The Spine Election Podcast - Episode 5

Obama's Handshake Cartoon

Bad Cartoons and New Blog

My rule is that I draw whatever my best cartoon idea is by 11pm.

I rarely have time to draw during the day. If I did, I think my cartoons would be infinitely better. It means that I have to confine my drawing to late night. I sit down about 11pm and watch the day's political programs, which usually means anything I can find hosted by the simply remarkable Andrew Neil. Election time is great for a political junkie such as myself. It means I can put aside about three hours of listening/watching the debate whilst drawing the next day's cartoon. It's always a worry that I won't last the cartoon. I need to have it nearly finished before I begin to feel sleepy because I never want to be left finishing a cartoon the following day.

Last night, I didn't have any great ideas for a cartoon. Some days are like that. I'd struggled all day to find a story that really clicked in my mind. I struggled to make a connection between two stories. I knew I wanted to draw the Clintons but it was only at midnight that I'd settled onto an idea I had about the Apple Watch, which, I think, was launched yesterday. I thought of Hillary using the watch to cover Bill's open mouth, given that Bill's open mouth will not be one of her best assets in the forthcoming election. It probably doesn't work but that's the nature of the game. You learn by your mistakes more than you learn by your successes.

I think my failure to come up with a better gag was down to my having eaten a cream cake earlier in the day. I rarely eat cream cakes and I think the 'Cream Crisp' had disagreed with me. I had lost all energy, which is always my key indicator for when I've eaten something bad. Then, when I slept, I had the craziest dream. It was the kind of dream that you don't shake off by simply waking up, walking around the room, or banging your head against the wall. When I went back to bed, I had exactly the same dream. It carried on all night. Nigel Farage was inside the Minecraft universe. 4.30 this morning it was really freaking me out.

Today I want to crack on and put the Clinton cartoon behind me. I want to follow Stu's advice and split this blog apart. I've been wanting to do something like this for a while but never before had I such a clear sense of what I want to achieve. Part of it, I guess, is sheer egoism. I realised the other day that I should put my name more prominently in the title. I should try to be more professional about what I do and try to keep my doubts and grumbles away from the things I produce. I should try to promote my work and try not to promote my gripes with everyday things. I suppose I'd previously thought of myself as merely being an 'honest blogger' and that anybody who might enjoy my more 'polished' work, might also appreciate when I'm just being myself. But I guess life isn't like that. You have to present yourself as something better than you really are.

So, hopefully, by Monday, my new blog will be up. Anything I produce which I think is quality, will go over there on my new 'Cultivated Weirdness' blog. The Spine will continue to host the more 'prickly' side of my character and anything specialised like my occasional obsessions with programming. I'll see how things go for a month or so. Perhaps there won't be much difference. I'm hoping that being more myself will help me to invest more time into writing funny things. Perhaps I'll do more podcasts. I guess I'll see how I feel once I realise that I'm getting two hits a day...

Hillary Clinton's Apple Watch Cartoon

Iran Cartoon

A Michael Fallon Cartoon

Digital Paint

I think I'm sliding into a black hole. I'm having a day when it feels like even my emails aren't being returned. Sent two today and both people have either chosen to ignore me (likely) or my emails are entering some interweb snarlup and not being delivered (less likely). It leaves me sitting wondering if I've done something to offend somebody. It's highly unlikely since I'm not the kind of person who likes to offend people I know.

Hmm...Not sure how to feel but my main work of the day finished, I'm going to draw a cartoon. Or I'll attempt to draw one, whilst checking my email three times a minute.

Talking about cartooning: I should really go back to using a real medium. Digital is just not giving me what I want. Nor, I suppose, is it giving me what I need.

