Why Do I Doodle?
Dear readers, Doodles. Drawing. Art. Why do I do it, or attempt to do it? What is the point of it all? Why do any of us do anything? Why even breathe? Where are we? Point of life? Who knows. Seeing that I’ve diverged into pretentious, philosophical nonsense, I will now attempt to get back to the point (if there is one?), addressing the question of this blog post. I doodle. I love it. I do it all the time. Drawing. Or writing. If I have a pen, pencil, brush or mobile app in or at my fingertips, something to draw on, and an idle mind full of ludicrous inspiration, I am at my happiest. Letting the world and hours fly by and switching off my phone to all distractions. A coffee or tea close by is a nice luxury. The location of where I’m vomiting my imagination on paper isn’t much of a worry, unless I’m in an environment provoking motion sickness, and then I’m vomiting my last meal on the paper. Not a good thing. Unless you like vomit art. And if you are, please stop reading now and visit the dark web or wherever sedates your needs. You know who you are, even if we don’t. Spoiler alert: I don’t practise that kind of art. I also love the absurd. In art, novels and movies. The tens of thousands of thoughts we have every day. The vast majority of them are useless; we don’t practise upon them because of just that: they are absurd. But art enables us to do that: spew our thoughts out on paper [note to self: enough of the vomit analogies. I don’t know what’s got into you. It’s tiring your dear readers and beginning to sound like verbal diarrhoea. (Pun intended.)]. I have always enjoyed drawing or doodling, or painting. I don’t think I’ve ever been that great at it. I struggled to colour within the lines at school, causing much disdain among teachers (I justify it now by telling myself that art shouldn’t be kept within the lines…I wish I’d had the wit at the time to tell the teachers just that, not that I hold any [much] resentment). Through constant practice, and I don’t want to bore you with the ‘practice makes perfect’ line, I’m proud of my improvement. Maybe it’s the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule to master an activity. Fuck knows which hour I’ve reached. I’m not counting. Who does when one’s enjoying themself? Just recently, I feel I’ve turned a corner. Not to blow my own trumpet. I’m not winning any prizes (yet!), and when I look at doodles and drawings in galleries or social media or Pinterest or by friends, I am astonished and inspired by the thought process and technique and style of the artist. It’s a constant learning process, like everything in life, but in a more profound way. Sometimes it is just a stream of consciousness and improvisation, being inspired by something I see and trying out styles and/or putting my own touch or narrative around it. Just finding out what I like, and fucking up with no pressure or remorse and succeeding now and then and being proud with what I produce, taking my foot of the pedal, so to speak. Self-teaching and finding a voice for everything. I love to see what comes out from an intangible idea created in a millisecond, to create a tangible work of art. The spark of it all. The burst of activity. This comes through all acts of creativity. But still, I love it. I guess I started something of an artistic journey two weeks after my father passed away. To the day, actually. Sunday 23rd October 2022. I found myself walking down the high street in Great Malvern with a fiver in my pocket. Not in note form, though; just coins and shrapnel. And if anyone knows anything about the UK or even spent 5 minutes there, they love change, and to make matters worse, the coins weigh a ton, even if it doesn’t come to that greater value. You need a belt to save your trousers or skirt dropping to your ankles. And don’t think that baggy trousers trend in the early 90s had anything to do with aesthetics or style; fuck no, the eejits just had too much change in their pockets. Which is where I found myself that morning, no doubt a grey morning considering the time of year. To be honest, I can’t remember if it was grey or even a morning. I just remember walking down the high street, trying to adjust to the death of my father and a cashless society. I felt the coins in my pocket and had a burning desire to part with them as quickly as possible, with an adequate rush of consumer thrill (more like dull thudding), while also trying to keep my jeans at waist height. I was toying with the idea of a sausage roll and/or Cadburys Chocolate. But then the book and craft shop, The Works, stood before me, so I stepped in to see what nonsense of a book I could buy and probably not bother to read. But, amongst all the Christmas shite that Santa had no doubt barfed up, there sat with halo around it was a little black sketch book; the colour pretty much reflecting how I was feeling around those days. I needed to fill it with whatever storm was brewing in my head. I picked it with some colour pencils and went to the till. The irony was, the two items came to over five pounds so I had to use my card anyway, and I was still left with the hunger to part with the fiver. Luckily my hunger for a sausage roll and Cadbury’s Chocolate had not departed, so I walked home with the thought of being slightly fatter and the potential urge to do something artistic. And it all sparked off
18th of December: Ode to Shane MacGowan
