15 years ago today I took Michael to get his turtle tattoo for his birthday, his 40th. It was before we had fancy phones, and there are no photos of the day. 2 years ago he died, and I realised how few photos of him I had at all. The best moments of each year […]
The original idea for this came early last year, back when my biggest worries were getting old and disillusioned. I started drawing it later when I knew better. It all got too hard, both life and drawing, and it stalled until six months back. It came together surprisingly quickly and I sent a photo of […]
A gentle drawing about grief. I finished it last week, but the hardest part was not being able to text a picture of it to Michael. I should have posted this then when I’d had two Wednesdays off to myself, for the first time in months, when I was feeling positive about things being back […]
I keep forgetting the details. We were talking the other night about how Karen’s gall bladder emergency was a major trigger last year for Brigitte’s breakdown. But then we remembered the boy who was stalking her, and talking about killing himself, just beforehand. I’d been so focused on the aftermath that I’d forgotten that when […]
Last Wednesday I couldn’t face the picture I’d been working on. Another one that’s a bit grim, but somehow didn’t seem dark enough. The Wednesday before that I’d sent a progress photo to cousin Michael like I always do when I’m working on something. I’d thought I was sending texts and photos for him, keeping […]
Passed cystoscopy number 10 yesterday. Maybe it was because I’m on a week’s holidays, but I was pretty blasé about this one. No drawing even! On the bus to the hospital there were a group of Down Syndrome teens on an outing. It was a sunny day and they were having an infectiously fun time. […]
This was going to start off like so many recent posts – been tired, took a long time to work on this, bla bla. But it was worse, a new insomnia and a new level of stress. Waking up at 5am and not being able to get back to sleep. Waking up at 4am, waking […]
This is a story of two halves. Bad part first. The idea for this came into my head a couple of years back when I got the letter about my first check up scan. I still feel like a bit of a faker telling people I had cancer, because I never felt sick, but chemo […]
Most of my work is about myself. I’ve been using some of these symbols for so long they’ve been progressively boiled down to a few details, whilst becoming increasingly complex in meaning. For the two or three people who’ve come along for the ride, they might make (some!) sense, but for everyone else they can […]
This was going to be about death. A few weeks back, I was listening to a Pink Floyd album, one of the seminal bands of my late teens and early twenties. I looked at the date of the album, and realised that they’d essentially broken up 25 odd years ago, and two of them were […]