Here in Portugal, Agustina Bessa-Luís is one of the greatest authors.... and I had the privilege of illustrating this one.  The first edition came out in 2006 in big art book format.  And now this one, that I illustrated, which is in a smaller, more accessible form, and created in a really classy mid-20th century kind of book style, with cloth binding and hard cover, with my B&Ws inside.  It's out now.  It's a lovely object.

Fama e Segredo na História de Portugal

It's 20:10 and here's to a better year than 2009 for everyone.  What an odd year that was.  Some awfully good things happened (we moved, prof's big fat brick of a book was finally finished and got into the bestsellers and he has moved papers, this time to Expresso, I had a couple of nice jobs to do) and most of everything else was a speeding but damp squib, for us and an awful lot of friends.

This morning I saw a cedar tree with about 40 egrets sitting on it.  I was driving past it on a main road so I couldn't take a picture, but it was so weirdly beautiful.  My daughter was with me, she saw it too, so I know wasn't dreaming... and I was so annoyed that I hadn't got a picture of it, so I could stick it on flickr and say WOOOO, LOOK what I saw!  and then I berated myself for being annoyed... ten years ago it wouldn't have mattered to me whether anyone else saw it or not.... I was enough.  I think the internet needs to give me some space.

I'm going to spend a lot more time away from this internet thing this year.  I need to go back to the drawing board in more ways than one.  I may find that in a couple of week's time I have so much to write about that I go back to illustro-blogging daily, but I doubt it.  I feel rather spent.  Although my head is full, it is also stuck.... full of ideas and thoughts, but needing some space and time to get any of them out. I want to work on some bigger things, get a whole book done (god knows what about), get this house underway, work out where the hell it's all going.  It has much to do with the utter chaos that has abounded since we moved into this odd and quite crap house that we shall hopefully be demolishing this year.  The drains are abysmal, the lectrics are hanging by a forty year old thread, strange things happen when it rains, and it's full of the junk that I didn't have time to dump when I had to move us and 20,000 books all of a sudden in the summer.  I'm de-junking this week.  I used to live with an Aussie friend in London who used to say "I just going to de-spunk" when she was going to take a bath.  This didn't sound wrong to her sweet young antipodean ears.  Anyway, I'm not de-spunking, I'm de-junking.

Twitter has utterly done for my attention span, so that's going to be accessed only when I'm standing in a queue with nothing else to do, I am rather fed up with it.   After six years of an awful lot of blogging, my site will probably morph into more of a portfolio site... everything will still be here, just different and there will still be things to be writ in stoney gibberish, but gosh, sometimes I do feel like I've said everything.  The more outrageous or disgusting things I want to say or paint will go on Unkempt Women... which I created for just this eventuality, when a gel just wants to write from time to time or do something different.   I'm not giving up, just going a bit easier on my non-internet-self

So here's to a gloriously creative ten past eight for me as well as all of you.