Christmas etc.

Went to my Mum's place for Christmas. I was a bit bored there, to tell the truth, but my mate Alex was around, visiting his folks. Did a bit of drawing, but nothing spectacular. It brightened up when Katy came to visit on the 27th.

Good news on the job front. They offered me some work after that interview I thought I did so badly at the other day. 3 days a week. Not sure what the salary will be, but it sounds good. That means I will have 2 weekdays, plus the weekends to do as much drawing as I like. Brilliant! I am going to treat it like a job, and work as professionally as I can on my comic and other projects (stories etc.) The catch with the job thing is that I will have to get qualified properly before I can start. That means most of January will be spent revising.

Also, I brought my scanner back down, so I can scan in some pictures...

Job Interview

Had a good weekend. On Sunday, we cooked a huge Christmas lunch. There were 11 of us. Half were vegetarian, and half weren't, which complicated the whole process. It was a lot of work, but worth it, I think, in the end, and I cooked a perfect turkey! Katy made bread sauce and enough potatoes to feed the Russian army. Still looking for work. I just had an interview at the place I am volunteering at. I hated the whole experience, as usual. Still not sure if I want the job. The money is excellent, but the workload commensurate with that, which means - no time for drawing. Haven't drawn much for days. Going to do a page of Year Zero, my long project now.

Poetry Reading

Katy and I seem to be having a surprise date once a week, which is quite fun. Last night she took me to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where there was a poetry reading by a poetry group called the Lazy Birds.

The last time I went to a whole evening of poetry reading, it was dreadful. I only remember one guy who made the rhyme "two recent divorcees from human resources", but that was the highlight.

These guys were a lot better. My favourite was Sjaaak which was a kind of Brechtian operatic poetry, but very funny too.

I drew some sketches - think I'm getting a bit better at representing people, but still need a bit of work. I'm using the technique with 9b pencil and blending stick which Anthony Zierhut uses on his sketchblog. Have a look.

Jews at a street corner

I'm staying with Katy, my girlfriend, at the moment. The area she lives in is full of Orthodox Jews. They make great drawing subjects, with their black clothes, or on weekends, their white capes over their clothes, and their cylindrical hats. One of these days I would like to go out and do a lot of sketches with some india ink and a pen, but the weather has been awful lately. They all stay indoors.

Who's a happy bunny then?

Not me, obviously, back in February, which is the last time I posted. Which is funny, because looking back on it, I had a high old time, with only the occasional stress-out regarding essays that were due in. That's what you get for studying a subject you have no talent in.

Anyway, a few months down the line, New York in the Summer, working for UNICEF, an MA under my belt, a one-month job with the worst boss I have ever had, lots of drawing, 9 months of bliss with my girlfriend, and it's nearly Christmas again.

My next task, should I choose to accept it, is to try to upload some sketches onto my blog, in the hope of shaming myself into drawing a bit better.

Coffee at 1600

Yes, I will meet you for coffee at 1600 Katrin.

Looking up

Things are looking up, slightly. I finally have a topic for my essay (typical work breakdown: 4 weeks to write essay - 3 weeks casting around for a topic, which I change 4 times, telling everyone about each of them in some detail; feeling sick and panicking and wondering whether to leave country, deciding it isn't worth it; find topic and have 5 days to write it; quite enjoy writing it, quite irritated that I have to explain to everybody that I have changed mind 3x since talking to them (what must they think?) submit: satisfactory mark; promise self that won't go through same process next time, will plan better etc. and relax about things; rinse and repeat for next essay)and have even made a start on it, even if the start involves a description of the Litvinenko affair, which doesn't seem relevant to my topic just yet. Still, nice to have something down on paper. Must have been the mojitos! Yes, went out on Wednesday night after interesting meeting with other students in which we described our law essays. The most racy one was Kelvin's which involved witchcraft, witch doctors and wizards with airstrips in the back garden for flying on broomsticks etc. I hope I never have to go to court in Cameroon.

Following that, saw Shooting Dogs with KT, a film about the Rwandan genocide, which Lars (our law lecturer) had said was no good, biased etc, as he has been there and knows a lot about it. Well, I was surprised, because it wasn't a bad movie, and if it was one-sided, I would argue that any situation with a bunch of people killing people with machetes is going to inevitably fall down on one side or the other. I just haven't the stomach for these things though, it depresses me no end watching people kill each other, you'd think I'd be jaded by now. I only ever saw two dead bodies in my life however. One was my dad, the other was a lady outside the post office in St. Petersburg. She had just sat down and died, and was just sitting there like a grey statue. It reminded me of a good sketch by Alexei Sayle I once saw, in which Burke and Hare, the bodysnatchers dig up a corpse of an old lady one night, traipse through the town with it, and then knock on a door. A voice cries, "Is it fresh?", and they say "Yeah" in gruff voices, and pass the corpse in. The old lady is propped up in a chair, and then morning arrives, the sun shines and a cock crows and we see that she has been propped up behind the counter in the post office, where there is a queue stretching out into the street, containing Phileas Fogg, who has made a bet to go round the world in 80 days, but has spend several weeks in the post office queue waiting to submit his passport form.
Anyway, then went to meet Kata and Hemmie in ludicrously expensive bar in soho (£7 for a Mojito, though Hemmie says there are better ones at the soho hotel which cost £13 - I'll take his word for it) then we went to cheaper pub (only 12 for three drinks) where Kata insisted on playing truth or dare, a perfectly horrible game, as I go into thinking I am a fairly open person, and then suddenly remember the most embarrassing things in my life which I promptly blab about.

