What follows is a WORK OF FICTION, and in no way a thinly disguised report of anything that might have happened in real life. Any similarity to any actual awful shrieking crows, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, and definitely not libellous.

One day, some of the forest animals went to a music festival. There was a donkey, a she-donkey, a Swedish kingfisher and a pink flamingo, an orangutan and a hairy gorilla, two Canadian geese, a couple of goats, and an overgrown chimpanzee. They lived in a weird forest.

On the second day of the festival, most of the animals wandered from their campsite to go and listen to some music. The overgrown chimpanzee was lagging behind, when a young rat wandered up and stuck its tongue out. The chimpanzee stuck his tongue out at the rat. The rat kicked the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee took out his whistle and blew it at the rat.

And there, perhaps, the matter would have ended, but the rat’s mother, an awful shrieking crow (er, the rat was adopted), began to shriek and squawk at the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee didn’t like this very much, so he swung away through the trees and ate a banana. The awful shrieking crow flapped off and found the chimpanzee’s friends, and started squawking at them.

The forest animals didn’t know what to make of the crow, who seemed to be overreacting somewhat to a whistle blow, and didn’t appear to understand that the other animals weren’t responsible for the actions of the chimpanzee. They let her finish her rant, then she flapped off to squawk at the security hippo, and the friends went to listen to the music and didn’t give the awful shrieking crow another thought.

When the chimpanzee had finished his banana, he scampered off to join the rest of the gang, but was pounced on by the security hippo as the crow hopped up and down angrily in the background, shrieking dementedly. The next thing the chimpanzee knew, he was being escorted to the local police station for questioning, and the next thing he knew, he was being summoned to court on a charge of assault with a deadly whistle, to the general bemusement of all involved, with the exception of the awful shrieking crow who, due to her evidently limited mental capacity, was presumably in a constant state of bemusement at the world in general.

And so three months later the chimpanzee went to court, along with the donkey, the she-donkey, the Swedish kingfisher, the pink flamingo, the orangutan and the hairy gorilla, who were there as witnesses for the defence. One of the court officials told them that they normally get one or two defence witnesses a year, so six in one case was pretty much unprecedented.

The awful shrieking crow went in first, and squawked her demented case. After that, the chimpanzee scampered into court to make his defence. It was then time for the witnesses to take the stand.

The orangutan was called in, followed by the hairy gorilla, and then it was the turn of the pink flamingo. The Swedish kingfisher, the donkey and the she-donkey remained outside, nervously awaiting their own calls, and were somewhat relieved when the chimpanzee’s solicitor, a - oh, I don’t know, let’s say duck - came out to inform them that the first three witnesses had done such a good job, the rest weren’t going to be needed. So all of the witnesses went to sit in the public gallery to find out the verdict.

The case came down to a semantic debate between the judge, a wise old owl, and the prosecution lawyer, a cross between a nasty sweaty pig and a weasel. For the case to stand, the pig-weasel had to prove that the whistle blow was done with intent to cause alarm. As the chimpanzee claimed his intention was merely to give the rat a shock, the pig-weasel did his best to argue that shock and alarm are the same thing. The wise old owl was having none of it, and pronounced the chimpanzee not guilty.

The forest animals rejoiced, and the awful shrieking crow contracted botulism and died.

Well it’s the last day of the month, which traditionally means I finally get round to doing a blog. But for once, it’s been an extremely eventful day, and I really do have something worth blogging about… but it’s been so eventful that it’s half past eleven at night before I’ve got round to it, and the remaining fraction of the day is insufficient to write it up. So instead you’re getting this cop out, with the promise of an exciting entry tomorrow, which will be a lovely story about some forest creatures that is IN NO WAY a thinly disguised report of anything that may or may not have occurred in real life.

Towards the end of my time at university, a statue was erected overlooking the lake. I was going to begin by telling you a bit more about it, but after a quick google, the only page I can find that offers any information is this one, a brief quiz which asks whether it was designed by Henry Moore and is valued at over a million pounds. If you submit the answer as ‘True’, you get the response:

0 out of 1
Correct.

Whereas ‘False’ gives you:

1 out of 1
Sorry, that is the wrong answer.

So really I’m none the wiser. All I can say for certain is that, like so many things, it either was or wasn’t designed by Henry Moore.

Having appeared shortly before I left the university, I wondered if it would still be there when we came last year for the open day. It was, but now that we’ve actually moved down here, the statue is gone. What’s clear - as clear, at least, as the issue of whether it was designed by Henry Moore - is that it was put there to mark a silent vigil until my return. Rather nice of them, that.

