Heathrow, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

We’re in england! This morning we went for a horsy ride around florence and then got on a plane. Now we’re at a posh hotel at heathrow courtesy of cheapestflights.co.uk. Seeing as between us our clothes are covered in ketchup and chocolate ice cream, i think we look a bit out of place.

Duomo take two, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

We just climbed all 463 steps to the top of the duomo and back again. I think we deserve some yummy gelato.

Leaning, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

We’re in pisa today. We got fined on the train for not getting our tickets stamped at the station. This is the beautiful view from the top of the tower, and you can see pisa in the background.

Rain, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

Today we went for a tour on an open topped sight seeing bus in the rain. We were the only people who sat on the upper deck. This statue is called “transformation of a woman into a giant polo mint".

Duomo, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

Here’s the other one that didn’t get through. I was going to give you a stunning view of florence at sunset from the top of the duomo, but it was shut so you got the door instead. I also gave you an update on the flight situation - the travel agent grudgingly admitted responsibility for the cock up. We’re still flying back to heathrow, but they’re putting us up in a hotel and flying us back to manchester the next day.

Statues, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

Some of my photo blogs seem not to have got through so i’ll try sending them again. This one was a statue called “woman being sucked into an air vent while playing naked twister".

Florence from afar, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

Florence as seen from the top of a big hill. Apparently when st mineas was beheaded he picked up his head and marched up this hill with it. We found it hard going with our heads on, so i’m quite impressed.

Manchester, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

So we arrived at manchester airport to be told our flight leaves from heathrow. Luckily they’ve managed to get us onto the flight from manchester that leaves at the same time, but we still don’t know which of those airports we’ll be flying back to. I’m beginning to understand why cheapestflights.co.uk is so cheap.

I’m going to Italy! Hooray!

The system by which I keep track of what work I’m supposed to be doing is crude but effective. I have an Excel spreadsheet, with one row per client, and four columns - their name; the current stage the job is at - which is usually either “Do work", “Wait for feedback” or “Get money"; the deadline; and how much I’m charging them for it. Jobs which require action on my part - the “Do work” faction - are highlighted in red; jobs that don’t require action on my part at this time, but which I need to keep an eye on to make sure the client does whatever I’m waiting for them to do so I can prod them with a broom if they don’t do it, are highlighed in orange; and anything I can safely ignore until something happens isn’t highlighted at all.

As of five minutes ago, for the first time in ages, everything that’s highlighted is orange. It won’t last for long - some of them will turn red when the people I’m waiting for feedback from feed back, and there are always new jobs pouring in - but it’s nice to have a moment’s calm for once. And it couldn’t be better timed, for tomorrow my lovely Jess gets back from Spain, which I’m quite ridiculously excited about, and the orangeness of my jobs means I can spend a day or two with her doing no work at all and not feeling remotely guilty about it.

So hooray! And that’s really all I have to say.

Many moons ago I wrote a little poem called The Unhappy Hiccup, and a few people suggested in the comments that I illustrate it and try to get it published. Being a good boy who does what he’s told, I illustrated it, and tried to get it published, with no success whatsoever. But a few people said they wanted a copy, so I stuck it up on one of these self-publishing print-on-demand website thingies, and there it’s sat ever since, selling in such vast quantities that it’s already sold a phenomenal twenty copies. I don’t have the figures to hand, but I think that’s more than Harry Potter.

One of those copies was to my sister, who got me to sign it to her two kiddies, Thomas and Ben. But since that time, another one’s popped out, and apparently he’s started asking to have it read to him, and it can only be a matter of time before he’s old enough to figure out that his name is excluded from the dedication. So now she wants me to do another book that I can sign with a message especially for him.

I think this means I’ve got to illustrate Jimmy McWhirlitzer and the pirate space monkeys. I wonder when I’ll find the time to do that.

Meanwhile, after months of not updating because the software mysteriously stopped working, I’ve got my webcam going again! The steady entropic decline of simong.org to a state of heat death takes a small step backwards! Now you can all sit and gaze longingly at me all day instead of doing any work. I’m concerned about the effect on the economy, of course, but sometimes one has to take these risks.

