Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner…

This past week, other than my duties which I won’t drone on about, I cleaned up my office, demolished my drawing “studio”, and shoved my TV in its place thinking that I need to start to relax a little more than I do. My plan was to find a game (hopefully a little old so it’s cheap) and throw myself into it. I’ve bought Borderlands 3 for less than a tenner and that might be my weekend sorted (other than duties which I really need to stop mentioning, though I hate that Protestant work ethic mentality that means I hate it when anybody thinks I’m actually having fun).

I demolished my desk because ‘Private Eye’ had broken my spirit one more final time. I’m a crap cartoonist, I declared. Never touching a pen again…

Of course, I then broke that vow by drawing Tim Martin for Martin Rowson’s latest challenge, and now that promise has been made to look even more foolish because I’ve now won Martin Rowson’s previous challenge for drawing Jacob Rees Mogg.

YES, I WON!

I’m delighted, of course. I’ve had other small accomplishments along the way but this feels the best. I just wish it had come on a week when I could enjoy it, rather than it becoming a tangential detail whilst I’m trying to look after somebody who has had a particularly bad week. (Question: how the hell do you take the blood pressure of somebody who has white coat syndrome and whose blood pressure spikes every time she thinks she’s about to have her blood pressure taken?)

As for my desk: I’m not replacing it. The truth is that I still do almost everything I do digitally, and I have neither the space nor the cash to invest into ink work. Much as I’d love the freedom to experiment with ink and paint, the cost of Bristol Board is simply too much to justify all the waste I’d generate. If I were selling work, it would be worth preserving my efforts in a physical media. For the time being: I’m sticking with digital.

I have a mild urge to write about US politics today but I’m setting it aside for a day or two. Might as well wait to have it confirmed that Trump is picking a right-wing walloper for his Supreme Court choice. The woman has apparently argued that the law is there to “make God’s kingdom on the Earth” or some such quack-a-doodle nonsense. It’s also clear that Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution and believes that, like in business, if he can tie up a dispute in the courts, he can carry on as normal. The reality is that if America doesn’t produce a clear winner by January 20th, then on that fine Wednesday morning, the Secret Service will knock on his bedroom door and proceed to drag him from the building. Then I believe Nancy Pelosi is made President, until the confusion can be resoled by the House (also under Pelosi’s control and therefore likely to confirm Biden). I really don’t understand why the Republicans are playing it as they are other than as the last desperate attempt to use the power that should hopefully have taken from them for a very long time, or at least, until they remember what it actually mean to be a republican.