Happy Incredibly Belated New Year everyone.

News:

1. I have been continuing with my activities.
2. I joined the Professional Cartoonists Association. I have a profile here. I intend to be more professional from now on.
3. A new website on its way. It will be for non-church-related cartoons.
4. An upgrade to this website is on its way. There will be some improvements.
5. A relaunch of my licence system is on its way. There will be some improvements.
6. I have been beset with problems (technical). Problem a: inability to make any printer / scanner work using my main computer (Mac). Problem b: I tried to make my mobile telephone take photographs in pure black and white (no grey like the one above) and failed. Problem c: My cascading style sheets are in a knot.
7. I still don’t really have anywhere to go and work during cartooning days (diagram above) but I have learnt to deal with this.
8. I was going to learn to make newspapers, but it didn’t happen.
9. New year’s resolution: to draw in notebook every day. There have been quite a few days when I have not failed at this.
10. It is dull when people say they intend to blog more, but I do. There may be some shorter updates with less academic depth, etc.

[Cartoon unrelated to content - for illustration purposes only]

Here are this week’s notices:

Thank you
Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed to my ideas post. There are many brilliant ideas that I will be able to use, along with some sent by e-mail. Please do continue though if you think of anything else. Now all I’ve got to do is a bit of drawing.

Interview
To read an interview with me in which I talk about this and that see the Big Bible site. The interview is mainly to do with this website. Big Bible is all to do with the Big Read, a campaign encouraging people to read the Bible during Lent 2011. My friend Bex runs the website. Whether the introduction of ‘Big Bibles’ is part of the plan I have no idea. These would be for those who like to share a Bible with several friends or who find smaller print irritating. I may well suggest it.

2011 Calendar about to sell out
I have it on good authority that stocks of next year’s calendar will run out very soon – over 90% of the stock has now been sold. Last year they were on sale after Christmas as they didn’t sell out, but the same won’t happen this year. Various shops may have stock – otherwise you can order via Canterbury Press here.

Book not about to sell out
As long as people are sensible about it and form an orderly queue there will be enough copies of The Exciting Word of Churchgoing to go around. Thanks to everyone who has been buying it – it has made the Church Times Top 10 for a third month which I’m very pleased about.

Essubi
Finally, if you’re looking for a small charity to support this Christmas may I recommend Esuubi, which works with children in Uganda providing education, medical care etc. My friend Kate set it up and I can vouch for the people involved. Some of my family may be getting some alternative gifts from there (please don’t tell them if you see them).

Image: choir hats. For illustration purposes only.

I’m sorry not to have updated this blog for over ten days. I’ve been suffering from low morale and general loss of diagrammatical confidence and so didn’t have anything good enough to blog. I still don’t have anything good enough to blog, but have decided to remedy the situation by lowering the bar of quality considerably, so that any old rubbish will be fit to post.

This is a picture of the hats as worn by the choir members at my church. When I say ‘my church’ I mean the one that I go to on an occasional basis. Apparently hats of this kind are unusual in choral circles. I certainly think that these are some of the pointiest* hats that I have seen. The choir is also unusual in that there are four women and they all look identical**.

* It irritates me that my spellchecker doesn’t like the word ‘pointiest’.
** I’m just being silly now. Expect more of this kind of thing.

Then yesterday to the internet conference, where I mingled with interesting people, gained inspiration of various kinds, chatted with friends and went to the pub. I’ll perhaps post some reflections about things I learnt through the mediums of rambling and diagrams at some future point.

Back to the awards: I’d like to say thank you to all readers for the 110% efforts that you have been putting in over the last six weeks. But now that we’re not trying to win an award I think it is time to declare an ‘era of slackness’, where the following are permitted:

• Ill thought out-comments, perhaps with occasional lapses in grammar and spelling
• The posting of comments whilst wearing gardening attire or a ratty old bathrobe (thanks Anne for the latter suggestion)
• Content that doesn’t really mention Christianity
• Whilst I, as blogger, pledge to continue to post regularly, occasional lapses in quality will be permitted. For instance, I may post shopping lists found in my supermarket trolley for collective analysis.

Shopping list found in my supermarket trolley
This has been posted for collective analysis.

Questions for study groups
What is ‘cross’
The apple puree. For a child, or pork?
The list writer. Male or female?