I've finally come around to the realisation that I have to learn to use colour in my cartoons. I don't like using colour but perhaps that's not entirely true. I'm beginning to think I merely don't like using digital colour. Digital colour is too often just about a flat colour, which you have to work hard to layer with other colours to build up any kind of effect. Physical paint is rarely a single shade. Watercolour, for example, is an amazing medium, even if it's a devil to control. Yet it is (excuse the pun) fluid in a way that no digital paint can ever be. If you have a hugely powerful computer, you can find digital watercolours that try to act like real watercolours. Corel Painter has some pretty impressive 'real' paints which work but they take huge amounts of computational power to physically model the way that water soaks into the page, the way gravity drags it down, but also the way that it takes up and mixes with adjacent colours.

So, as I try to improve my skills as a cartoonist, I am trying to improve my skills with colour. It's not easy. Not when working digitally or, at least, working digitally on a Samsung tablet. The software isn't powerful enough to produce really convincing colours. Or, at least, I've not found software that can do that, whilst working on a canvas which is 4096 pixels wide and high. I've loved using this Note but I definitely feel like I'm pushing its capabilities. Perhaps going back to paper might be my next step. It just feels so drastic...

Putin Plays Games

The Current Zeitgeist

Just for the records, here are the most popular search phrases bringing people to this blog. This is a memorable list because the porn/norm ratio is abnormally low. Only five of the twenty five are related to porn.

My Problems With Being Richard Madeley (Revisited)

I'm not a man much given to hero worship. I have people I admire and whose work has inspired me. I could rattle off a long list of people who I hold up so they catch the light and sit bathed in a slightly angelic glow. Does that make them my heroes? Perhaps it does, though I've never really seen myself as a person who has 'heroes'. When I see celebrity in the flesh, I've always been a person who tends to give a shrug my shoulders and walk on, even if they're people I like. I see them as just human beings and I'd never want to impose myself on them nor demean myself by being 'fan like' in my admiration. It was good to meet Steadman on that day when I'd travelled to London to see his exhibition not knowing he was going to be there. Yet I was so conflicted. I didn't want to stand in line to meet him because I don't do that kind of thing. Yet fate had placed him in the same room as me on the one day in about ten years that I was actually in London. How could I not meet him and make a bit of a fool of myself? So, it was good to meet him but I really didn't meet him. I was presented to him and, in that sense, I think I lost something that day.

The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...

It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.

I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.

That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.

This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.

The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.

Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.

The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I  stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.

Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.

The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.

The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.

'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.

It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.

A Non Dom Cartoon

A Flat World

It's one of those flat sea days we all occasionally get but I tend to have only when I'm between ideas. I've just finished writing an eBay app for a friend and my own programming has come to a bit of a halt. The Gag Machine is finished, as are the other little tools I wrote for myself. Yesterday I used my bank holiday to tinker with the Wordpress API and manage to retrieve my blog's listings and post test articles (in draft) via code. However, there are too many pieces of quality software out there that do that sort of thing. I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, even if I might learn a few things along the way. I'd need my version to do something different and I can't see a novelty to make it worth my time. The ocean just looks flat from where I'm standing.

In an ideal world, I'd like to level up my programming skills by moving towards C++, which is probably the purest computer language out there. It's the language that allows you to do the most with the hardware but it's also the hardest to learn. Yet I'm also in a comfort zone with C#. I'm at the point where people can ask me for software to do a specific job and I can put together a rough but usable program in a couple of hours. It's rather dull stuff, basically forms and data manipulation, perhaps interacting with an online API. C# is also the language of Unity, so I can also write basic games but, really, there's so little point.

If I had the time (and finances) I'd like to move towards C++ and get my teeth into the Unreal engine and do some  more work with procedural generation which really interests me. However, I can't so I probably won't.

But it means I'm currently a bit stuck between projects.

As always, I'm happiest writing but I promised people that I won't waste any more time writing books and, really, I shouldn't even blog. I'd like to do a podcast but I'm pretty deflated about them, though, I guess, I'm feeling deflated about everything. It's the nature of this flat world, I suppose, that 100,000 people will watch James May make a fairly dull Shepherd's Pie on Youtube and laud him for it but the rest of us are lucky to get a scrap or two of feedback despite our best efforts. There's nothing complicated about the reasons. It's the same motivation that makes people write me long, laudatory emails when they believe I'm Richard Madeley. When I point out the fact that I'm not Richard Madeley, they can't even be bothered to thank me for being so honest. Work or jokes that were 'good' before are then less than nothing. Context is everything.