Dear readers, So what does 18th of December mean to you? Yes, you. Is it your birthday, or that of a loved one or friend? Do you know someone that died that day? Is it a significant day in your relationship? Did you meet someone, marry someone, divorce someone, or dare I say it, murder someone? Maybe it’s the date of a Christmas nativity. Maybe you smashed it, maybe you buggered it and it gives you childhood trauma. Damn it. Tell me what it means to you, the 18th of December. It’s a random date in the 365 of them in a year to throw at you, I know. It’s 7 days before Santa Claus comes to make or break the festive season. Either that’s going through your mind, or God knows what else, but I doubt the date means that much. Com’on, you eejit. Where’re you going with this? Well, reader, yes, 18th December is very dear to me. It is actually the night that the Pogues used to come to Birmingham, for what I think was the best part of a decade, to perform their Christmas concerts. For the lack of a better term to adequately express my emotion, it moved me to my very core. I jigged in the mosh pit with the rest of the fraggles and psychopaths, glasses of beer and piss thrown in the air, while everyone sang along to Shane MacGowan’s growl. I’d arrive home with a strong whiff of the worse side of human life. I cared not, though, despite the looks and giggles from family members. I saw them in three different years: 2001, 2009 and 2010, always on the 18th. I can’t remember the name of the venues. I can’t remember how many months in advance I bought the tickets. But I remember counting down the days to the night of the concert, like foreplay before the climax, and the thrill was always worth it, especially to hear the Fairytale of New York at the end. The Pogues – which means the kisses in gaelic – shortened from Poguemahone, which means kiss my arse. They were punk and folk and they were explosive on stage, just as much as their melodies and lyrics. They formed in the 80s and went on into the 90s, but without their frontman and main songwriter, Shane MacGowan, after he was fired for drug and drink dependency. Yet the band regrouped in the 2000s to do the aforementioned Christmas concerts. I can’t remember the whole story of how the band formed, but they were a wonderful mix of talented of Irish and English musicians. They wrote of Ireland and London and love and politics with such furious devotion…it wet-fish slapped me into understanding the power of music and literature at such a young age, and brought so much inspiration into my own attempts in the creative arts. I doubt I will ever see them live again. It definitely won’t be with Shane MacGowan. He passed away on 30th November of this year. The Gods insisted he be born on Christmas Day of 1957, and creative Gods helped him co-write probably the most iconic Christmas song in the English language, the song I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, the Fairytale of New York. Ironically, the song became something of a poison chalice in the eyes of Shane. He apparently came to loathe it, and you can understand why when everyone is singing it every Christmas. For the millions, it became their favourite Christmas song. Without doubt, it became mine. The broadway melody mixed with melancholic lyrics, focusing on lost dreams, lost hope, and a toxic relationship. Saying that, it’s not my favourite Pogues song, although it was the first I heard of theirs when my mum and dad used to play it at Christmas when I was young. I really got into Pogues in my teenage years and early 20s and they became a constant in my life, wired into my brain and became part of who I am, as idolism has the power of doing. It was the punk and hedonism that attracted me, the rebellion and storytelling, the lyrics that would suckerpunch my imagination and emotions and make me jump or jig or reflect. I put him up there with the best for his storytelling: James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and Roddy Doyle. But melodies…the damn melodies. I went through a period of trying to get my hands on every piece of merch available before the internet became a thing…the posters, tshirts, and every book ever written about him. I loved the man. I just didn’t get a chance to meet him. I feel more than blessed to have seen him live though. The day he died wasn’t much of a shock, sadly. I don’t want to repeat what millions have said about him “living close to edge that it is a surprise he made it to 65”. His hedonistic ways could be seen in his disheveled hair and disjointed teeth. However, I’d been following him on social media in the previous months of his final day, and I had witnessed he was in acutely bad health. Pneumonia beat him in the final round. Now he’s up there dancing and singing with Kirsty McColl. He was more than his hedonistic lifestyle. He was a romantic, a rebel, a poet, as well as being spiritual, with a fierce sense of humour, quite shy and eloquent. He wrote about dabbling in drugs and prostitution in his early years in London, as well as having part of his ear bitten off at a concert. The absurdities and madness followed him. I can only take what I know of him through documentaries and literature. There was more to him than his rep. He wanted to make Irish music popular, and he certainly did that. The Thatcher government knew of his popularity and saw it as a threat, banning a couple of his songs. He threw everything at