But what you’re really wondering, I suppose, is what freelance illustrators do with their time. “They certainly don’t spend it blogging, except on the last day of every month because they can’t bear to see any missing from the archive on the sidebar,” you may grudgingly add. Well, I too have been wondering what freelance illustrators do with their time. Ever since I’ve been self-employed I’ve had this constant nagging feeling, whenever I’m not working, that I probably ought to be. I’ve always thought it rather fortunate that I started dating Jess early in my career, because without that distraction I could easily have become an obsessive workaholic, and by this point have broken down completely and forged a new life for myself living under a railway bridge and explaining to every passer-by that I am, contrary to appearances, a sausage.

Now, of course, Jess has commenced an intensive degree course, giving me ample time to myself in which to become an obsessive workaholic and etc etc sausage. So it’s a good time to evaluate how I spend my days, and come to terms with the fact that, actually, it’s fine to not always be working.

How, then, to find out what I do all day? The obvious solution, I suppose, is to attach a camcorder to my head and review the footage at the end of each day. But a) that’s not the obvious solution at all, and b) since I spend most of my time sitting at my computer (or do I?) a similar record can be achieved by setting up said computer to take a screenshot every five minutes.

So there you are - that’s what freelance illustrators do with their time. See the big swathe of light blue over the last week or so? That’s how long it takes to wade through fifteen thousand screenshots and construct a spreadsheet of what you were doing in each one, and then make them into that diagram. And the medium red is how long it takes to almost, but not quite, make a game about a retired army colonel trekking through the Himalayas in an attempt to visit every Buddhist relic.

I don’t know if all freelance illustrators do that. That one might just be me.

I’ve very nearly let September slip by without any bloggage, haven’t I. We’d better do something about that.

Life in Essex is good. Jess has started her course, I’m slowly adjusting to the weirdness of living in a place that I left in 1998 thinking I’d never be back, and Henry’s enjoying having a house with a garden. Because he’s a ragdoll cat, and therefore too stupid to be allowed out on his own, we decided it would be OK to take him out in a harness. But he couldn’t really walk properly in his harness - possibly another consequence of stupidity - and crawled around the garden rather like a fat fluffy lizard, so now we’ve abandoned the harness and occasionally let him roam free, under close supervision. The garden’s fully enclosed, and he hasn’t yet worked out that it’s possible to climb fences, because he’s stupid. I might have mentioned that.

Meanwhile, I have a little project on the go. I won’t reveal the details yet, but it will at some point involve me dying my hair blond and growing a beard, though not at the same time. I’ve been trying to spend all the time I can on this little project, so when, a few of weeks ago, I had an idea for a computer game, I thought, “Well it’s an interesting idea but I’m far too busy with this other little project to actually make it.” But then I thought, “I could just knock up a simple thing just to see if the principle works.” So I did, and then the simple thing got a bit less simple, and before I knew it I’d made the whole game. And when I finished writing all the code and drawing all the graphics, I thought, “Hooray! I’ve finished my game! Now all I need to do is invent a load of levels for it!” I imagined, in my naivety, that this was something I could do in a spare afternoon. But it turns out that actually, inventing interesting levels is the hard bit. My game may not be completed for some time.

My other little project that I’m trying to spend a lot of time on hasn’t been touched since the 26th of August. That one may not be completed for aaages. Still, it gives me plenty of time to grow a beard.

And loads of other stuff has happened, but I’ll let you use your imaginations about that.

Where were we? Oh yes, trying to move house in the face of incarcerated removals men.

Surprisingly, things went pretty well after that, and here we are in our little house in Wivenhoe. Other house moving cock-ups included Virgin deciding it would be a good idea to arrange for a BT engineer to come and set up our broadband on the morning of our moving day. Even if things had gone to plan they’d have had a wait of several hours before we could let them in, so I had to reschedule the appointment, and the next slot they could offer us was two weeks later, so for the first fortnight in our new house we didn’t have the internet, and if you’ve ever tried to run an internet based business without internet access, you’ll appreciate my difficulty.

It’s weird to be living here again after all these years. The other day I had a cheque to bank, so I looked on Barclays’ website to find my nearest branch, and discovered it was on the university campus, just down the road. “That’s handy,” I thought. “What a lucky coincidence that there’s a Barclays on campus.” Then I realised it’s not a coincidence at all, because the existence of this very branch is the reason I opened an account with Barclays sixteen years ago. If that’s not the circle of life then I don’t know what is.

But more exciting than any of that, we went to Cropredy! Omally and that lot have been going for years, and we wanted to tag along last time, but it turned out to be when we were in Edinburgh, so we went this year instead. As someone who has neither been to a music festival nor camped in his life, it was all very new to me, so there remained the possibility that I would hate every minute of it and spend the weekend sobbing in the corner and wishing I was dead, but it was super fun! The weather helped, which wasn’t the RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN that was forecast, but more like SUN SUN CLOUD SUN rain CLOUD SUN CLOUD SUN, which made sleeping under a piece of cloth in a field a lot more pleasant than it might have been.