The problem is that it makes it difficult for a man to know quite where he stands in terms of quality and his own sense of worth. If that sounds like a gripe, then it isn't. It's simply a statement of where I am on this flat Tuesday in spring.

I noticed last night that Steve Bell had done a Cameron with a lamb cartoon, so always eager to get hits on the blog, I put a link back to my throwaway cartoon, drawn late at night whilst my brain was in slowdown. His had Sturgeon. Mine had Farage. Nobody liked mine. I don't know what to think about either. I feel just lost without a compass. Which way is land? I'm just following the seagulls

Cycling On A Spring Bank Holiday Monday

And so it begins. The summer, I mean, or the lead up to summer...

Today was probably the first day when I realised that I was overdressed in my usual 'Winter Gear'. I have a winter hat which today felt like it was crushing my skull with the heat my usually sedate peddling was generating. I have a summer hat which is light and breezy but I hold off getting it out of the cupboard because the longer I can delay, the more I can deny that summer is coming.

Today was my usual early week run to Tesco and I took my usual route along a scenic cycle path. Except it was a warm day and a bank holiday and that meant, for the first time since last Autumn, I was not alone on the path. There were men in shorts and vests drinking lager as they swanned down the country lanes shouting crude things at the women in revealing clothes who were themselves a constant distraction. There were prams parked, tramps on benches, kids screaming, dogs pissing, and then there were the motocross bikes...

We're plagued by motocross bikes in this corner of the North West. Their throaty whines can be heard throughout most of the summer as they blaze up and down the local bumps and dips. The landscape in this part of the country is scarred by the coal industry. The industry was  destroyed in the years of the Thatcher and has been romanticised by some but I'm not sure it's entirely missed. There remains a generation of men with lung conditions and 'white finger', a nerve condition caused by the heavy machinery used to dig the coal. The pits have gone and the wheel towers demolished. Now only the slag heaps remain, the spoil turned into nature walks but then spoiled again by the chunky motocross wheels which dig up the paths and grass and butterfly meadows.

To combat the brainless cash rich louts on their motocross bikes, the council recently erected an anti-motorbike gate across the cycle route, meaning that my usual relaxing walk is now punctuated by five minutes of my trying to squeeze a large bike, my larger frame and even larger bag of shopping through a narrow six in gap. I was squeezing through today when the motocross boys blazed past me. Though it was designed to stop them accessing the country park, the gate has done nothing to stop them. They smashed down an adjacent barrier and now have even quicker access to the dirt trails than they had before. There is, I suppose, a lesson in this about new laws and prohibitions only curtailing the pleasures of people who obey laws and prohibitions. The only difference the turn style has made to the country park is that it's now more inaccessible to the cyclists who legally use it as the cycle route it is meant to be.

The other thing that struck me today was how bad the roads have become in the last twelve months. Because the usual paths were crowded, I was forced to take a slightly different route which took me onto main roads I hadn't used since last year. I'm amazed I didn't chip tooth enamel given that my bike was bouncing so much. The road is used by a lot of commercial traffic and is now almost unridable. I don't supposed it's been repaired in years and the reason, I guess, is 'austerity'.

I'm not convinced entirely by austerity. The problem with the Tory vision of austerity is that I'm not entirely sure where austerity ends and their natural preference for low taxation and even lower government spending kicks in. I hit one pothole today that brought me to an abrupt halt and had I been going any faster, there'd have been a blogger sailing over his handlebar and wondering how to turn his resulting broken wrists into a funny anecdote.

