Now this is a sign you don't want to be standing staring at at 18.52 on s Friday night. It's the sign at Portavadia harbour telling me that the ferry to Tarbert, a short 10 minute journey, has just gone, and there won't be another till tomorrow.
Good old Sat Nav. This is just one of the hiccups I've had using my new Garmin Sat Nav (I say new, I got it last Christmas). One of the differences it has from its predecessor Tom Tom is that Tom Tom used to give you a choice about ferries and toll roads. You could ask it to warn you if there were those obstacles coming, and then it would give you the choice, right at the start of the journey. Take the ferry route or not? Obviously for my journey a couple of weeks ago to the Isle of Wight I'd have ticked Yes for the ferry. But on Friday afternoon's journey, having picked up my hire car from Glasgow airport at a little after 4.30, I would have opted otherwise.
However it wasn't until I got to Gourock, passing through Greenock and Port Glasgow which were of course familiar from my classes there back in August, that I realised I was taken a route more like the crow flies. If the crow takes a ferry that costs 16 quid, that is. Still, a pleasant ferry hop to Dunoon - the first time I've done that journey since an ill-remembered excursion with Gran and a coach-load of screeching pensioners back when I was 12 years old - and I was en route to Tarbert. There was, as we've seen, one more ferry to come. And, once I'd missed it, there was an additional 2 and a half hours suddenly added onto my journey. So instead of getting there at 7pm, I got there at 9.30. Hey ho, I do organise these trips all by myself.
And then I did a couple of Comic Art Masterclasses which were, of course, texbook examples of me doing what I do and the kids enjoying it. Although the travel ate a little bit more into my expenses than most trips, it's always worth it to reach far flung corners. And it was quite fun to drive home through falling and settling snow, which you don't get so much of back home.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.
Here's a lovely grab bag of comics produced by pupils in my Comic Art Masterclasses from almost all points of the compass. Okay, not as far-travelled as last week's comics from Amman, or last month's comics from Switzerland, but still flung enough to be described as far. The ones above are from Tarbert Book Festival, on the Mull Of Kintyre, and below we have another Literature Festival, this time in Cornwall.
Looe to be particular, and what a lovely wee place it is, yet another of the diverse new places I've been to this year in my almost pathological desire to travel to Lit Fests nationwide. Nairn, Bradford, Manchester, Snape, Looe and Tarbert. Where is there I've not been this year? Burnley. I don't think I've been to Burnley.
Oh no, you're right, I went to Burnley on Tuesday. Padiham to be exact. And by the way haven't we been keeping up a high standard of originality in the titles of the kids comics this month? As ever, everybody in the class comes up with an idea, then we choose the best between us. You should read the ones that hit the bin.
* Oh yes, you're probably wondering what Tarbert's m84 CUBWr means? It was one of those lovely times when a poor unfortunate pupil is a bit too young to have mastered written English (in this case I think she was 5 or 6, bless) but still has a brave stab at writing a title down on the piece of paper I give them all. In this case she was trying to write the same title as her Mum had written, Duck House. This is what Duck House looks like when you don't really know what letters are or how they work. It was the kids idea to turn the upside down 4 into a robot, so that was what I did.
The celebs these groups chose for the treads-on-a-worm demo strip were Roald Dahl, Simon Cowell, David Cameron, James Bond, Katy Perry and Johnny Depp. ㄣ
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.
Possibly the most flattering display I've ever seen greeted me as I entered the classrooms of Padiham Primary School near Burnley this week. A veritable shrine to me. Don't worry, I'm not under the delusional impression that I merited it in the slightest but it's a fun thing nonetheless.
This day of Comic Art Masterclasses had been arranged and paid for by DC Thomson and The Beano, Padiham having won me as a prize in the Read For My School competition, and the pupils and teachers had thus spent the previous week swotting up on me and my comic work. As a result of which we have a wall of essays and drawings about The Beano, with copies of Match and Doctor Who Adventures to boot, in not one but two classrooms.
So I arrived already heralded as a superstar of comics and, thanks to the classes going rather well, went away being asked if we could compare diaries for my return visit, to teach all the kids who'd had to miss out. This really is the sort of thing that could go to a young man's head. Especially a young man who is clearly as gorgeous as these drawings suggest.
I shall have to prepare now to lower my expectations for the next schools I visit, and not be too surprised that nobody's ever heard of me or seen any comics I've ever done. But I'll always remember that day when I was Kev F - World Famous In Padiham.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.
I don't know if everyone in Amman gets the ropey TV picture that my hotel room had, but I can attest that it's possible to enjoy TV shows even if they look like this. As ever the TV was really only on in the background, though I manage in the course of four nights to have seen the Jimmy Kimmel show twice, a thing called Last People On Earth with Kristen Schaal, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll with Denis Leary, bits of The Avengers and the Hulk, and lots & lots of going round the dial seeing glimpses of mostly news programmes but also some awkward looking soap operas in, I assume, Arabic. Though one show was dubbed from one possibly-Arabic language to another, so I'm guessing different countries have different languages, obviously, and I am ignorant. There was TV from every middle east country apart from, as far as I could see, Israel. I managed to finish artworking and to send to print my Comic Art Masterclass calendar from my hotel room (order it now).
