I’ve been watching Kung-Fu movies and drawing this weekend.

It’s probably not cool to draw the people around you, but… Here’s some drawing practice from the pub this morning, trying out a new ink mixture which is crazy-wet, but perhaps this is a good thing.

I let my subscription to Spirou lapse because, let’s face it, I can’t speak French. I indulged in the magazine subscription in order to get a regular dose of what is — sometimes — my favourite form of comics (Franco-Belgian “B-D”). But now I’ve had my fill, and I’m back at that point of “Okay, stop looking at other people’s work and get on with your own.”

The last issue, however, came with my favourite thing: a tiny assemble-it-yourself comic that’s, apparently, referred to as a mini-récit:

Yes, I drew a bad Putin. I mean, he’s a bad person, and I drew him badly. This is part of drawing practice (I tell myself). Of course, I have no ambitions to being a caricaturist, but it keeps coming up. Whatever; I had fun doodling this page.

Today I drove to John O’Groats — the longest trip I’ve made on my own so far.

I worked in the Storehouse café there, looking out at the abandoned isle of Stroma past the Overlook Hotel (I don’t know what it’s actually called; I’ll always think of it as the hotel from The Shining).

I sat next to the fire”¦

“¦where I did some thinking and scheming.

Then I drove back to Wick and continued my work on a big Strategic Coach project, something I can’t finish in one go. I find those challenging — but it’s just The Ziegarnik Effect.

On the weekend, stopping over in Inverness on the way home, we went to Waterstones bookstore, and there were two books we picked up and deliberately bought the hardcover versions of, specifically because:

• We wanted to support a physical bookstore (even though we could probably have got the books cheaper online).
• There was something undeniably more pleasurable about the feel and the mechanics of a hardcovers in the hands.

My sketchbook is hard-backed, and there is something elevating about having my work in-between those boards.

Incidentally, the books are Ruby Wax’s Sane New World and Alain de Botton’s The News.

~

Last night found us sanding down the new yard-arm for the Isabella Fortuna (the 40-ton sailing ship I accidentally hit a shark with).

We learned a lot about sailing terms (a surprising number of which have come into common parlance), and… We sanded. For a long time. But it’s for this:

My mum just sent a message saying that my dad just re-broke his other hip. I don’t even know how to process this.

Last night, Craig got his first proper look at the Northern Lights. I’m always amazed that our atmosphere keeps working, that it doesn’t just get blown away when bombarded with solar particles, or (for that matter) that all the cells and bacteria in my body remain in the specific delicate balance that allows me to be alive.

Of course, at some point on a personal this will stop working and I’ll die, and on a galactic level everything will all be incinerated or sucked into nothingness. But for now, it’s pretty neat.