Festive Folk 2012

 I went along to the annual (and when I say annual I mean it happened last year too) Festive Folk gig in our local pub, The Swan.  It was a good evening all round, especially when I wont he mince pie competition, beating last years winner by just one point!  Homemade cranberry and ginger wine mincemeat for the win!

Being me I also did some doodles.  In the top left is our compere Caroline, and the others were our performers for the evening.  The music was great, and each of them had to slip a Christmas tune into their reportoire.

One of the performers, Jake Manning (whose website you can see here) liked his so much that I've done it up nice for him, so expect to be seeing it soon on mugs, stickers and other paraphanalia at his gigs.  Whoo yeah!

Why I love my new job

1.  My work is mentally stimulating.  Even when it's difficult and annoying, it's still an improvement on the previous job where I was bored out of my mind.
2.  I get to work in my home town.
3.  This means I get to cycle to work!  I say it like it's a gift, and you cannot imagine how pleased I am.  For ages the long commute at the old job bothered me as it had to be taken by car.  The 60+ minutes it took to get somewhere that normally only took 30 minutes.  The exhaust emissions (and everything that goes with that).  The constant road accidents.  The dulling effect it has on your brain to be sitting in traffic for an hour every morning for no discernible reason.  But now.... THIS:

Cycling takes me 15mins, of which I'm on a road for a total of 2mins.  The rest of the time I'm zipping along the canal towpath, which has surprisingly few pedestrians in the morning.  There is no noise, there is no smell, there is no danger of being crushed by a lorry.  I don't have to worry about traffic jams or parking spaces.  I can go to the doctors or the dentist, because I now work in the catchment area I live in.  I get home feeling like I've actually been outdoors and done something useful and active.  I leave home later than ever before and get home earlier - and I'm satisfactorily tired when I do!  Even when the weather's rotton, there's the satisfaction of having beaten it when you arrive at your destination, and I have waterproof trousers for the rest.


And it's beautiful.  Check out the ice beginning to form, next to the frost-tipped grass on the bank.  You don't get to see that on the motorway!

Congratulations Tom and Zoe!

My friends are getting married - Hooray!  To each other - Hooray!  And they asked me to do the inserts for the invites - Hooray!

It's always a pleasure to do something so unique and personalised for people I love.  Tom and Zoe are... not exactly an indoorsy couple.  They spend all the time they can in the great outdoors having adventures - climbing, cycling, hiking, you name it- and really wanted this reflected in their invites.  They already had some ideas, including having a tree as a recurring motif, and having several different invites to use for all the guests.

(The names, locations and contact details have been scrubbed out for obvious reasons)  Personally my favourites are 1 and 4, but they were all fun to do.