In light of the comments left on last night’s entry, which went to confirm my fears that standards have gone downhill at D. C. Thomson & Co., Ltd., today I went out and purchased The Beano. Strictly for research purposes, of course.

It turns out that things aren’t quite as bad as I feared. Dennis and Gnasher do their best to squirt Walter the Softie with a water pistol, startle a policeman, and then beat up a journalist, Minnie the Minx comes close to destroying the family car and then throws a rock through a window, and while Roger the Dodger’s naughtiest dodge is merely an attempt to get into the sweet shop before Fatty scoffs the lot, at least he doesn’t come over as quite the crusader for truth and justice that he did last week.

Which isn’t to say that the issue didn’t give me any cause for alarm. I’ll finish with a picture I scanned in from Calamity James. The less said about it the better, I think.

Not long ago, whilst browsing the comics aisle in the village shop, I was drawn to The Beano by the free water pistol sellotaped to the cover, and commenced to browse. What I found inside shocked and alarmed me, and I feel it my duty to alert the world to the sort of thing malleable young minds are being subjected to.

I’m talking, I’m afraid, about Roger the Dodger. When I was a lad, Mr the Dodger was a rebel. A maverick. He wasn’t afraid to break the rules. His dodges, which he executed with skill and cunning, were invariably designed to subvert the system, avoiding school and homework with ease. Except when they didn’t work, which was usually.

But what did I find when I read Roger the Dodger in this recent edition of the Beano? He was trying to dodge bullies, that’s what. No longer a cheeky young scamp wriggling out of his responsibilities, but a put-upon hero outwitting the forces of evil. It’s possible that this was just a one off, but I have a nasty feeling that it may be political correctness gone mad. Is the Roger the Dodger we used to know and love gone forever? Are young minds now considered insufficiently sophisticated to handle the concept of an antihero? I suppose next we’ll be seeing Dennis the Menace helping Walter the Softie make a daisy chain. Or maybe they’ll do away with Roger and Dennis altogether and bring back the Get Along Gang and the Care Bears.

I’m not happy about it. That’s all I have to say on the matter.

Oh dear, I was determined to blog tonight but then I got engrossed in all sorts of things and now it’s half past four in the morning.

Not that I have very much to tell you. Jess successfully made it to Spain without being blown up, and I’m busy working. I’ve almost caught up on my backlog of drawing, then I can get onto all the administrative things that need doing and some last bits of preparation for Italy, like getting travel insurance, and euros, and learning Italian.

My computer seems to have done one of those automatic updates that Windows likes to do now and again, and every few minutes a message box pops up asking me whether I want to restart now or later, with the N in ‘Now’ and the L in ‘Later’ underlined. I’ve been clicking on ‘Later’ for about an hour, so it’s getting quite annoying - which I realise is the idea, because I probably should restart - but it can only be a matter of time until I’m in the middle of typing a word with the letter N in it when the message pops up, and I’m unable to stop myself in time, and I accidentally tell it to restart now, and these deep and insightful musings are lost forever. Except that wouldn’t really happen at all, because a) they’re neither deep nor insightful, and b) I long ago tired of losing half written blogs when things went wrong and implemented a handy autorecovery feature. But it would mean I’d have to sit here twiddling my thumbs for a minute while I waited for it to reboot, so for the rest of this blog I’ll avoid use of the letter that comes after M yet before O. The letter that, said aloud, could be mistook for a species of flightless farm bird said by a chap or chapess who hails from the lower classes.

The message just popped back up. So perceptive to the letter at issue has the latter part of the previous paragraph made me, I very almost selected the choice that I’m supposed to avoid by mistake. But I was able to suppress the urge before it was too late. So that’s alright.

It’s really jolly tricky to express yourself adequately without recourse to the sixth most popular letter of our mother dialect, so I should probably admit defeat. I will therefore cease this activity. Good… er, bye.

I’m home! My eternal gratitude to all you lovely people who commented on the workingness or otherwise of my website. It sounds like it works less perfectly for some of you than I thought it would. I shall apply one of my best brains to the bugs just as soon as I’ve had some sleep.

