Drawing a Breath

The album masters are all done, and now it's sleeve design time. I have a drawing from when I was five that I'm going use. McDad's best friend Charles worked in the X-ray Department of the Royal Victoria infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne, and used to show up every so often on a Sunday afternoon with a huge cardboard box of the orangey-yellow paper that film was wrapped in. It was absorbent so you couldn't paint on it, but I drew my way through piles and piles of it. It was very unstable and used to tear easily, and I drew so much that a lot of my drawings got thrown away, but there's one that I really like and I'm going to use that for the cover. Over and over again, I drew girl groups with their mouths open singing: usually three friends singing together in a line with their arms around each other's shoulders.

This is the grafty bit of making a CD: making sure everyone is credited, making sure that the songs are registered with the copyright agencies, getting photos done, making sure the design works. There are a couple of mega-hot days ahead and I can do some of this while it's impossible to go out. I think it sounds really good, and it's only a pity that I learned so much towards the very end!

And then there is organising a tour to promote it. Or just to tour, really: I like the travelling and playing to people.

It's weird, having handed in my notice at work. Formal jobs have lots of mini-goals and 'We will be doing this' and 'We must do this' deadlines and so on. Without that trajectory and being driven by a desire never to be bored, rather than ambition, I'm not sure how life will pan out. I do know that I want to campaign seriously for the NHS, and against misogyny and racism. The latter is very difficult from within an organisation.

These periods in life, gaps for thinking, are very welcome. I tend to live life at a hectic pace and the only thing that I'll sit down for are TV news shows (having  break because of the despicable Tories), detective shows, reading detective novels, and of course illustration, which I find completely absorbing.