Perspective

One of the things that sometimes gets sacrificed when doing a creative job that you love is the ability to plan and take holidays.

As an actor for example,  it is invariably once you’ve booked your cheap flight to the Maldives that the agent rings up with an audition slap bang in the middle of your away-dates.

You can occasionally book it last minute of course,  which can be costly for most destinations.

The other time you can get away with getting away is in the rare and magical event of having work lined up with a perfect holiday-shaped window carved in it.  A fortnight gap between two gigs for instance.  This is a once a decade occurrence for most actors.  The comet of the showbiz calendar.

A holiday is deemed to be a luxury thing but as I go along in life I realise more and more that it’s as necessary as food.  Maintaining health of body and mind,  sense of self purpose and a high quality of creative output.  You can’t reboot a computer without first shutting it down.

I’d go as far as to say that this is something we ought to be doing two or three times a day.  Five or ten minutes of absolutely nothing.  Just stop.

It’s worth remembering to do this when on a proper holiday too.  I went on my first holiday by myself recently and I got quite stressed at one point wondering what to do with myself.  It’s amazing how easy it is to forget how to do nothing.  And how completely wonderful it is when you remember.  It’s another one of those things that requires a return to childhood.

Christopher Robin explains it to Pooh like this and it’s worth keeping in mind:  “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it,  ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’  and you say,  ‘Oh, nothing,’  and then you go and do it.  It means just going along,  listening to all the things you can’t hear,  and not bothering.”  Simple.

Training.

As an actress and a pedestrian I spend a fairly hefty amount of time on trains.  I’m not great at reading on them… too many distractions.  Unless it is a very fluffy, travel-friendly book.  The sort of stuff you could accidentally miss a paragraph and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.  But even then I usually give up on it.  So what I mostly tend to do on journeys is observe people and think.

The large-man-sleeper is a common feature on trains up and down to London.  I’m sure everyone’s sat next to him at some point in their travelling lives.  Poor sod, crammed into his seat, utterly wiped from his eight-hour day of tie-garrotted monotony at the office.  Bless his polyesters.

When I find myself next to him I always think:  if you removed the train seats and gave us a headboard and duvet we’re basically in bed together.  What would your wife say,  fatty?  Eh?  You big rogue.

Think about that next time he’s wedged in beside you.  Sobering.

Happy Dance.

In a freelance creative person’s life there are fearful times;  there are wading through treacle times and then there are times when there is nothing for it but to happydance muppet-like all by yourself.

It’s the adrenalin you see.  Caused by the intensified joy caused by the element of surprise caused by never knowing quite when the turnaround is coming.  That’s really all this cartoon is about.

Sometimes I happydance without even putting music on because there just isn’t time to contain it.  Sometimes I need Bobby Darin singing ‘Beyond the Sea’.  Sometimes conducting is the only way to vent it.  In which case it’s pretty much anything by John Williams,  or occasionally Pirates of the Caribbean.  Though in all honesty conducting quite often gives way to fairly elaborate swordplay with that particular track.  Klaus Badelt knows how to shiver a timber and no mistake.

Quite seriously I do think happydancing should be encouraged in all workplaces.  It’s team building, it’s cardiovascular and it gets blood to the brain.  It should be just as compulsory as a lunch break.  I know I’m a different woman after a vigorous shimmy.

I also drew this because I struggle to draw bodies in motion.  There I’ve said it.  I thought it would be good for me to use the weekly blog sometimes to try and draw things I find difficult.  Buildings and bicycles to follow.  (Internal scream).

Interference

I don’t know why it is but for as long as I can remember I have always been quite fiercely intolerant of other people.  Specifically noise and smells that they inflict on me when I’m minding my own business.  But especially noise.  It’s the main thing I dislike about myself: my irrational and extreme sensitivity to outside sounds permeating my inner world.

I am not in the least bit proud of the toe curling, teeth gnashing and harrumphing that goes on in my flat at the mere murmur of neighbours chatting through walls, or the irregular whumping of a bass speaker through a ceiling.

I often wish I could remove whatever synapse it is that fires in my brain which exaggerates the harmless “Fwuh-fwuh whuffa fwaaah..” of a car radio momentarily parked outside the house into a form of ear-torture that must be abated before I turn into a lab-accident-super-villain version of myself;  smash my hand through the passenger window;  forcibly remove the radio from the car and hurl it into the sky.   That goes for mobile phones or iPods on trains,  sweet packets in theatres and crisps anywhere.

Whatever the reason, I find I function best in the quiet.  My ability to think creatively is greatly helped by silence.  Natural,  non-human-made sounds are also fine. Birdsong or noisy weather doesn’t disturb me at all.  Quite the contrary.  It must be something to do with the thought that the person making the noise either doesn’t know that anyone is disturbed by it,  or worse: doesn’t care.  Maybe this is the reason that it affects me so intensely.  In which case the sharpness of my suffering is almost entirely my own doing.

A quiet environment is crucial for successful drawing but equally important is a quiet mind.  Ironically, the crotchety grumblings of my own brain-voice is often the loudest thing I will hear all day.

