n December we took the questionable task of staying at Butlins Minehead in December and at a different weekend to the ATP festival. This was in part due the ever increasing cost of the festival and in part due to the venue itself and line ups of the last couple of years.

We paid less than a quarter what we would have for the ATP event, which was half the standard price for the room apparently, though even at that half price said accommodation was questionable value given both the cleanliness of the room and the tissue thin adjoining door seperating us from the rambunctious Welsh family next door(thats being polite.)

However accommodation aside I think I had the most fun I’ve had on a Minehead weekend. One of the adventures we undertook was the nine mile walk from Minehead to Porlock, and then on to Porlock Weir. We could have planned it better and we could have not lost the path a couple of times but even with a few mishaps it was a thoroughly enjoyable walk. It took us just over 4 hours in all and we were rewarded with both beer and food at the friendly and quite fantastic Bottom Ship pub at Porlock Weir(and I’m not just saying that because we came second from last in the pub quiz but still won a bottle of wine in the raffle.)

Anyway, here are a couple of photos from the walk…

Photos taken December 2011 in Somerset. For more on the South West Coast Path try this link.

s in my experience such things are only really made to fill the place of the ‘Going anywhere nice on your holidays?’ conversational starter for the month of January.

That said, I am aiming to get a painting of some kind done every week in 2012. That and to finsih some of the draft posts I have backed up from last September to fill the big posting gap. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

njoyed the varied and unpredictable shopfronts in Sandown, Shanklin and Ryde.

Photos taken February 2011 on the Isle of Wight.

‘ve spent a fair bit of time waiting in various doctors and hospital waiting rooms over the past six months so it was easy to get into the mood of this new cover illustration for S. C. Lees short story ‘The Waiting Room.’

Find out more about the short story at the authors website or buy the story direct from Amazon.

The image doesn’t address the biggest scourge of these places for me personally though, which is the recent addition of televisions into them.

I think it all started with chinese take aways you know, for years these places were the only waiting areas where, in a small and cheap way, some effort was made to make your ten minutes of waiting go by that much quicker. Ten years on and banks and hospital waiting areas have followed suit. My own bank prefers News 24, and seems to think being force fed the days news, whilst overhearing everyone else’s business at the desks to the left, is an acceptable alternative to employing enough people to sit at the counters… and don’t get me started on the useless extra person they seem to employ just to walk up and down the que asking if anyone has cheques to pay in.

Hospitals seem to have a more open, and individual choice as to what can be shown. Most A&E’s seem to go for ITV, especially in the daytime – as close to my own personal fifth circle of hell as I like to get being forced to watch Jeremy Kyle in such an environment. However on one recent occasion, sat in a hospital waiting room, CBeebies kicked in and due to the more noisy nature of the programme, the nurse came over and switched us all over to something more inoffensive; BBC One’s Diagnosis Murder, that days episode it turned out featured a nurse who was murdering the patients…

Anyway, I’ve gone on a bit much here. I’m not quite sure what distractions Edward has as he waits and waits, I guess if you want to know you’ll just have to read the story…

departure from the normal kind of thing I would do – I recently speant a day painting a poitrait of a stuffed parrot.

It was completed for a friends birthday and said parrot has spent the last year travelling the world with a variety of MG owners raising some money for Weston Park Hospital along the way. I should add the idea was inspired by the lovely toy paintings of Jennifer Maher

Martina came with me to the Screamin Festival in Pineda de Mar, Spain last year, here she is in fact with myself sat in the towns main square listening to some Rock and Roll.

I still remember the sense of horror as I woke up form a particularly late and heavy night when all I could remember was leaving the towns rock bar in the early hours and an altercation with a JCB on the walk home and had no idea where she was. Luckily she had made it home with us.

I’m actually quite jealous of the life shes had and the places shes visited in the last twelve months. I wonder if I could orchestrate such a trip for myself…

week or so ago I shot this out the window of Scruffy Jacks Bar on Sandown Pier while having a beer or three with a good friend of mine. It was shot on an old Cannon Poweshot using the Canon Hack Development Kit.