• I met the Illustrator Sarah McIntyre on Tuesday. She emailed me to say she was envious of my shed. I suggested she should build one on the side of her building… she has! Sort of… check it out here!

  • It’s a pretty fine shed I’m building. I really should be calling it a studio. All the backbreaking time I’ve been digging and mixing concrete and laying blocks for the foundations, I’ve been thinking that I should be writing about this in my blog. Then I come in exhausted and don’t really feel like it.

    Anyway, here I am. I haven’t done much serious building for eighteen months or so. I’ve managed to block out all the memories of building when we moved here. I worked like a maniac for the first two years. The shed/studio has reminded me of all the planning involved. My days then, were planned around the daily visit to Jewson’s the builder’s merchants, picking up and ordering stuff so that the building work could continue smoothly. I used to lie awake at nights running through jobs, estimating quantities in my head!

    Now I’m planning when to hire the concrete mixer, will they have one available for Wednesday? The weather is supposed to get better then and I’ve got a certain amount of artwork to do first and the polystyrene insulation should have been delivered by then… see… I’m at it again!

  • I went to Cribbs Causeway on Saturday. It’s our nearest big shopping mall in Bristol. People come from miles and miles to shop there. They even have day trip flights from France!

    A suspicious package was discovered in Marks and Spencer’s so the whole place had to be evacuated. It reminded me of the all the IRA bomb scares in the 1970s. It was a very calm and efficient evacuation. We were soon outside watching the rain clouds forming above us and remeniscing about bomscares we have known. I thought it was quite interesting watching people’s reactions.

    Then the mall creche walked past. They were hilarious. About fifteen toddlers and five or six carers all connected at the wrists by luminous green curly wurly cables. It was a fantastic image, so I got out my camera phone and made to take a picture for the weblog. My wife and a friend of ours, who is a teacher, were horrified and asked me if I wanted to be arrested!

    It’s so sad that we’ve come to this. Can the world no longer cope with innocent intentions?