Sam pointed out that the conversion rates being used on the prices page are rather out of date. I was surprised, because a year and a bit ago, when I first set up the site, I wrote a bit of code that updates them daily from here. I just did a quick investigation, and it turns out that when I set it up to run said bit of code daily, I messed up the filename, so every day for a year and a bit it’s tried to update the conversion rates and failed. Oops.

My lovely Jess has just this minute gone offline to go to the airport to get on a plane to go to Spain. As those of you who follow the news will be aware, the nation’s airports are in a relatively chaotic state at the minute as a result of some naughty people trying to blow aeroplanes up. Security has been heightened to the point that, as far as I can gather, you can take no hand luggage on board, and a maximum of two limbs and three internal organs. It sounds as though she’s going to have a lot of waiting around to do, but on the plus side it’s probably about the safest time to catch a flight for years.

And for those of you who failed to see me on the telly, here you go:

I decided I’d better get the revamped simongoodway.com launched before I’m on the telly, on the off-chance that they mention my name and eight million people google me, so I present for your entertainment: the aforementioned website. It probably hasn’t been tested as thoroughly as it should have been, and I’m aware of a few imperfections that I should probably sort out at some point, but overall it seems to work okay and is a great improvement on the previous state of affairs. I really would be terribly appreciative of feedback, especially about anything that doesn’t work properly. So go and have a play with it. Thankyoukindly.

So today I phoned the people I booked the flights from and told them they seem to be starting us at the wrong airport. Since I had no way of proving that I hadn’t selected Heathrow when I booked, the best I was hoping for was the option to change flights for a modest fee.

“Hang on, I’ll just have a look on the computer… oh yes, you’re supposed to be flying from Manchester. Oops. We’d better sort that out for you.”

So “Boo!” to cheapestflights.co.uk for messing up in the first place, but “Hooray!” for hastily rectifying the error once I alerted them to it.

Elsewhere in the news, I seem to have set up an account at flickr.com. So now you can go and look at lots of pictures of me! How great is that? Very great, that’s how.

And tomorrow I’m off up north to spend a couple of days on the farm, so you probably won’t hear from me again until Friday. But don’t forget* to watch How To Improve Your Memory at 8 o’clock on Wednesday night on BBC1, and see if you can spot me without using the freeze frame button. Good luck.

*Though presumably if you remember to watch it, you don’t need to.

The weekend has been and gone, and how did I spend it? I’ll tell you how I spent it. All on my own, that’s how. Reason bein’, my lovely Jess is off to Spain with her family on Friday, and in order to have a sufficiently depleted workload that I can spend the preceding days in her company without being wracked with guilt, I deposited her on the doorstep of her familial abode all the way back on Friday, and have spent every moment since working jolly hard indeed.

As a result of which, this was the first weekend I’ve spent Jessless since January. It was a bit rubbish really.

But I did manage to get lots of work done, so I can spend much of the week up north saying goodbye in a relatively protracted fashion. But despite the fact that I’ll be mostly skiving, the week will not be uneventful. At some point during the course of it, I will absolutely definitely probably be launching the revamped simongoodway.com, and on Wednesday I’ll be on the telly*, unless I’ve been cut out, which is entirely possible. But seeing as how you the licence fee payer gave me three hundred quids for turning up, I would jolly well hope that I haven’t if I were you.

Meanwhile, the recent versaries having passed, I’ve now had the best job in the world** for twelve months, and the best girlfriend in the world*** for six, and the time has come to turn my attention to my next goal, having the best bank balance in the world. At present I’m approximately $47 billion short, and in order to make up the shortfall I’ve been contemplating the ever present problem of how to raise my website’s position in Google searches, and thus increase the amount of work I’m getting whilst having the opposite effect on the amount I’m forking out on ads. Ideally, what I need is something on the site comprised mostly of a lot of text on a subject related to illustration, of sufficient interest that a lot of people with illustration related websites will link to it, and it’s struck me that a series of carefully crafted essays on how to draw would be just the ticket.

