrenheit today (that’s about a million degrees Centigrade, or it feels like it anyway). It’s really quite unfriendly outside.

And pretty unhealthy, which is why we’ve been having Spare the Air days here. On those days, people are encouraged not to use their cars and add to the pollution, but use public transport or simply stay at home. Buses are free, though it means waiting in the thick smoggy heat for one to come. When will it end, I wonder? Well, it won’t rain until, I don’t know, November, and we currently have a drought which means water is scarce for fighting wildfires (though it doesn’t seem to affect those three-times-a-day lawn sprinklers in our apartment complex, the ones that spray even when it does rain), and the state budget is already shot to pieces. Thank goodness for air-conditioning; though if the rolling black-outs start up again, we might not even have that. California, here we come.

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Ok, time for the now-expected pun-based gag. Britain have something similar to Spare the Air days: they’re called Spare the Heir, and on those days tabloids and glossy mags are encouraged not to write anything about Prince William. Especially not Heat.

Poor, I know. But it’s 110 degrees, so I have an excuse.

(By the way, this is my 50th post on this new blog!)

For those of you watching in black and white, Jack the Ripper is the one in grey.

This is the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields, where several of the Ripper’s victims drank (and the rest) before meeting unfortunate endings involving bits of them being mailed to the local bobbies. They never caught the Ripper, but I bet he was a bit of tearaway.

I love the French name for him, Jacques L’Eventreur. I love all the foreign names for him: Jack lo squartatore (Italian), Viiltäjä-Jack (Finnish), Jack Trbosjek (Croatian), Kuba Rozpruwacz (Polish), Seoc an Reubainnear (Gaelic), Джак Изкормвача (Bulgarian), ג’ק המרטש (Hebrew), Jack Bantha-poodoo (Huttese). Okay, maybe not the last one.

Originally he was known as Jack the Perforator, but the papers didn’t like it. These days, he would probably be called a Tearorist. Oh come on, it’s late, gimme a break here.

An ink attack on the page by the Copic pen, fresh from drawing every single line in fleet street, on night two of ’sleep-training’ (it went very well too). I wanted to draw more bare trees again, but this time with buildings behind them, so I went back to a photo from London back when I lived there, and was studying nearby this place: Temple Church, off Fleet Street, former HQ of the Knight’s Templar, now a busy destination for tourists bugging the priest about the (inappropriately titled) Da Vinci Code, and medieval students looking for William Marshall (guess which of these two groups I fell into).

Sleep-training the baby is not fun, especially if the baby stubbornly refuses to sleep. During that process, going in and checking on him every ten minutes (as per the book), I got the Copic pen out last night and drew lots of little lines, that eventually ended up looking a lot like Fleet Street in London (my favourite street); there’s the church of St. Dunstan in the West, there’s the Royal Courts of Justice, there are offices of newspapers past and present (well, not many present any more), there are the clocks I was watching closely.

Well, euro 2008 turned out rather well, and I’m just now sitting waiting for the Final to kick off, I have my Pepsi Max, I have my Pringles (the crisps, not the cardigans), and I’m impressed that after all his unpredictable prognostics, Mystic Pete got one thing right: Germany in the final. And who said Mystic Pete couldn’t really see the future? (with apologies to France and Portugal, etc)

But there’s now a contender: Mystic Mister T. When  asked for a prediction for the final, he scowled at the camera and gave a simple response: “Spaiiin“.

Can’t argue with Clubber.