Tesco was quiet except for a few Bank Holiday shoppers. One woman, pushing a trolley, was wearing a skin tight bright pink dress that revealed every inch of her body and left nothing to the imagination. I'd like to admit that I didn't look but I did briefly until my higher order thinking kicked in. There's often something spectacularly non-erotic about the people who dress that way. Perhaps it's a symptom of a working class  town but the way they reveal themselves is often a rather abject display of ungainly twisted underwear, pimples and sag. There is also a kind of desperation in the act. They're rarely the beautiful people but, rather, people with a kind of twisted beauty, which is peculiar, individual, and only attractive to some. The woman wasn't what you'd call a classic beauty and I sensed that she was compensating by revealing every inch of her body. Feminism doesn't really have much of a hold in these parts. There are far more primal games afoot.

Not that it's always like that. Like all towns, we have rich people living here and you occasionally see the beautiful people fresh from the gym, nipping into the supermarket for their expensive energy drinks. They exist on a different physical level. Perhaps they just have money to ensure that everything is tucked and nothing is twisted. They buy quality underwear that rides up in the rear just the right amount. Cheap underwear ends up splayed across a buttock. Or so it seems to me, a casual observer of the phenomenon. But what do I know? I ride a bike and wear hot hats in warm weather and I hate the summer.

After the louts, the pink dresses, and my least favourite checkout assistant blathering on about Pyrex dishes, I chose to return home by a different route. I hate to admit it but I think spring has arrived. I have to start thinking about how to arm myself for summer.

David Cameron and the Cute Lamb Cartoon

The Kate Emms Tour: The Australian Leg

It's only a guess but I assume Australian TV has just aired Michel Cockerell's excellent series on the House of Commons. Early Sunday, my web statistics went crazy with hits from the southern hemisphere. For two solid hours, I had hits from people searching for... Well, if you've read this blog long enough, then you'll know what they were searching for.

This whole 'Kate Emms' thing is beginning to intrigue me to the point of it becoming a distraction. I watched the Cockerell series twice and I didn't immediately hit the internet to research the name 'Kate Emms'. Yet that's precisely what hundreds (if not thousands) of people regularly do whenever that second (I believe) episode of the series is aired.They say hat certain people have 'star quality', that hard to define quality which can neither be taught not bought. If that's true, then it seems sensible to reason that there must be people out there who have star quality and just don't realise it. I'm beginning to think that Kate Emms might be one such person. If this blog can get thousands of hits from 'fans' of Kate Emms when all she's done is briefly appear on TV buying chocolate bars from her co-workers, then imagine what would happen if she launched a proper career in light entertainment. Perhaps with a song and dance act. Think Madonna with a Parliamentary/Chocolate slant.

I don't know. Thinking on my feet here. I see a name in lights. A spotlight picking out a figure. It's a large cardboard cut out of John Bercow, with oversized novelty head which wobbles from side to side. The music starts and the figure does a soft shoe shuffle before somebody carries the head one way, the arms and legs another, and then the body splits in half revealing the star of the show dressed as Black Rod and doing a two minute tap dance.

There has to be money in this. Perhaps this calls for a letter to Sir Cameron Mackintosh...

***

The problem with technology is that it ages so damn quickly. At the moment I'm struggling with aging computer hardware and my limitations seem to grow by the day. I know now that there will come the day when I'll simply have nothing left on which to blog and The Spine will go dark. Already this year, I've lost a laptop which I can't afford to replace. My remaining PC is a six core beast but beginning to struggle with some of the tasks I ask it to perform. It's also hardly portable and getting on in the years. My Samsung Note is good for drawing but severely limited when it comes to painting with colour. It's also useless when it comes to writing or blogging. I wrote yesterday's blog post on it and it was a very long struggle. It's the reason why I'd probably never again buy a Samsung tablet.

There are certain things you realise about companies once you join their user groups. With Dell, it was their complete lack of responsibility. My laptop was always overheating because of a design flaw. They failed to issue a recall and I was stuck with it and it died a few weeks ago with barely enough hours on its clock to justify the initial outlay. Plus they had incorporated technology into their power supplies so you always had to use an 'official' power supply, which I always think is a bit of a shoddy trick. I won't buy Dell again. It's a shame but the thinking of some corporate types goes beyond logic when they choose some short term gain over the loyalty of very long time Dell owner. It's the same thinking, I suppose, which made them move the Dell technical support to India. It says something about any company when they choose to save money instead of providing proper support to their user base.