The only snag is that I don’t really know how to draw. I can do it, but I’d be hopeless at trying to show someone else how. So instead of that, maybe the essays could assume prior ability, and address issues relating to how one can take said ability and transform it into a full time career. I’d be a bit of a phony if I pretended to be any kind of expert, since I’m clearly not, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t recount my own experiences and observations. Except for the rather crucial reason that I’d be teaching people how to get work that would otherwise have been mine, of course, but I suspect the net result would be beneficial. Possibly.

Maybe I need to sleep on it. And since it seems to be half past three in the morning, this would probably be a good time to do that very thing.

*Notice that I’m such an integral part of the programme, the official website has a ‘Simon’ link in the sidebar.
**This may be a slight exaggeration.
***This isn’t.

Years ago, when I had something called “spare time", I wrote a bad murder mystery novel set in renaissance Florence about a woman who discovers her own corpse in an alley, the backstory of which I later rehashed when stuck for ideas for one of the monthly short stories I used to do in my blog when I still had some of that “spare time” thing.

None of which is especially significant, except that in writing the novel I did lots of research, which mostly involved buying every book about Florence I could get my hands on and reading it. The one thing I never did was actually go there - after spending so much time learning about it, I would have loved to see it for real, but it never happened.

So earlier this year, when Jess and I were discussing what a splendid thing it would be to go on holiday together, I remarked on this urge to see said city, and before I knew it I was booking flights. We leave on the 24th.

But the real issue is where we leave from. I’m certain - and Jess, who was sitting beside me at the time, is also certain - that I selected Manchester as our starting point; so I was a bit startled this afternoon, four months after booking the flights, to look at the confirmation email I received at the time and discover that we leave from Heathrow.

Heathrow! That’s miles away! The flight’s at 6AM. I don’t even want to think about what time we’ll have to get up.

Today was Jess and I’s six-month-iversary - not to be confused with last week’s six-month-iversary of when we met - and we wanted to have a super lovely day in recognition of the occasion, but the super loveliness had to be planned around the fact that I had to spend the day taking her home.

When we went to Monkey Forest a couple of weeks ago, we discovered a lovely little lake nearby where you could hire boats, which seemed like a pleasant wheeze. We hadn’t had time for it then, but it struck us as a nice way to break up today’s journey, so we pencilled it in on the agenda. Once we got up north, we then intended to head cinema-wards and watch Superman.

Unfortunately, I failed to take into consideration the possibility that you could only hire boats between certain times. It turns out that the latest you can get them is five o’clock, which a nice man informed us of when we arrived at 5:07. “Oh no!” we cried, “our carefully laid plan to mess about in a boat has gang agley! Never mind, we’ll continue on our journey and arrive at the cinema super-early.”

Unfortunately, I had also failed to take into consideration the fact that if we went to the earliest showing of Superman that hadn’t already happened, I’d be driving home at three o’clock in the morning, and since I was already getting tired that didn’t seem very clever, so we abandoned that plan in the interests of me not falling asleep at the wheel and dying.

And thus our six-month-iversary celebrations were a complete and utter failure. Meanwhile, my parents seem to be selling all the furniture on the grounds that they’re probably going to move house in about a year. I’m sure it all makes sense.

Hello! I’m alive!

Stepdad meetification seemed to go pretty well. I have four remaining limbs, and while I neglected to count them beforehand, I don’t remember having many more than that.

Website relaunchification didn’t go quite so smoothly. When I first set up simongoodway.com, I had no experience of freelance illustratificating, and no previous jobs to show off as evidence of my skill; as such, the site comprised mostly of hiccups and donkeys. Until the current revamp I haven’t really altered it much since then, so that’s still more or less the case, but the new-look site will change all that - it’s choc full of case studies, each describing the brief I was given and displaying the results.

It makes me look a lot more professional, but the trouble with briefs is that they’re client confidential, and I can’t go waving someone’s briefs around in public without their permission. Therein lies the hold-up, for I’m still awaiting the go-ahead to use one of the jobs that I particularly want to as an example on my site. As soon as I get that, the utterly thrilling relaunch will occur. I can tell you’re all utterly thrilled.

Meanwhile I’ve been having a jolly pleasant week with my lovely Jess, doing absolutely nothing that would be of the slightest interest to you.