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.

A few items of news:

Cards
My greetings cards are now available from Church House Bookshop and can be found on their page of my various things. This means that after a couple of years of them not being available they are now once again available. There are five designs that can be bought – the sixth (‘My life in segments’) has now more or less run out owing to the plumbing incident of 2006. The ‘orange juice’ design (above) will be the last to sell out.

Calendars
The 2012 calendar can now be bought with a special 2 for £12 offer. This is ideal for people with a friend, or those who are likely to lose their calendar through spilt tea / negligence / weakness / own deliberate fault.

Grandiose project report
1 Some small progress made, not completed
2 Some small progress made, not completed
3 Some small progress made, not completed
4 No progress made whatsoever
5 Some small progress made, not completed

Other news (vague)
It is likely that I will be doing rather less cartooning (were such a thing possible) in the coming months owing to various developments. I have no immediate plans to stop any of the regular cartoons I do, but I’ll be spending more time in London doing other things and less time at home trying to be a cartoonist and undertake grandiose projects.

1. Making the t-shirt website that I have begun to work on actually work so that people can buy t-shirts and everything.
2. Finding a person who lives in my vicinity to do some admin work for me so that things are a bit less of a disaster.
3. Approaching churches near me with a mind to being their cartoonist in residence. The idea being that they provide me with a bit of space to draw diagrams and people flock in through the doors to see what is going on.
4. Actually doing something vaguely useful at my church. And in life generally.
5. Undertake new cartoon project, the nature of which I cannot divulge in case someone else steals my ideas. It involves making a new website and someone with WordPress skills.

Please nag me continually about these things.

Church Times. This week I’m back in the paper with some illustrations for a feature on church small groups, and these drawings are also on the cover (above – or a bit bigger here). My Guide to the Church cartoon isn’t there this week (still that blessed office picture), but should be from next week onwards.

Thanks to all of the people who have encouraged me in various ways in recent weeks. Not been the best of times – I’d like to say more, but… [*rewrites repeatedly*] I can’t bring myself to do so here, what with people reading and everything.

Place to work. I know I’ve said this before, but I still need somewhere to do things for 2-3 days a week. Within reasonable travelling distance by railway (from Laindon station) would be ideal. With other people preferably. Offices, churches, towers, sheds, hovels – all fine. As would some combination – a tower of offices or a church hovel spring to mind.

Bit of a break. Whilst I’m cartooning again I may not be actually around much on the internet (Twitter etc) for a while. I think you’ll be OK.

I have contributed to an exhibition entitled The Emblem of My Work, which opened in Yorkshire yesterday.

The Emblem of My Work celebrates the 250th anniversary of the marbled page (page 169) in Volume III of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. You’ll find the book in the ‘Classics’ section. Approximately 169 contributors were asked to picture the emblem of their work on a blank template of the page (above). These 169 contributions will, over the next month or two, appear on a blog, and then be auctioned at the end of October. The names of the contributors appeared today, but, in a subtle twist, the names won’t be matched with the pictures. This is all a bit baffling, I know, but the blog or the Laurence Sterne Trust website should help to explain it and fill in the bits that I haven’t explained that well.

Others contributors include Quentin Blake, Mark Wallinger, Martin Rowson, Tom Gauld, Glen Baxter, to name a few I quite admire. The exhibition is part of Art in Yorkshire, supported by Tate. I’m hoping to make it up to Shandy Hall (15 miles north of York) at some point to see the exhibition, but no travel arrangements have yet been made.

My contribution? Well, you’ll have to work it out…

We have been away but are now back from several places.

This is just a quick blog post to say thank you for all of the really very kind things that were said to me at the Greenbelt Festival. I really do appreciate the things people say and to see my work being enjoyed every year.

I was pleased that the t-shirts (sample, above) proved to be popular. Sorry to those who didn’t manage to get one – this being the first printing the order was made cautiously, but hopefully there will be more in the future. Sorry black wasn’t available – once again, next time, all being well.

For those who were unable to get a calendar – you can get one from places listed here.

Please forgive this not especially thrilling blog post. Slight struggle to form much of a sentence at the moment to be honest (we’ll call it start-of-term blues), but I did want to write something / strike whilst the iron was at least still mildly lukewarm.

A little bit of a blog update, an August 2011 newsletter if you will, to let people know that I am still technically here.

News:

Five years
On 3 August 2006 I posted on this blog to say that a book of cartoons ideal for reading whilst reclining on one’s side was about to be published… and that I was taking a break from blogging to get married. Five years ago – goodness. It was the best thing I ever did (getting married, not the book of sideways diagrams).

Twitter, etc
I’ve been off the social media and not sending many telegrams for a while as I’ve been concentrating my mind elsewhere. The world has kept on turning perfectly happily without me being involved in such activities. I don’t foresee any immediate reversal of this general state of things, but who knows.