Yes, I do deliberately choose shopping trolleys that have other people’s shopping lists left in them.

Althea:
Thankyou lots, I am obliged to announce that your blog is excellent!

Thank you Althea. I’m sure your blog is excellent too!

Hearst:
Hi There, I just spent a little time reading through your posts, which I found entirely by mistake whilst researching one of my projects. Please continue to write more because it’s unusual that someone has something interesting to say about this. Will be waiting for more!

Hearst – bless you! I’m glad that I was able to help you whilst you were looking for information for your archdeacon project. You’re right – the amount of really dull stuff out there on the subject of archdeacons is incredible. As soon as I write another interesting archdeacon post I’ll make sure you’re the first to hear about it.

Kerry:
The content on this publish is really a single of the very best material that We have ever are available across. I love your publish, I’ll occur back to verify for new posts.

Oh Kerry, you have quite a way with words. I’ll watch out for your reoccurrence the next time I make a publish.

Ezekiel Malinky:
Precisely saying thanks won’t just be enough, for your unparalleled lucidity in your own authoring.

Ezekiel – brilliant! I couldn’t have said it better.

Minerva:
When i was simply reasoning that there are a lot improperly stuff on that theme and yourself basically altered my personal attitude.

Minerva – I know! The improperly stuff on reversible knees irritates me too. But it is good to hear that my blogging has made such a difference in your life.

Toshiko:
Hello! Is it okay if I go a bit off topic? …

No.

Take as an example this page and scroll down to the very bottom. The links say:

« Previous Page — « Previous Entries Next Entries » — Next Page »

This would be all very well, except that previous page leads you to the next entries, previous entries takes you to the next page, next entries takes you to the previous page, and next page takes you to the previous entries. It is a well known fact that 50% of all visitors are getting lost 50% of the times they click a link, and 50% of those have no idea whether they are the lost 50% or the other 50%. There are people who arrived on this site back in March who are still going backwards and forwards with little hope of respite.

The Judges (let’s capitalise, why not?) are going to be noting this kind of thing down in their noting-things-down books. Something needs to be done.

Worst of all, my arch-blogging-nemesis, the Church Mousse, has been taunting me.

If you are an expert in WordPress end-of-page links please scroll down to my technical plea. Everyone else: here are some proposals for replacement end-of-page links when this sorry saga can be sorted out.

Technical plea
Any advice from WordPress experts welcomed. I tried editing a page that contained one set of these end-of-page links, but doing so broke the blog. The duplication happened when I upgraded once. I use my own theme which is very outdated, but I like it. Anyone who can tell me which page I should edit would be profusely thanked.

Some news: I have entered this blog into the Christian Blog Awards. I did it before if you remember in 2007.

In order to stand any chance I have decided that we need to ‘raise our game’ up to 110%, ie 10% greater than is possible. The graph above shows how we are going to do that.

This period of 110% effort applies to me, the blogger, but also to you, the readers and commenters. In fact I am going to ask the spammers to do their bit too. It is a team effort.

As they are the Christian Blog Awards we will need to focus our attention on two areas:

1) The Christian aspect
2) The Blog side of things

We must remember that from this point on the Judges will be watching us with quite literal eagle eyes. They won’t just be watching me, they will be watching you. If you see someone loitering by a lamppost it is likely to be a Judge from the Christian Blog Awards. Just carry on as normal, creating a good impression if doing so doesn’t inconvenience you too much.

Well, that’s about it for the motivational talk. Just do your best, plus 10%. Thank you.

[This post is mainly written so that when people ask me things I have something to point them to.]

Why I’m not taking on freelance cartoon commissions

1) Nearly all of my time is taken up with ongoing work. I’m now doing two days a week in London in an ‘acting web editor’ role for the Church Times, and the rest of my time is spent on paid blogging, doing my regular cartoons for publications, admin, you name it.

2) I’m really not that good at them. By that I mean that commissions take me a huge amount of time, far more than I could ever charge for, and cause a lot of stress, far more than it would be acceptable to publicly moan about.

3) My best work happens when I’m free to choose the subject, captions and pictures. Ideally it is best if I have some knowledge of the topic in question. Recently I’ve had commissions where none of these have been the case, and they haven’t worked terribly well. I don’t like doing work that I do not think is really good.