The thing you realise being a Samsung user is that the company seems to have the attention span of a gnat. The Samsung Note 2014 Edition is a truly great tablet but, once the product was out the door, Samsung moved on to something new. Firmware updates have been sporadic and they have completely ignored the plethora  of people complaining about the Bluetooth issues that affect the tablet. Simply: it's impossible to get the 2014 Note 10.1 inch table to work with a Bluetooth keyboard. There are hundreds of pages on the web detailing the problem. Connecting to the keyboard is simple. In my case, I'm using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which is one of the better keyboards out there. I can type on it and the tablet captures my input. But after ten seconds, it drops the connection and I have to wait another ten seconds before it connects again. I then have about ten seconds of typing before it disconnects again... Ad nauseam.. After nearly two years, there are still no fixes.

Since my main activity is writing, the Note has been a huge disappointment. I can't type using the screen. My fingers are simply too big and I want to type quicker than the touch screen allows. It's not enough to turn me off Samsung products entirely but I'd be cautious about buying another.

Friends I know swear by Apple and though I've always scoffed a little, I can see why their loyalty lasts. I've never had such luck finding a company to whom I've been entirely loyal. Apple were about the best but I could never live with their restrictions. I wanted access to SD cards and operating systems. I want control over the devices I own and I don't want to pay the earth for beautiful hardware that's locked to me. I don't know where I'll turn next or even when I'll have a chance to move on to new hardware. Perhaps I'll go back to paper and ink and I'll grow a beard in the style of Henry David Thoreau, retire from the electronic world to live in a cabin. Sometimes it feels like it would make a lot more sense, instead of wasting my days making podcasts that only three people listen to and writing words largely ignored by the multitude only passing through in order to read the last news about Kate Emms.

 

The Problems of Podcasting

I don't suppose it comes as much of a surprise but podcasting doesn't come naturally to me. I suppose it's something I've wanted to do for a long time but something held me back. My personality is of the introverted type and I don''t have that nautral belief in my powers as a communicator to ever think I'd be any good at that kind of thing. Yet I wanted to try it because sometimes you just wonder to yourself if it's at all possible and how might results sound. It's also good to face your fears and deficiencies head on. I think (or perhaps merely hope) that it makes you a better person.

What I've discovered is that writing a podcast is only a very small fraction of the battle and that the harder part of the work is the recording, which brings with it all manner of unexpected problem. It's often small things which you wouldn't believe could cause you such headaches. I bought myself a really high quality microphone a few months ago for work I was doing and which was suffering because of the really low quality sound I was getting from a cheap £10 mike I'd bought from Maplin. Now my problems are reversed. The microphone picks up every noise in the room. Should my stomach growl, it will be there hidden in the mix. If I move in my chair it picks up the squeaks of the arms. If a dog barks outside, it's there on the recording alongside every machine tool, lorry reversing, and even the sound of the wind in the distant recotory wood. And unlike, for example, working with photographs, there's no chance to get in there and erase the sound unless you're lucky and the problem occurs at a moment of relative silence between words. It's easy to go in there and snip out your intakes of breath. It's impossible to erase the distant sound of your Android tablet updating with its characteristing whistle. All of those ruined recordings today.

Even more horrifying are the noises I find myself making. It's slightly disturbing to realise that when speaking your mouth makes all kinds of strange squelches that nobody would pick up in real life but are there on an extremely high fidelity recording. Listening back to myself, I sound like some 90 year old with a set of loose fitting dentures. It's really offputting. My breathing sounds heavy, my voice twisted in all strange manner of convolutions. Then there are the language prolems. I always thought that I wasn't too bad at public speaking but then you hear yourself constantly mispronouncing words, missing syllables out, or simply stumbling over a series of phonemes like a drunk man stumbling over a garden fence. The whole recording process begins to amount difficulties that have to be overcome before you can even begin to edit the results into a podcast.

