New Jeremy Corbyn cartoon and a bit about my nightmares

I suppose I should know the name of the storm that's currently raging but, as I explained last week, happy not to know. It feels more primal this way. And speaking of primal: my dreams are getting worse. The previous night's were bad but last night they were genuine nightmares, something I so rarely have. I had at least two last night. In the first, a relative rang to ask me about Plato and the colour yellow. I know nothing about Plato or the colour yellow but recollect muttering something about Platonic ideals. I then found myself in some college talking to him on the phone when a woman told me off for discarding a sheet of A4 without covering it. I swore and left the college but discovered I didn't know where I was. I was in a bus terminal and a woman with bright red hair told me I was in London. I was utterly lost. There was a lot more to the dream than this: including a ride in the back of a taxi in which the driver was amassing a ball of Haribo tantastics, one of which turned into a rainbow striped worm and tried to get into my shoe.

At some point, I  woke up and when I fell back to sleep had the second nightmare. I was rushing to catch a flight from the local airport (which was conveniently at the local railway station). We landed in the Far East and racing through streets chased by locals who had been painted white and with sharpened teeth (I'd been reading an article about George Miller and Mad Max before I went to bed, which at least explains this bit). The whole thing then became a nightmare about Ken Loach films which I can't quite understand or fully remember. It was in black and white and at one point involved my parachuting off a viaduct and landing in a barrel of water where I met a bunch of hippies including a young Helen Mirren.

Needless to say, I really don't understand any of the above. Perhaps if I did, I wouldn't have explained it in such great detail... Any psychoanalysts out there who can see through the mud, I'd be very grateful for an explanation. The bit about the worm really freaked me out.

A Corbyn/Watson/Labour Conference Cartoon

This one doesn't quite work and I haven't time to fix it. Composition could have been better...

Madness

I'm in a screw-the-world mood today, which is always the case when I work particularly hard on something and then the blog traffic dries up. Sometimes I wonder if I could deliberately create anything that could prove less popular. I doubt if I could.

Other than write and record the podcast, I spent yesterday turning my attention to things other than politics and current affairs. I drew three cartoons, two of which go straight into the folder labelled 'things only I find funny'. It was a strange day in that respect. I'd fired up my Gag Machine for the first time in a few weeks and the ideas began to flow like they've not flowed in a while. I wrote until I had a full page of cartoon ideas and thereby proved to myself that sometimes the imagination does indeed run flat and needs time away to recharge.

Of course, I look at the list today and wonder what the hell I was thinking. A few of the ideas towards the bottom are indistinguishable from madness. As I write the ideas, I always sort them according to their strength. Some are fully fleshed out ideas and others are just strange phrases that I like to keep in the chance that on a future day I'll look again and see the cartoon that was previous only peeping out.

I then start drawing them, working my way down the list, hoping that by the time I reach those at the bottom, I'll have sat down and written a new list, which I incorporate into the old. Over weeks, the list will reach hundreds of ideas, the best of them drawn and the remainder undrawable. When the undrawables gets too long, I usually abandon the list and start again. Yesterday was one of those new starts.

Today I intend to spend drawing more cartoons for myself. I've missed them. There's something to be said about trying to draw standard 'mainstream' cartoons on topical affairs but it can get wearying. I started to cartoon all those years ago because I like to draw the sort of surreal cartoons that I find funny but I so rarely see published anywhere. When I say cartons for myself, I mean that my absolute favourite cartoons lie in a very hard to define region between the lucid and insane. I mean this sort of thing:




The fact I have so few of this kind of cartoons over the past few months is a bad sign. I've been chasing the kinds of non-surreal cartoon ideas I see elsewhere which I don't find quite as funny but stand a reasonable chance of getting published.

That's one of my chief frustrations. My favourite cartoons would never get published. They appeal to such a very small minority of people who share my sense of humour and 'get' them. It means I end up trying to restrict my natural instincts towards the 'crazy' and draw ideas like 'Issac Newton under tree. Apple logo falls on his head'. That was on my list yesterday and I thought it so weak that I even uttered an 'urgh!' as I wrote it down. I also knew it must have been done before, not only once but a thousand times. And frankly, I wouldn't find it funny if I saw it. So I changed it and had 'Isaac Newton under tree. Apple Mac falls on his head'. Now that's a bit funnier but I also guessed it would have been done and so it has.

That is the kind of cartooning I hate. It probably explains why I don't get published and get so dejected when my best work is rejected. The market forces you towards the mainstream and to copy the cartoons you see getting published. You end up worn out by the struggle to be derivative and 'middle class'. I'm going to see if I can hold that back for a while and try to just enjoy cartooning for a few days.

For that reason, I'm glad that politics will now ease off. The politicians are now heading deep into 'screw you' territory where it becomes dispiriting to follow.

Tom Watson is a fine MP and, despite my earlier reservations about him, I think he's worked tirelessly around the business of Westminster pedophiles and other forms of systemic corruption. He's now running for deputy leader but I had a jaw-crushing-my-toes moment when I saw how he's trying to crowd-fund his campaign and will probably succeed.

I clearly go about things the wrong way. I can't raise enough money to buy myself a new pair of boots and after a few hours Watson is already two grand up towards his £25,000 target to fund his campaign. Scratch that. In the time it's taken me to write all of the above, it's gone up another £1000.

Twenty five thousand pounds! And that's only to become deputy leader. It seems such an odd thing to do only days after winning your seat and another five years on a Christ-only-knows-but-I-can-only-dream-about salary. The donations are already in crazy donation territory. Plenty of people throwing £50 at him but also many over £100. If politics engages people that much, how come the things I've done with a political slant have the lowest traffic? It baffles me. In ten years of blogging, my biggest donation remains less that £10.

I should start offering to sell my original inked cartoons for a stinking fortune. I should stop writing a blog which actually costs me money to give away the entire creative output of my brain. It's madness. I need to learn from these socialists about how to make money. I've been going about it the wrong way. I'll never afford boots that don't leak water at toes at this rate.