• Mood: bruised knuckles
• Music: pet shop boys - red letter d-d-d-d-d-d-d (skip track)

the planes are flying too low today

Still blurry even after I got that decent night's sleep, buoying myself up for the afternoon's workshop with egg sandwiches and Irn-bru. It won't be enough, stumbling down the street through scuffling drifts of willow fluff under sky muddled grey as the ink wash I use to indicate denim. It got a work-out this week, as I inked and washed and process-whited and swore and ran out of cooperative nibs. (Turned out that though I'd bought up all the good gold nibs in the shop, I'd also managed then to put them somewhere safe. Now looking forward to finding them in six months time when I have a new favourite nib.)

Standing at the pick-up point waiting for Aimee, probably at the wrong entrance to the Park and Ride. There's a chaffinch so angry with me for standing here that I can hear it over David Bowie singing Let's spend the night together. Ten minutes. Definitely on the wrong corner. A Reliant Robin just drove by, painted a dark, lustrous and very modern blue. Still had a very old man in a flat cap driving it, though. Suppose I should call her. There's a blackbird sneaking across the tarmac -- run-hop, run-hop. Do I have to? It's nice here. Peaceful.

Later. After the workshop is over. Going home on the bus to save Aimee's tyres and temper while some dirty-blond bintette smokes some noxious herbal cigarette that smells like burning silage. Sickly hot wet weather makes everything bad smell worse. Every speed bump in the county lined up between here and Oxford. Rabbits and magpies, lime trees and peonies, all the way back through suburban sprawl. There are houses for sale here; they look big enough to drown in.

I've got ink fatigue. Inking has a sort of deadening, dulling satisfaction to it -- it feels nice like slowly cooling water. If writing is like storming through a mess of brambles, inking is like sprawling stunned in an icy ditch after.

And here's what I've been inking, or the next page of it, anyway. Going to gigs with Siouxie will be serialized over the next few weeks, but if you don't fancy waiting or think it would be nice to see my work unpixellated for a change, tomorrow I'm printing it and some of my favourite strips from the past year up into a comic called we are obstinate and do not go to bed when we are tired, which, as Damian commented, sounds like an Oxford band name. If you want a copy, email me.

Oh, and I won the last round of the Picky Picky Game, though not by much -- anyone who wants to join in the next round, Damian's now fixed it so that it will accept BMPs so you can contribute a panel even if all you have to make pictures with is Microsoft Paint! We're voting at the moment on whether sausages, beer or grey-faced people staring moodily at lasagne will lead to the best plot development, and any help would be much appreciated.