Of course my week in Amman wasn't all about studying TV pictures, it was about teaching kids how to make comics and, as you can see, I did it with my usual aplomb. Yes, it is quite a low flipchart, so I spent a fair bit of the week on my knees. The kids were great and, as I explained when I gave a rundown of the comics they made, work in Grades, this being an American School. I did classes with 6 groups of Grade 6, 7 & 8, and gave half hour talks to Grades 3, 4 & 5, all in their lovely well appointed library which had a massive collection of graphic novels.
One book Jessica the librarian gave me to read overnight, and I did, was Ellen Forney's excellent graphic novel Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me
about her life with bipolar, and very good it is too. Jess is pushing
for that book to be available to the older teenagers. It was the only
book I read this week. Having brought an Ian Rankin and Robert McKee's
Story with me, thinking I'd read a lot on a 5 hour flight, I ended up
watching TV and movies all the way there and back. From Heathrow to
Amman I watched Ant Man, Fawlty Towers The Builders, a bit of Avengers
Ultron but fell asleep, and from Heathrow to Amman the journey was
almost exactly the length of Twelfth Night from The Globe (with Mark
Rylance & Stephen Fry, and jolly good it was too, though I did take
the opportunity to make notes about how I'd direct it and my dream
casting to make it much funnier throughout, some parts of it seeming to
let the comedy slide, favouring a more dramatic and even corny style of
performance), Mad Max Fury Road (an excellent bit of film making that
would have been good to see on a bigger screen than the one in the back
of an aeroplane headrest), and an episode of W1A. Yes, it was a 6 hour
journey home thanks to headwinds which I'm sure I heard the pilot say
were 150 mph, but I may have misheard.
Jessica Levitt and her family, looked after me marvellously all week. They took me out to eat on Wednesday night (above you see us in a Lebanese Restaurant called Leilas, daughter Hayley is the one on the left), introduced me to the novelty of driving in Amman, where there are no road markings and, it would seem, no rules for either drivers or pedestrians. This amusing video they showed me gives you some idea.
Some of the graphic novels in the library, of which they'd taken a massive delivery, were in the process of deliberation as to whether they should go out on the shelves. Some parents being very conservative, they were wondering whether to put out Fables, Swamp Thing and Sandman, which I would have thought very acceptable, but when you look at some of the imagery and some of the language you realise might not be.
Then on Thursday night we all walked to a party in a teacher's apartment, the route of which ended up taking us half an hour because maps in Jordan are not as reliable as they might be. En route daughter Sarah and a friend recorded this video for Heather, whose birthday I was missing.
In advance of this trip, about which we were very trepidatious, Heather and I were looking at the Government websites advising travellers from the UK to only go to Jordan if essential, and warning about terrorism and the like. Well, despite the fact that Syria is the next door neighbour to the north and there have been incidents in the past, and my hotel had an X ray machine and metal detector which me and my bag had to pass through every time I came in, and a security guarded big metal gate, the place felt totally safe, and not the oppressive regime I'd come to expect.
And here we see Thursday night's party at a teacher's house, and since we're drinking beer which you get at one of the many Liquor Stores, I'd say Jordan is way more liberal than a lot of fellow Muslim countries. Sadly I didn't get to see any of its historic building, or its impressive sounding museums and art galleries, because I arrived late Monday, flew out early Friday, and was working all the daytime hours, but getting to chat to various International School teachers gave me a good insight to the country and peoples lives here. Did you know the tap water comes from tanks on the roof that you get refilled by water from the Nestle company? That Jordan has its own micro-brewery, whose beer we were drinking? Okay, that might be all of interest I really learned.
The school fish tank has a shark in, and a Jordanian Dinar is worth about a quid. What more can I tell you? My week in Amman was organised by Authors Abroad who, a few weeks back, sent me to Switzerland. I am immensely grateful for a genuinely enjoyable experience, so many thanks again. Next week, a school near Bolton.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - emailfor details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.
Not wanting to be unsympathetic to anyone hit by Storm Barney. But....
Barney? Is there any male name beginning with B that doesn't a bit,
well, unthreatening? Hev & I just discussed this, and all male B
names are essentially comedy names or the names of friendly uncles. Bob =
case in point. Billy? Bertie? Brian? Basil? Benny? Is there any B name
that you could really use for a villain? Or, indeed, a storm?
Richard HayesIn
2014, a study came to the contentious conclusion that female-named
storms caused more deaths because less people thought they were
dangerous and so didn't take precautions. Still, "Barney"?
Pete RenshawBeelzebub, not sure how many little Beelzebubs there are running around the school yard. But, I checked, parents are going for Bain, oh dear. 'Storm Beelzebub will be hitting the NW coast of Scotland' might get you battoning down hatches Vicky.