I'm beginning to have new respect for anybody who does this regularly whilst working on their own and who produces anything half listenable.

When I started out recording these about a week ago, I genuinely thought I'd manage two before giving up. I've now recorded four, despite the lingering problems cause by a really bad throat infection. I'd like to do more but as I sit here typing this, I don't know. The amount of effort required for just one podcast is so great that I don't know if I should carry on. Even if I can write the 1500 words or so in an hour or two, then another hour to record it a few times, iron out the problems, and then another hour to fit it all together and upload it, that (at the very minimum) is a four hour job. Today's was such a rush. Was it worth it? I'm pretty certain that it wasn't. But it's only by trying these things that you discover what is and isn't possible.

Yet as I type all those doubts up. I also feel a contradictoy sense of the effort being worth it. I don't mean that quality is there or that simply by doing this I somehow make a difference. I realise that these are instantly forgotten bubbles in a universe of froth. There are simply too many voice. What I think I mean is: what is the alternative? You have to put your effort into those things where you'd want others to put effort. The alternative would be to admit defeat and let the world become a homogenous whole, with no voices of dissent or difference. I'd rather go down saying things I believe in than go down saying nothing at all.

The Spine Election Podcast - Episode 4

Rushed. No time to edit this better, perfect my vocals or do any of the hundred other things I was intending on doing. So, it was either publish it as it is, or waste everything I'd done so far. Anyway, for what it's worth: enjoy.

The Spine Election Podcast Episode 3

Via Youtube with pictures:



Or via Soundcloud without pictures.

General Discontent

March was a hellish month for me. April has not started out well. There have been a few small highlights, things along the way that have made me click my heels or punch the air, but they're things tangential to my life. For example, yesterday, the Daily Politics gave me one of my rare 'hell yes' moments. Andrew Neil was interviewing the deeply smarmy Sajid Javid. Neil asked a question which Javid immediately ignored in that way that's become indicative of this debate-free election. I can't say that I've noticed the LIb Dems, Labour, or even UKIP doing this but the Tories have it mastered like they've been practising it in conclaves beneath Westminster.

'Is it raining?' you could ask them.

'Well,' they'll reply, 'what's clear regarding the weather is that the long term economic plan is working and merely looking out of the window to check the heavens for precipitation would put that long term economic plan in jeopardy.'

Only yesterday Neil did something I've not seen a journalist do before. He visibly lost his temper and, damn it, didn't it feel good! I'm utterly sick of hearing about the 'long term economic plan', which means very little to my life. It's been my highlight of my election so far.

I am, I suppose, one of those small businesses (ha!) the Tories love so much but it's damn hard to earn anything. I really need to rethink what the hell I'm doing. Today was supposedly 'pay day' but my pay has taken a huge hit due to factors beyond my (and my client's) control. I should really negotiate a new deal but I'm not in a position to do that. I need to find better work but life has many complicating factors. To do that would also mean no more writing and no more cartoons and definitely no more blog. Moneterising the blog has resulted in about £3 in three months, with donations sitting at a big empty sack of zero. As I periodically ponder, usually at the end of a month when I look at my bank balance: why do I even bother?

I know I've been here before but simply because you often walk to the edge of an abyss and then step back doesn't deny that the abyss is there and that my blogging life is precarious.

Oh, sod it. I drew a John Kerry cartoon last night. I might go and finish that as I ponder these hard questions. I also have real 'work' to do, which I'm not in the mood to face. Not on this money, an amount that any one of you would think is risible, shameful... Christ. What the hell is wrong with me? I have so many skills but I lack the simple ability to negotiate a decent wage.

Seriously, if anybody out there wants a cheap minimum wage dog's body able to write essays, articles, books, draw cartoons, build websites, write Android apps, create Windows software, model 3D objects, make animations, presentations... You know where I am.

The Spine Podcast - Episode 2