Wednesday, May 14, 2008

George went on his first trip to a garage yesterday. Having called the AA out to tell us why the car hadn’t started, they promptly asked who had fitted the battery as it was clearly the wrong battery for the car.

It was, of course, the AA.

He turned up within a couple of minutes of another AA man there to tell us why the other car wouldn’t start (they couldn’t just send one AA man – that would be far too sensible). The reason the car wouldn’t start was of course that it needed a new battery.

I’m starting to think car maintenance might not be quite as complex as I’ve always thought.

The AA man was very helpful though and pointed me at a Kwikfit garage where I spent the next hour waiting with George while the slowest Kwikfit fitter in the world dragged himself around the car.

To be fair, it wasn’t his fault. He was hampered in his work by a lady trying to sell counterfit DVDs of the “night of the living dead” and the self evident fact that he was a member of the living dead himself.

A barbecue at Sam’s later presented an opportunity to eat more asparagrass, jersey royals and fish from Worthing beach…


Today is my actual 40th birthday, and I awoke to the rather disappointing news that a work project I thought was going particularly well, isn’t going to happen at all. I did a test for a children’s book illustration job which I’d way under-quoted for because it looked like a fun project. But it turns out that the book’s writer doesn’t like the illustration… here it is:


personally, I think the image works very well, but the author (who does a little sketching himself) would be better off doing the illustrations himself since he obviously has some picture in his head of exactly how he wants it to look, but doesn’t want to see somebody else’s interpretation of it.

I think the reality is that he’ll probably end up with the kind of hasty watercolour scribbles that most children’s books are illustrated with. Which is a bit of a shame, because I think doing it the way I was would have made the book into something unique.

Oh well, never mind.

At least it gives me a fighting chance of getting some of my other projects up and running…

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