This is what I see out of my study, looking WNW. When I’m procrastinating or in need of help, I try to tap into the creative vibe of the Arsenal Tavern, the largish Victorian building towards the middle of the picture (with three big upstairs windows). It used to be home to small groups of clever Irish pensioners who would cluster around the bar and discuss football tactics/formations/horseracing/poetry. To the right of the frame are the trees of Finsbury Park. Moving left, and hidden behind the block of flats, is the mast of Alexandra Palace. Then it’s Highgate and far off to the left hand corner, Hampstead. If I added a soundtrack to this pic it would possibly be the low rumble of Seven Sisters Road, countless police sirens and the occasional police helicopter. But often it is just quiet.

First installment of my Tactics Masterclass videos.

Due to popular demand* my wang-eyed pop folk art paintings will be showing for another month at Blackstock Road’s famous** Cinnamon 2 gallery***. Included in this mini-exhibition are paintings of German footballers, dead flowers, old men, know-it-all deities and people I’ve bumped into on the tube.

* ie. They haven’t forced me at gunpoint to take it all down.

** Actually, not famous.

*** Well OK it’s more of a cafe with big walls.

I’ve done the illustration for two business books by Alison Branagan that have come out in the last month or so.  The Pocket Business Guide for Artists and Designers: 100 Things You Need to Know and The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers (both published by A&C Black).

Here’s an article I did for The Guardian about home filing systems – the printed version had lots of illustrations with it. Don’t think I’ll be asked to write a productivity manual any time soon.

Some expert ideas… .

My article about kids listening to old records has been published in The Guardian Family section. See here.

What my kids think aboyt my old vinyl record collection.

Buy the T-shirt

At the moment I’m looking for my NME C81 cassette. I’m sure I saw it quite recently – say, around 1989 (I put it on a table in Walthamstow).

In Small Town England, nearly all the names have been changed. For the highly charged section called ‘Lincolnshire Love Rectangle’, the names have been double-changed then put through a special filter of Enigma Code complexity, so that it’s unbreakable. That said, there will be forty-somethhing couples sitting down to relax in the evening, reading copies of the book, and the bloke will splutter “Lips like cherries, thighs like California redwoods, brought up in Lincolnshire – my God, Gladys, he’s writing about you.”

Sometimes you just can’t disguise a character.

On 11/11 I always think of my grandad, who fought in the First World War. He volunteered in 1914 and was invalided out a few months before the Battle of the Somme two years later. But then I think of the two minutes silence and our contemplation of  “the fallen”.

Except they didn’t ‘fall’, they were mown down in freezing mud by machine guns after being conscripted to fight some kind of hellish jingoistic empire/turf war. Not quite as snappy, is it? So everyone wears a poppy for a couple of weeks – more now than, say, 30 years ago when I was a teenager – but rarely these days is the question asked “what was it for?”

At some point in the not so distant future will the poppy stop being a symbol of the hopeless sacrifice of the common man caught up in the military-industrial machine of the early 20th Century and instead become a sign of our respect/acceptance for the waging of a 1984-style perpetual war on terror?