• So much talk recently about exam grade degradation and how boys don’t fare well in the coursework environment and boys failing in general.

    One of the reasons has to be that boys are rarely in the company of men these days. The boys who probably need men the most are the very ones that have no male contact at all.

    A boy born to a single mother, who is statistically likely to be the child of a single mother, will rarely meet men, other than passing “uncles”, who only see them as an obstacle.

    From the word g, boys meet female midwives, health visitors, social workers, teachers and librarians, (if they are lucky).

    By the time they meet male teachers at secondary school, the hormones have begun to rage and it becomes their duty to disrespect the teachers.

    Then, at sixteen, the boy wants to be paid like a man so he can swagger down to pub on Friday night and binge with his mates. But he doesn’t want to learn the trade. He wants proper money in his hand now.

    The apprenticeship used to be a legally binding appointment, where the master agreed to teach the trade and the pupil agreed to turn up and learn. Often, parents paid for this priviledge. The boy not only learn a trade, he learned to be a man, by working alongside other men. This relationship has almost disappeared.

    Any older man who might show an interest in the welfare of young men keeps their interest quiet these days, and walks on the other side of the road. Why bother? The state and the media assume they are up to no good and they have to go through a process of proving themselves innocent before they work with young people. The rot sets in and spreads deeper and deeper.

    I worked as a sort of apprentice signwriter. My boss, Roger, watched and commented as I worked, while his dad pottered about doing all the carpentry. I learned so much more than how to paint a letter in my short time with them. I learned how annoying old people can be, but also that they are human and possible to rub along with. Whenever I’m drawing letters now, I can always feel Roger’s presence over my shoulder, telling me to cut that “O” in a bit more.

    I can’t think how we could ever get back to the old apprentice system. I can’t think how we can get back to men taking responsibility for bringing up boys. Somehow it needs to be done or we have to accept a future were women not only want it all, they will have to do it all, while the men sit back, watch TV and let them get on with it.

  • Simple rostrum for the Creative Vado
    Simple rostrum for the Creative Vado

    I’ve been trying to get my head around this one for months.

    Since I started my YouTube Drawing School, I’ve been trying to sort out several problems. The first was easy, I managed to get a cheap Creative Vado Camera from the States which is brilliant. It’s HD and dead simple to use. Once Mac sorted out the software glitches with iMovie it was perfect. Then I had lighting problems. In the end I realised that the best thing was to work in our big north facing window in daylight. But I needed some kind of a rostrum to keep the camera steady, that would not throw shadows over the paper.

    I also realised that I had focusing issues. The little movies I made did not look sharp. Then, recently, I had a brilliant idea when I watched my wife putting on her reading glasses. I snatched them off her and did some tests with her glasses in front of the camera lens – hey presto! Perfect!

    So today I got hold of some £1.99, 2.5 diopter reading glasses, did some test filming and designed my rostrum. The camera and the lens are held on with elastic bands, which help deaden any shock movements. The whole thing works beautifully. I’ve run out of time today, but tomorrow I will return to the drawing school and start posting new lessons. I’ve got a wild idea for Dark Claw, so I think I’m going to concentrate on him and the other characters in the series first.

  • Thanks to Damian Harvey for giving me an idea for today’s Blog. It’s quite hard keeping up this blog-a-day thing. Damian noted on Facebook that he’d spent the day driving his kids to and fro to some music event in Leeds. He wondered if parents drove their kids to Woodstock in the 60s.

    Well, of course they didn’t. Nowadays the parents are more likely to join the kids at the gig! Going to festivals was a generational rebellion thing.

    Somehow, when I was 15, I managed to get my parents to let me go off to the last Great Free Festival in WIndsor Great Park with my mate Godfrey, to meet up with our gang, who were also travelling in pairs. It took us all day to hitch from Bedford to Slough where we caught the local train to Windsor.

    The town was heaving with the unwashed. Queues of hippies lined the streets to get into the toilets under the town hall where Prince Charles and Camilla were later married. I didn’t have a tent, just a sleeping bag wrapped up in a tarpaulin.

    It was crazy. There was no real organisation, just a flatbed lorry as a stage. Most people were stoned. All the time you could hear the cry, “Where’s Wally?” wafting over the crowds. Wally was a mythical drug dealer. I think if you called out for him, someone would approach you and sell you some dope. I was more of a hippy than my friends, indeed several people used to call me “hippy” in those days. But I didn’t do drugs. I puffed a few joints that were passed around but I didn’t like it and was terrified of anything stronger. At that age I had a friend who was a heroine addict who eventually died of an overdose. I couldn’t see any glamour in it. Also there were serious sanctions for being caught in possession of even the smallest amount of any kind of drug and in those days the “fuzz” were quite happy to plant it on you if they suspected you but couldn’t find any on you.

    At the festival, I bumped into Glyn, my old best friend from my previous school. He and his brother had gone full time into hippydom and were quite stoned. I joined their camp as they were really quite together. They were raiding for firewood and had a nice little campfire going and were actually cooking stuff on it. I had a few tins of beans and a can opener. That’s all I had to live off for the weekend! Glyn had turned into a fabulously romantic character, bare-chested with a yellow velvet cloak and long, flaming red hair. He looked every bit like a Viking God and had picked up the attitude to go with it.

    There were no toilets and luckily no rain or otherwise the place would have turned into a cholera breeding ground. Stoned hippies were urinating and defacating where ever they liked. There were no nice Highland Spring plastic water bottles to be bought from Tesco in those days, no catering vans or mobile toilets. No event industry. It was a bit like a modern Flashmob. The word went out and everyone turned up. The town pretty much ran out of food. I think emergency standpipes were set up so we could get a drink and splash our faces.

    As I remember, Mud and the Pink Fairies were the major Bands. There was no running order. No one knew who was playing. Bands just turned up and played. The first you knew was playing when someone introduced the next band. The generators would often pack up half way through a set. Ah, such innocent days. Not like today, mollycoddled in Stadia, with barcode tickets and overpriced merchandise bought through your bluetooth phone.

    We were awoken at daybreak on the last day, it must have been the Monday or Tuesday after the August Bank Holiday. The “fuzz” moved in to “bust” us! “Move on or be arrested,” they said, kicking the sleepy heads awake and itching to arrest and have a go at anyone who stood up to them.

    Us weekend hippies packed our bags and slinked away back to normality, giving the town of Windsor back to it’s inhabitants.

    I guess most of those old hippies are establishment old farts like me now. You can’t tell me that 90% of the great and the good of today never inhaled.

    Actually it really was an exciting time. No one knew what the rules were. Not like now when anything that might be fun must have a health and safety audit and a clear profit stream. No wonder you see videos on YouTube of kids racing on top of cars and doing stupid stuff like that. Kids do stupid things and learn by their mistakes. My generation did the most stupid things and realised how dangerous they were and decided to protect our kids from themselves.

    Where’s Wally now? I imagine he’s got a clip board and is organising safe family events somewhere.

    Either that or he’s wearing a bobble hat and a stripy jumper and is happily walking around in the world of children’s books trying to hide in the crowd. Only the walking stick gives a clue to his former, shady life. He never quite walked properly again after the “fuzz” beat three shades of shit out of him in a cell in Windsor police station back in seventies. He’d been dealing in illegal substances all weekend and done pretty good business and had to pay his dues.