HQ
The final dregs of my CartoonChurch HQ detritus were cleared up yesterday, and the keys and fobs given back. It was a bit sad but the right choice to make. I took one or two very poor photographs of myself standing in the vicinity of a vacuum cleaner in the office just because I will never have that opportunity again. The house, the garage and Sue Ryder’s Laindon emporium are all more cluttered than they were before.

Cards
A lot of time has been spent packing up the majority of my greetings cards. I have sold most of the stock to Hymns Ancient and Modern. They will be selling them at Greenbelt, and also, one imagines, via the internet / Church House Bookshop / elsewhere. It has been discovered that my wife is a lot better at putting cards and envelopes into wrappers than I am. The most efficient way to get the job done is for her to do the actual work and for me to do peripheral tasks that do not involve doing the actual work.

Greenbelt
I’ve done my annual map for the Church Times Guide to Greenbelt. If you’re a Greenbelt Angel (regular supporter) you’ll get one before the festival. Otherwise, if you are a Greenbelt-goer, look out for people a bit like me giving them out. There will, all being well, be a cartoon exhibition as usual in the Church Times tent, which this year is also G-books (the bookshop). I’m not doing anything at Last Orders or appearing in any on-stage way this year, but I will be appearing in tea queues and sitting on steps. A t-shirt that I may or may not have drawn may or may not be available.

New regime
Doing more thinking over coffee at the Salvation Army Headquarters and doing more drawing in the offices of the Church Times newspaper has been working quite well. This week I sent off four Church Times diagrams. This is unheard-of and the editor was incredibly surprised, thinking that my promise was figurative. Thanks must go, as ever, to those who have helped me, via this blog, in conversation, and by sending things.

Negotiations
One of my diagrams may appear on a [shouldn't say]. My people (me) and their people (them) are still in negotiations so I can’t mention it.

Gift
I was very pleased to see that Liz enjoyed the picture that some of her friends gave her.

Cycling
Wasn’t the Tour de France good?

Filler
I forgot to iron the left half of my shirt today. No one noticed. Half-ironing of items could be the answer to all sorts of things including some problems that haven’t yet been thought of.

Fenestration
The window cleaner did the back windows.

ENDS

Keen observers of my blog may have noticed some small hints that I’ve been thinking a bit about what I do and how I do it. I’ve decided, for now, to make one change, that of saying goodbye to CartoonChurch HQ, the office I’ve been working in for the last year and a bit. The idea was that getting out of the house to work would be a good thing, and you might remember my excitement and enthusiasm when I started. Unfortunately the honest truth is that it hasn’t really worked – working alone in an office isn’t a lot better than working alone at home. So I’ll be moving out over the next few weeks, and by early August CartoonChurch HQ will be no more. It is a bit sad as I had high hopes, but that is the way things go.

On the plus side I am now working at the Church Times in London, which I enjoy doing. I wasn’t doing this when I first began working at my HQ. I plan, for a while at least, to go into London one extra day a week (so three days in total) and do some of my cartooning there.

In the next few weeks I have to do quite a lot of getting rid of things, both from the office and from home, as space needs to be made for a lot of cartooning paraphernalia. If anyone is interested in two simple wooden Ikea desks with metal legs, an under-desk filing cabinet, a very laid back Ikea Poang chair, a very basic office chair, lots of Christian books / Bible commentaries or indeed any of my other possessions let me know. All to be picked up from Basildon, 15 minutes from the M25. I’ll post photos and possibly eBay links here at some point. I could also do with shifting a large number of greetings cards and some cartoon canvasses, but in a way that doesn’t involve me having to post them, which is the thing I don’t have time to do. Any thoughts on any of the above welcomed.

The author copies of my 2012 calendar arrived yesterday, which means that they are available for the incredibly organised to buy. The calendar is a bit different to previous years, in that instead of new material it contains 12 of my favourite ‘Guide to the Church’ cartoons. I have hand-picked them, which means I chose them without using any kind of mechanical device. Some of the diagrams are in the books, but some of them have not appeared anywhere else but the Church Times. I’m sorry that there aren’t new cartoons this time around, but I’m hoping that a collection of some of my best pictures will still make it a good thing to give as a present, etc.

The Canterbury Press (they are my publishers) page about the calendar is here, a similar looking one from Church House Bookshop is here, and the Amazon UK page is here. I’d recommend ordering it through your local Christian Bookshop if you can. Go in and have a chat with them while you are about it. If you are a shop why not talk to Canterbury Press about stocking it?

I’m on the lookout for new opportunities and possibilities. Not necessarily involving cartooning. Must involve me making a living somehow.

(This is not me saying that I plan to give up doing all of the things I currently do, but it isn’t me saying I intend to keep on doing them either.)

Any thoughts or ideas? Please get in touch via dave at cartoonchurch.com – thank you.