‘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…

In lieu of a new piece I’ll re use this one from 2007 and hope nobody notices. Been a hectic year with one thing and another. Aiming for more artwork related type work next year

Merry Christmas one and all.

ope, not a site update, just updated to the latest version of WordPress.

I didn’t like the new style admin of version 2.5 so after installing it I spent about three hours rolling my site back. however you can’t fight progress and luckily the admin has changed again, and while I’m not sure if I prefer it to how things use to be, I’ll just have to get on with it.

At least the site still seems to be here so thats all good…

Honest.

can make an educated guess as to why I ended up with three bulky copies of this months Birmingham Town Hall/Symphony Hall brochure though the post. My address is spelt in slightly different variations on each thick white lumpy envelope, all in uppercase on one, correctly on another and then a mix of uppercase and lowercase on the third. I guess they’ve gathered them up from tickets I’ve bought in various places and added each instance to their list.

I have no idea at all how I ended up on the Monto Water Rats Weekly email Update, I’m not in London that often so its kind of irrelevant to me too, but I don’t like to complain…

I was similarly confused to find a newsletter from Drift Records arriving in my inbox, I’m sure I’ve never signed up for it, In fact I’d never heard of Drift Records at all, though I had heard, and bought, the album by The R. G. Morrison who seems to be one of the guiding forces behind it.

Anyway, there I was, tied to the laptop, toiling away on the hottest saturday of the year when it popped into my inbox. Such was my involvement with the work I was doing at the time, and my intrigue at any label with a record called ‘Finish your chips’ that I was soon off, trawling round the interweb sampling the Drift collective wares. There we’re no samples on the website so it was on to the mildly tedious myspace, it ain’t great when all you can connect to is a 56k phone line, anyway, after listening to a few tracks I was soon headed back to visit the Drift Shop.

The above mentioned ‘Finish your chips’ album by Matt Eaton is very fine indeed. I also really liked the nicely packaged and stylistically varied Thirty Pounds of Bone  ‘The homesick children of migrant mothers’ album. In fact I’m looking forward to the listed forthcoming Mary Hampton album as well.

As soon as I was done it gave me some much needed motivation to get back to work and earn some money to pay for the unplanned shopping excursion. Everyones a winner indeed.

In fact the only bad thing I have to say about the whole thing is that they both cds are without the bands/albums name on them, so I know that at some future point I’m destined to spend many hours trying to remember what they are called and where the cases might be…

ast nights wind and rain woke me up, which at least gave me the title for this. Now added to the artwork portfolio…