If I’m at home, there’s always a cat to draw. I don’t always want to draw a cat, but sometimes they just sit there, and you can’t help it. We have two cats, Whiskers is the smaller, Sawyer the bigger, but they are litter-twins. Well technically they were triplets, but the other kittie lives somewhere else. Anyway above was the last day of January, very rainy, the first of three days when I was home sick. That’s ‘at home sick’, as in I had a really nasty cold, but I’m always  a bit ‘homesick’ as well, for London, that’s normal, it’s been a little harder than usual being away from my London family lately. Still we plod on. I was working from home while sick for part of that day and Whiskers was helping, but I had to sketch him looking out at the window. I made him a little bed on the desk from my scarves. There’s another cat that looks like them both who often comes into our back yard and winds our cats up, usually resulting in our two cats turning on each other and spending the next hour or so hissing and clawing at each other. Cats and their politics. That cat is like Fox News, and within seconds of appearing he is dividing our two usually friendly cats up with his nonsense about pretend culture wars or something. I usually have to go out and shoo him away. I haven’t seen him in a while though, since he was nearly attacked by an owl. We get these huge owls around here, and they can pick a cat up so you have to be careful, well our neighbour said they saw one swoop down and scare that other cat away. It must be the same owl that lives in the big tree near our house, I hear it hooting at night. We get a lot of owls around here. There was a superb owl last week on TV.

Sawyer spends a lot of time sleeping on the couch. In fact I think the couch itself gets up and moves about more than he does. I was trying out those Graphitint paints mentioned in the previous post and thought I’d use them to sketch Sawyer. I knew he wasn’t going anywhere for the next six hours, so I had plenty of time to work on it (it took me about 15 minutes top). On weekends I also spend a fair bit of time on the couch, so I can’t talk. I’m not exactly talking Royle Family levels, but those mornings when I get up super early to watch Spurs at 7am, and then suddenly its midday, well what are couches for. I got up this morning to watch Spurs actually, and we lost (I’m still in a bad mood about that), but I did go for a three mile run afterwards, before settling back to the couch to practice guitar, build some Lego and watch a Spider-Man movie. It’s been a busy and occasionally quite stressful week, it’s good to relax.

And here is Whiskers again, sitting looking out the window while seated on my big heavy copy of The Riverside Chaucer. I was at home that day working remotely (had several Zoom meetings and a deadline to meet so was glad not to have the interruptions). That copy of The Riverside Chaucer is always by my desk. If I were a smarter person I would say that use it for inspiration, hoping the Canterbury Tales might unlock the conundrum of campus office space, or that Troilus and Criseyde might help me figure out the teaching budget, but I don’t really read it much at all any more. It still has a lot of little post-it note fragments poking out of the top. I had to study it during my MA in English at King’s College London, and felt it important enough in my life to bring it with me when we emigrated in 2005, this massive heavy book of text I would probably never study again, not that I knew that. However it has been useful, immensely so, in a way you might be surprised at. I keep it on my scanner, because when I want to scan my sketches, this big heavy book can lie on top of the sketchbook and keep it much flatter than just my hands. It’s perfect for that, and even better with a cat sat on top. I drew this with the brown fountain pen, very quickly while Whiskers posed. It was quite a sunny day, and that spot by the scanner gets a good bit of sunshine in the morning.