Medicine

I often say how lucky I am to have such wonderful friends.  And the best friendships of all, I’ve found, have been cemented in hysteria.

One such crystallising moment was when my friend Milly and I pulled what we each considered to be the ugliest face we could muster in the dressing room mirror.  That was fairly funny in itself.  But then after a long pause Milly said darkly:  “God.  Your face is SO much worse than mine,”  rendering us completely helpless for about ten minutes.

You really do (as the saying goes) ‘have to be there’.  Not just there in the room but totally ‘there’.  Present,  receptive and completely open.  Which is probably why it is the small,  unexpected,  innocuous little things that sometimes have the biggest impact.  They just pop in there,  almost unnoticed…  and then you’re gone.  Utterly disarmed.

Recently my sister was having lunch in the canteen of her workplace.  She was sitting down with her plate of food (a piece of fish lying on top of spaghetti) and thinking to herself how limp and unappetising it looked when her colleague said enthusiastically:  “Oo. That looks nice.” Almost under her breath and with no expression at all on her face my sister replied:  “Yes. They appear to have adequately killed it.”  The colleague’s ensuing hysterics were so prolonged and infectious that several people on different tables were craning to see what they’d missed.  Such is the transformative power of the unfettered belly-laugh.

Laughing has always been a big motivational driver in my life.  In my relationships and my work.  Which I suppose is why cartooning appealed so much as an art form.

I’m sure most people have someone in their lives who,  for whatever reason,  is the one they call when they know they’re in need of levity.  Some people naturally know how to get to our funny bones and when we are with them everything is funnier.  Even we are funnier.  And life is suddenly dreamlike.

Thank goodness for these people.  Angels really do walk among us.  And they’re hilarious.

Busking It.

I got my very first rejection from a large commercial greetings card company last week. And I have to confess I am feeling perversely cheerful about it.

Being an actress has prepped me well for the sting of rejection and now it’s not so much a sting as a sigh, a cup of tea and I’m back on the horse.

‘Rejection’ is a dreadful way to interpret it anyway.  I like to think of it as a gentle nudge in the direction you were always meant to be going in the first place.  Like a child being coaxed away from the sweetshop window.  It is,  usually,  for the greater good in the end.

I got turned down by this person at this company so that’s not where my work is meant to go.  Great.  That’s narrowed it down.   Maybe I am not and have never been someone with ‘commercial’ appeal.  I think I knew that really and potentially it’s my strength.  I can celebrate it.  To work! (Sound of bugles and galloping.)

In truth, as a customer, I haven’t found myself  especially drawn to the greetings card racks in big chain or department stores.  I tend to make my own cards for people or go hunting round independent shops who employ a more personal approach to their buying.  So thinking that my work might fit in a retail arena where I myself don’t choose to shop was perhaps a bit daft.  My work is me in cartoon form.  I’m glad that it is and actually this has been an affirmation that it is.  Which is a very positive thing to take away from this first door closing.

Also there are guzzillions of wildly and wonderfully diverse publishers on the planet and all the best people get rejected.  I am in terrifically talented company.  I’m sure a lot of rubbish people get rejected too…  but that doesn’t help illustrate my point quite so well.

I believe in what I’m doing because I feel joyful doing it.  This cartoon is one of the ideas I submitted for consideration.  It is now even more meaningful to me than when I drew it.  Funny how that can happen.

Love Life.

Ah Valentine’s Day.  A day of sweaty palms, fluttering heartbeats and pinkening cheekbones.  A day of delayed…  mortification.  At least it was when I was at school.

Now I’m grown up (debatable) it’s inexplicably a day of Red Everything and being forced to endure other people’s Valentine plans.  And, seemingly anyway,  it’s more about people who are already well stuck into their relationships than those who are still shyly,  and perhaps a trifle hopelessly,  seeking the one they love.

Which is sad because it used to stand for something.  It used to stand for doing something a bit courageous.  A bit crazy.  A mite..  Charlie’s Angels.  It used to stand for:  ‘I LOVE YOU..   PERSON..  I’VE NEVER ACTUALLY SPOKEN TO.  PS. This is not from me.’

The only time I ever received a card on Valentine’s Day it was predictably from the boy in the class who made me feel nauseous.  You know the one.  The watery-eyed chap with tipp-ex on his fingernails.  I should have been delighted that someone felt the same nervous excitement about being in a room with me that I,  in turn,  felt about the boy two years above me who didn’t know my name.  Who,  in turn,  regarded me as the moon-faced ninny in his periphery.

I doubt that Saint Valentine ever meant his day to be about unrequited teen-lust or an excuse for people in tired relationships (and rosey ones too) to be pressured into gift giving and overblown competitive gestures.

I suggest re-inventing Valentine’s Day altogether.   How about, instead, making it simply the day for letting someone shy know that they have no reason to be.  Now that’s something I could really get behind.

Happy Shy-Person’s Day all.  Try not to get sucked into..  The Red.  Despite what they may tell you,   you cannot buy love in Marks.