I’ve posted a cartoon entitled ‘Volunteer transport‘. You can click that link for high resolution file, etc.

Sorry once again that there hasn’t been much on the blog recently. I’m just about getting by and not really in a blogging frame of mind. You can, if you’d like to, follow my updates on Twitter, which are rather more frequent.

A cartoon has been added – the organ tuner. Those holding a licence can find the high resolution file here.

Vital statistics for this cartoon it originally appeared in the Church Times in July 2009 and appears in the Exciting World of Churchgoing. Page 75.

New on my church cartoons website: Loyalty cards, from February 2010. Republication information is here.

Photograph: abandoned crazy golf course, Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote. This is why Spain are not a force to be reckoned with on the international crazy golf scene.

I have been uploading some holiday photographs. Scroll down/click ‘read the rest of this entry’ below if you’d like to see a few of them. I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t. There are some more on the set on Flickr, or they can be seen in large slideshow format, here.

Lanzarote seen from nearly the highest point on the island.

Volcanic landscape, Timanfaya National Park.

Wind sculpture by the artist César Manrique.

Lava, at the César Manrique Foundation.

This is me.

See the rest here.

This was a cartoon I did approximately 14 years ago. It could have been 13 or 15 years ago, I don’t really know. My 14-year-old cartoons were passable back then, but now I really don’t like the style, and, as someone wanted to use this image, it had to be redrawn. The high resolution version is here if you want to republish it (licence info).

I can hardly bring myself to post the original version.

14 years ago I had no idea that it would be used anywhere except possibly in a photocopied youth notice sheet. There are quite a few even older ones in the ‘cartoons’ section of this website. Sometimes I think I should remove them all, but people still enjoy them and I suppose they demonstrate a certain amount of progress. But if any are needed for anything important I will redraw them.

Do I have to? Oh, go on then. Original cartoon:

Another cartoon has been added to my church cartoons site, CartoonChurch.com. It is entitled The church hall, and is about (to save you reading it) the frictions that you get when different groups of people use a church hall. As per usual licences for republication are available, and if you like it you can buy a book (Book 3, The exciting world of churchgoing) with many more of the same kind of thing in.

I originally drew this in May 2008. It was probably partly inspired by my former life as a church youth worker, when making sure that other people’s church-hall belongings were not tampered with by rampaging youths was one of my main concerns in life. I seem to remember the toddler group leaders having occasional cause for complaint.

I have added a cartoon to my church cartoons website, CartoonChurch.com. It is entitled ‘Health and Safety’. It originally appeared in the Church Times in January 2009, and can be found on page 51 of your hymnbooks*.

My favourite line is the ‘racing blindfolded children’ one, and I think the rest of the cartoon was probably built around that. The stepladder combinations may or may not be based on experience somewhere.

I’ve got more cartoons to come over the next week or two, including some seasonal ones to help church magazine editors over the long summer months. As always information about using the cartoons in your own church publications can be found via the ‘using cartoons‘ page, above right on every page on this website.

*The Exciting World of Churchgoing, info here.

Image: ‘Camel’, taken last weekend whilst on holiday. Lanzarote seems 1700 miles away to me now.

First of all: belated apologies that this site entirely died for a few days whilst I was away. I’m hoping that it won’t happen again, but one never really knows.

I’m hoping to be back on the blog a bit more from now on as it is good for me and I enjoy it. Perhaps even on a daily basis, though I think taking weekends off might be wise. Be warned that I am aiming to let quality standards dip a bit. I know, I say this every time I come crawling back, but this time I really mean it. For instance I may post one holiday photograph a day – I think I took about 340 so that is a year taken care of.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in once again.

Hello. Here are a few things that I have been doing.

1. Yesterday I had a cartoon published in Cycling Weekly. The cartoon isn’t online yet, but will be at some point. You can find the magazine in your local newsagent (if you’re in the UK). I am pleased about this as it is the first one I have done for them and I have been trying to develop the cycling cartoon side of things. I started reading Cycling Weekly in my teens when I first did a bit of bicycle racing. Hopefully they will want me to do more.

2. My article about my week in Uganda is in this week’s Church Times, available today. It is online and you can read it here. Click the ‘slideshow’ button for the pictures that go with it. I am hoping I have communicated it well and that more people will want to support the work that Tearfund is doing as a result.

I do hope to get back to regular blogging at some point. In the meantime I am tending to update Twitter more often as it is easy to do. It is the place to find me should things of little interest be of great interest to you.

Picture: The #tfbloggers at the source of the Nile on Sunday. From left to right: Odiira from PAG Uganda with Shane, Katie from Tearfund, me with awkward hands, Bex, Liz.

This might not be my final Uganda post, but I don’t have any others specifically planned, hence the title.

I have said this before, but I was incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity. I did my best with the blogging, and there is still, all being well, a Church Times feature to come, so hopefully I will have told the story as well as I can. Please forgive the ineloquent nature of this post – I know what I want to say but I’m not a very good writer.

I went back to the City of London today for the first time since being back. I can’t really imagine a greater contrast. Please excuse me if I drift into sentimental rubbish here, but… I hope I will continue to remember the people I met and everything I saw. I hope I will remember how lucky I am in so many ways – to have food and comfort and so many choices. I hope I will also remember how poor I am in so many ways – in the quality of many of my relationships with those around me, in faith, in friendliness, in determination.

I’d like to thank Tearfund for making it possible for us to go. For Holly, who did the organisation behind the scenes, and for Katie, who looked after us and put up with me and my various complications.

I have come away from this a believer in the Tearfund approach to development – that of working through local people and local churches. I’m sure other ways of doing things are valid too, but I liked what I saw and I can see that it works. In particular the ‘PEP’ concept, that of training people to make a change themselves using the little they have, rather than giving them things that they will then continue to need.

If you have found what I have written over the last ten days interesting and this is a kind of work you’d like to support, then you can do so via this page on the Tearfund website. And if you do so you will get updates from the community that we visited in Ogongora. There are many other locations where the same work is happening, but this is the place that is featured, (along with two others in Latin America and Asia), so that you can follow progress.

The tfbloggers page is still live if you want to catch up on other posts / tweets / pictures by the three of us – easy to remember link tearfund.org/dave.