If I had time I would write about the meeting with bunch of committee weirdos from the university. But I don't.

morning panic

This morning I had a panic about all the things I am supposed to be doing, but am not. These include: reading the complete works of Dostoevsky, finishing the french novel I started last century, finishing the comics page I am drawing, doing the 6000 word essay I haven't started for my course, all of which is very stressful. So instead I trained my brain with Dr Kagemusha's time-wasting device and got a very satisfactory score on multiplication, beating my previous personal record. All is well with the world. Went to first "study group" last night, which was really enjoyable and actually helped a lot. Still the prospect of what I am supposed to be doing later on looms ever larger.

Funding proposal

At the moment I am contemplating putting pins in my eyes, swallowing a broken glass, jumping down the stairwell - anything but this funding proposal, which is crawling along at an ungodly 15 words an hour. I wish I was exaggerating. Part of the problem - no, wait - the whole problem is that I am not the slightest bit interested in my proposal idea: it is so dull, I can't even be bothered to repeat it here. It was my third idea, after all. The first two were a bit more interesting, but they had already been done somewhere in the world, so I had to switch. I suppose this would be flying along a lot faster, but I have been taking regular breaks every 3 minutes to check my email, eat chocolate, download songs, draw pictures and then colour them in... It's all incredibly demoralizing and makes me wish I'd never started this MA programme in the first place. Then there is the strange phenomenon which Dan mentioned the other day, which is when you are working on something you start getting really inspired about things you would like to read or do. In this case I have had some brilliant ideas for comic stories I can do, and my doodling has really improved 100% since last week, but I frustratingly can't justify drawing when I should be extrapolating costs for an imaginary project which is never going to get put into practice. Where's the justice in that? I'm going for a walk.

Bagpipe music

Not much happening in my life, but when has that ever stopped a columnist? Interesting lecture today by a shell executive and someone from Amnesty, arguing about corporate responsibility. They both made good points, but, for my money, the shell guy made the better points. After all, a company can only do so much, and can't dictate how revenue is spent, any more than a company can stop its employees spending their wages on kalashnikovs and besieging a local old people's home (for example). Lunch at the Hari Krishna man was unusually sparse, perhaps because he splurged yesterday, with ginger beer and poppadoms. Still, as it is free, one shouldn't complain. Listened to interesting radio programme about Louis Macneice, my favourite poet, whose anniversary it is this year. Odd to hear him reading out his own verse in those clipped Oxford tones, ("We are dying, Egypt, dying"), without a trace of emotion. I don't think poets read their own work well, as a rule. Yeats is just dreadful, like some senile old loon; wonder what kind of actor Shakespeare was.
After 32 years of trying to master small talk, I have decided to give up. Alright, I wasn't really trying the first ten years, but come to think of it, the problems only started once I did start trying. Anyway, it's a waste of time, I can't do it, at least in my native language.

Not exactly productive

All my fantastic plans for getting on with work today were sabotaged when my Icelandic friend hauled me off to the pub and poured 3 pint of Guiness down my neck. Now it isn't even six and I don't feel like doing anything else today. Interesting getting to know people from course, some of whom are completely different to my previous conception of them. Everyone (including me) seems much more relaxed this term. Makes me sad we are not going to be studying that much longer together. Have to run out and meet someone...

Christmas, New Year, Christmas...

I wonder whether anyone else senses the law of diminshing returns operating with particular efficiency around the festive season. Christmas has been getting progressively crapper since 1981, apart from a small blip in the graph in 1998, when Christmas was crapper than it has been before or since.

I mentioned this to Simon (who has kids) and he said "Well, Christmas, it's about the kids, isn't it?" Well, that's frankly unacceptable, if you ask me.

If there's one thing worse than Christmas when you're not a kid, it's New Year full stop. This year I didn't even bother staying up for it. I've done it all: linking hands with old friends and singing "Auld Lang Syne", or watching a firework display. I even remember drinking myself into a coma on Nana Plaza, allowing some small toerag to make off with my grandfather's watch (or did I give it to him?) It's all terrible, terrible...

Still, griping aside, I did get a chance to put my feet up for the first time in several months and got to see a few old friends.