In future I might go back do doing freelance work, but for now this is the situation. I do have one or two jobs still to finish, but these will be the last. I’m hoping that you’ll see the results in terms of more and better cartoons done just for the fun of it, better blogging, better filing of pieces of paper into numerical order, etc etc.

ENDS

(No idea what the point of ‘ENDS’ is. Just seen other people do it.)

Warning: If you have no interest in Twitter, the well known internet timewasting service, and Christianity, the well known religion, you will find this post dull and an utter irrelevance.

The Twurch of England is the Church of England on Twitter. The bishops, the clergy, and the… hang on… it’s only the bishops and the clergy! The laity (ordinary people) are nowhere to be found. This is an unjust state of affairs which sends out the message that the ordinary people are not as important as the bishops and clergy. Being mildly deeply upset about this I started a ‘Reform the Twurch’ campaign yesterday – you can read all of the tweets on the subject via the hashtag #reformthetwurch. It was great fun and a most creative protest. Proceedings were conducted calmly and peacefully, and from time to time nuns came out and brought us tea.

Of course there are other Anglicans not in the CofE, and other denominations of Christians who are also not a part of this group. I certainly think it would be good to include these people, although I understand that the ‘Twurch of England’ may not be the most appropriate banner under which to gather them. Perhaps there needs to be an ‘Anglican Twits’ (Anglicans who aren’t CofE) group, and one for ‘UK Twistians’ (UK Christians whether they are Anglican or not). I suspect forming a ‘World Christians’ group might be rather more time consuming.

My challenges to Twurch administrators (The Church Moose and Peter O) are as follows:

1) First of all I think you really need to include CofE laity if you are to go on calling it the Twurch of England. It’s OK, there aren’t many of us and we’re declining in number all the time.
2) Secondly, I understand that you may want to restrict membership of the Twurch of England to members of the Church of England. However, if you don’t find a way to include the wider groups of people (Anglicans, UK Christians) in some way I suspect someone else will. There is an opportunity for a creative individual to form the Anglican Twitter community or the Christian Twitter community, and sooner or later someone will do so.

The picture above has nothing to do with this post by the way. I just didn’t have anything else to put in.

Now… stop trying to distract me – I’ve got work to do. My big important project went a bit better yesterday, for which I am thankful.

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of the dearth of cartoon inspiration (sorry…) I sometimes need a little encouragement to lift my spirits. Fortunately such a boost occurred yesterday, when I was described by the Telegraph’s Blog Editor Damian Thompson as “the world’s worst cartoonist”. Had he described me as “a mediocre cartoonist” or “a cartoonist of comparatively little merit” it would have stung somewhat, but “the world’s worst cartoonist” is something worthy of being embossed on a plastic keyring, or, as I shall do in due course, written proudly on a blog ‘about’ page, particularly when it comes from such a source.

So how did such an accolade come to be awarded? To quote Damian Thompson’s Twitter message in full:

I have incurred the particular wrath of the world’s worst cartoonist, @davewalker, who jottings decorate the Church Times.

The description of “wrath” was not terribly accurate, but I think he was a little bit cross about a Twitter post of mine.

Please RT: Never supported @earthhour before, but planning to do so just to irritate @holysmoke http://www.earthhour.org/

This was in response to Damian’s post on his Telegraph blog in which he attempted to encourage people to waste as much electricity as they can by turning on all of the lights in their houses during ‘Earth Hour’, a symbolic campaign encouraging people to consider using less electricity. You can read the post in question here: Switch ON your lights for ‘Earth Hour’, 8.30pm, March 27. I think that the fact that my message had been “retweeted” by quite a number of people was the ultimate cause of the grumpiness and grand pronouncement.

Damian Thompson is regarded as something of a figure of fun within Anglican circles. He is one of those people who is unwittingly an evangelist for those things he tries so hard to oppose (Liberals, people who care about the environment, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, Ruth Gledhill, etc etc) owing to the way he tries to make his points. You don’t need me to tell you why – reading his blog will make it evident very quickly. As I said to someone yesterday, if I’m ever in doubt about what I think on an issue I just look up Damian Thompson’s opinion and know I should think the opposite.

Anyway, all most enjoyable, and something that has given me a little bit of a boost during a busy deadline week. Talking of which, I must get back to it. Please excuse a scarcity of blog posts over the next seven days or so.