• I nearly crashed the car this morning. I was listening to the radio when a news article about carbon trading came on. The Friends of the Earth claim that Carbon trading is now being wrapped up into derivatives by the financial world, setting us up for another crash.

    The Financial expert came on and, with a patronising tone, said the the FOE lady obviously didn’t understand the complexity of financial markest.

    What! I yelled at the cows in the field. It’s the Financial experts who do not understand the the financial markets. They have made that very clear. If they had the slightest clue of what they were doing we would not be in the mess we are in now. It’s the financial experts that created the crash and the recession. They are driven by greed and care only to rob those who entrust their money to them.

    As for the carbon trading scheme – What a scam! Could anyone think up a scheme more open to fraud? Well, maybe the old milk quotas were as bad – similar scam really.

    Why do we put up with it?

  • If you voted for the Pink Car rally on blingmycoach.com last Friday, many thanks. The pink Car Rally won the competition and so will have a pink coach join the rally next year, raising funds for the Little Princess Trust, who provide real hair wigs to children suffering hair loss due to cancer treatement.

  • My latest Drawing School offering, follows a request from Tom Greenfield, who I met at Blundell’s School recently. I have drawn Rhinos before both in the Just So Story, How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin and also in my Millie and Bombassa books (one of which is being prepared for the iphone – more of this later).

    It’s hard to decide what the drawing should look like. I suppose the cop out would be to promote Millie and Bombassa – maybe I’ll do that drawing lesson when the iphone app comes out.

    Being asked to show how to draw something like a rhino makes me go and look at rhinos again. I think I often draw what I think a Rhino looks like, but when I really go into it, I realise what extraordinary things they are. Drawing a rhino as a rhino, i.e. without clothes on, makes me follow the lines and really understand that their heads are huge and that parts of their faces are not in the places that you might think they are.

    There is nothing like observing and drawing to get to really understand how something works, otherwise we half look and make assumptions.

    Sometimes I think I’m only now getting to grips with drawing. I suppose I’ll still be thinking that when I’m ninety two.