I’ve been so busy the last month and a half, I’ve not had a moment to blog. Well, I have really, I went on holiday for a week in Tennerife, But I left the laptop at home and had an internet free week. Lovely – it can be done.

I became a little obsessed by textures on Tennerife. The high Volcanic desert was eye-poppingly wonderful. every few feet the terrain seemed to change. Most of it seemed to be in the process of still being formed which, in a way, I suppose it was.

We were staying across the road from the Botanic Gardens which provided me with such a wealth of textures to photograph, I had to buy an extra memory stick! This picture is of some kind of tree hanging its leafy things down.

Otherwise I’ve been making lots of visits to schools and libraries. At Home I’m working on my new books about Monster Boy. I’ve finally done the covers and have this week got around to the inside artwork. I’ve Eight books ahead of me. A daunting prospect in some ways, but I’m getting very frond of the character.

School visits have been interesting. I sense a sea-change in English Primary Education. Teachers have had enough of government intervention and are slowly beginning to ignore all the target setting. I think Government will too soon. It will all be allowed to slide back to the good old days when we used to teach kids stuff instead of rehearsing them to meet targets.

I’ve started drawing in my sessions again and everyone is enjoying it. It’s like we are all waking up after the hundred years sleep of Literacy to discover again that art and drawing are just as important as writing.

I’ve also become really interested in the Right Brain/Left Brain thing. Don’t know what I mean? Well, I’m working on it. I started out with a prejudiced against the left-brain dominance of our society, being right-brained myself, But I now realise that it shouldn’t be a war. We all possess the same facilities but use them differently. The trick is to work on the parts that are weakest. Putting the two sides together makes for a formidable brain. No point siding with only one half when you can have it all!