You want to know about the music? OK, I’ll tell you about the music. It consisted mainly of a series of musicians making pleasant noises with a variety of instruments. That’s about as refined as my musical appreciation gets, I’m afraid, which may make you wonder why I wanted to go to a music festival in the first place, and it’s true that of all the reasons I wanted to go, music was at the bottom of the list, somewhere below atmosphere, splendid company, sunshine, and stalls selling unhealthy but delicious foodstuffs. Not necessarily in that order.

What else has been going on? I had to have a filling, only I think the dentist used a bit too much anaesthetic, because for half an hour afterwards I couldn’t move the right side of my face at all, by which I mean I couldn’t even CLOSE MY EYE. If I wanted to blink - and I did, at fairly frequent intervals - I had to do it manually, moving my eyelid with my finger.

So that was fun.

It’s moving day! Always a stressful time, but so far everything’s going swimmingly. Assuming you’re swimming off the coast of Amity.

The removals people were due to arrive at 8:30 this morning. We were due at the estate agents in Colchester to sign the paperwork and pick up the keys at 3pm, which meant we were on a tight schedule. Everything had to run smoothly! Can you guess whether it did?

At 8 o’clock we got a phone call from the removals company, saying they weren’t going to be here until half ten, on account of one of the two removals men had been arrested, and was currently in the custody of the local constabulary with the keys to the van about his person. This wasn’t ideal, because a) it meant there was no way we could be at the estate agents by 3pm, and b) I don’t want my removals done by the kind of people who are in the habit of being arrested.

We made frantic contingency plans, which involved me driving down nice and early and Jess hanging about here to let the removals men in and get a train down later. Then at 9 o’clock the removals people phoned again to tell us they can’t do it at all, due to the lack of manpower that’s a byproduct of half your workforce being incarcerated.

It’s Tigers Removals, by the way. I think they deserve a plug. “Your 1st Choice for Removals and Storage” it says on the website. By which I suppose they mean you choose them first, then when they get arrested you choose someone more reliable.

Which is what we did, thanks to Jess’s mum finding someone who’s able to leap in at the last minute and load our stuff into his lorry tonight and drive it down to our new house in Wivenhoe in the morning. Remember how when my car broke down it was her who found somewhere that could fix it after I’d given up hope? That’s twice she’s saved our bacon. If it wasn’t for her, just think how little bacon we’d have left.

But we still have to sign the paperwork and pick up the keys this afternoon. The estate agent’s Lettings people aren’t there on Saturdays - they did bend over backwards to accommodate us, and someone from the Sales department agreed to sort us out, but they could only squeeze us in later on, and the removals people don’t want to hang about that long - so Jess is currently on a train to Colchester, where she’ll spend the night in our new empty house, and I’ll spend the night in our old empty house, and tomorrow, if there are no more little hiccups, we shall be reunited!

What could possibly go wrong?

Life’s getting interesting at the minute, so I ought to start blogging more often as a matter of historical record. Otherwise my grandchildren will be all “Grandad, what happened in the summer of 2011? And why is this seemingly eventful part of your life skirted over in your blog, and yet the bit where all you were doing was vacuuming up fish and stealing Christmas trees is described in minute detail?” and I’ll be all “Not this again! For god’s sake, Roderick, haven’t you got any homework to do?” and he’ll be all “My Homeworkbot 2000 is doing it. Anyway, why are you even here? Nurse will be waiting to give you your bath.” and I’ll be all “Don’t you give me your cheek, young man! Didn’t your father teach you any manners?” and he’ll be all “Manners? Pops? Fat chance! You should have sent him to a private school, not that state comprehensive that taught him how to steal hovercars and knife old ladies.” and I’ll be all “How could I send him to private school? You know how poor I was after my oil shares crashed in 2015 when they discovered that cars run equally well on horse wee.” and he’ll be all “No I don’t. You didn’t blog about that either.”

So, as previously reported, Jess will shortly be doing a masters at that august seat of learning, the University of Essex. All the best people go there at some point. Last week we went down to find ourselves somewhere to live.

The University of Essex is situated in the town of Wivenhoe, just outside Colchester. I spent three years at said uni, getting a degree in artificial intelligence that’s so useful in the life of a freelance illustrator, and I never once went into Wivenhoe. Turns out it’s a lovely little town, which is good because we’ve gone and rented a house there! It’s popular with artists and writers due to its bohemian quality, apparently. I think I might fit in.

They’ve got all sorts of art groups, and regular live poetry events with an open mic spot… hmm… tempting. I bet I’d be the only one doing poems about hiccups and obese vampires and pirate space monkeys.

Holidays in Greece, cars breaking down, and now moving house… my goodness it’s been an expensive couple of months.

So now we’re busy getting ready to move. We bought some boxes yesterday. Ten of them, great big cardboard ones. It’s all jolly exciting.

Is that enough for you, Roderick?