I suppose it’s high time I blogged again, but I don’t really have anything to tell you about.

I should probably mention for the benefit of anyone who might be inclined to use it that I’ve stopped receiving mail sent to mokey@simong.org due to it having started to get spam. I really should get round to reintroducing the ‘Email me’ link that used to be at the top of this page. I’m not about to tell you the new address here or the spammers will get that one too, but if anyone’s desperate to contact me and is for some reason incapable of doing it by any of the other many possible ways, it’s the name of the lighthouse keeper’s dog. And if you can’t work out what it is from that, then frankly you’re the kind of deeply ignorant and culturally unenlightened person that I’m unlikely to want to receive emails from anyway. Either that or you’re not old enough to remember Fraggle Rock.

What else is going on? Not a lot, really. I’ve spent the week working and tomorrow I head up north for another exciting weekend of Jessiness. We haven’t got anything planned, though there was talk of taking her little brothers bowling. I’m rubbish at bowling. I bet they’ll beat me and I’ll look stupid.

One of them beat me at air hockey a few weeks ago. They’re only eight! The humiliation! I beat the other one, at least, but he was rubbish so that wasn’t much consolation.

No idea which one was which. I haven’t learnt to tell them apart yet.

Meanwhile I’ve experimentally started selling greetings cards on ebay. So far they’re selling like hot cakes, assuming there’s only demand for one hot cake and once that one’s sold nobody buys any of the others. Still, they’ve only been on there a couple of days so far. Maybe people will get hungrier at the weekend.

Someone just phoned for my dad and he isn’t here so he asked me to give him a message, but the message was just that he’s going to phone him back another day. Honestly, is that really worth passing on? No, I didn’t think so either.

And that’s more or less everything that’s going on in my life, really. I told you I hadn’t got much to blog about.

A little over six weeks ago, I relaunched simongoodway.com. I’d put a lot of work into it, and the result was a much more professional site that made me look like a highly experienced cartoonist rather than some bloke who’d knocked up a website in his lunch break at the sausage factory.

Since the number of jobs I get is far from constant, I paid no attention at first to what effect the new site was having. But six weeks seemed like long enough for the results to be statistically significant, so I had a look at how many enquiries I’d had in the period of that length on either side of the relaunch.

In the six weeks before I relaunched my site, I had 69 enquiries from potential customers. In the six weeks after, I had 28.

This came as a bit of a surprise. I hadn’t a clue how much it was going to affect the numbers, but I was quite confident that they’d go in the other direction. It appeared that my revamped site had reduced the number of enquiries I was getting by 60%.

But were the changes to my site really to blame, or was this an arbitrary fluctuation in the number of people who felt the need for a freelance illustrator? To find that out, it was necessary to probe the figures more closely. Let’s take a look, shall we?

It seems pretty clear that interest dwindled the moment I rejigged the site. Which possibly leaves you thinking: “Oh no! You did all that work and it’s backfired horribly! You’re a failure!” But, you see, you’re wrong! Clearly there’s something about the new site that’s putting people off - all I’ve got to do is find out what it is, and I can incorporate the popular elements from both versions to produce a site that my public finds completely irresistable! And if I can work out why they don’t like whatever it is they don’t like, I can potentially use that information to make it even better still.

Which only leaves the question of how I find out what’s scaring people away, and that’s where my cunning plan comes in (did I mention that I’ve got a cunning plan? Well, I have). Anyone who visits simongoodway.com is now presented at random with one of five different versions of the site, each comprising different elements of the old and the new (well, it’s only random on their first visit - subsequently they always see the same one, or they’d get horribly confused). I’ll leave it a couple of months, compare how many enquiries I’ve had from each, and then I’ll know exactly which features my public loves and which it hates. And then, my pretties, I shall combine the best of both worlds, turn it into the most popular website ever, and then the world will be mine! Which will be nice.

So that’s my plan really.

Now that my mum’s retired (did I mention that my mum’s retired? Well, she has. She’s old, you see), she’s been contemplating the possibility of purchasing a bicycle to ride around on in the masses of free time she now has. But she didn’t want to invest in such a contraption only to decide that it wasn’t really her bag, so this afternoon she went for a ride on mine.

Meanwhile, I was up in my bedroom working hard like wot I always am. A couple of my clients wanted pictures posting to them on CD, and I chose this point to take said CDs, suitably packaged, to the post office.

Our front door has two locks (actually it has three, but two use the same key, so let’s employ a bit of artistic licence to keep things simple). On going to leave the house, I discovered that my mum had locked one of these, but not the other. Since there was still someone in the building, this was perfectly secure, but once I’d left, there wouldn’t be, so I felt that I ought to lock both of them. I presumed that my mum had both keys on her and so would be able to get back in, and if she didn’t, she’d only have to wait a few minutes for my return. So I set the burglar alarm, locked the door, and went to the post office.

Shortly after I left, my mum returned home on my bike. In fact she did have two keys with her, but not the two keys for the front door; instead, she had just one of the front door keys, and the key to the garage. This she opened, and went inside to put the bike away. Setting off the burglar alarm in the process.

Being an astute and quick-thinking person, my mum hastened to the front door to let herself in and switch it off. At this point she discovered that she couldn’t let herself in, because the lock that she didn’t have the key to was now locked. This, she discerned, meant that I’d gone out, which meant there was no way of stopping the alarm until I got back. Meanwhile, neighbours were emerging from their homes and waving pitchforks at her.

Since my car was still parked in the road, it was clear that I hadn’t gone too far, so she hopped back on my bike and began visiting anywhere in the village she could think of that I might have gone to.

As I walked home after successfully dropping off my mail at the post office, the distant sound of a burglar alarm grew ever closer. “Ha ha,” I thought to myself. “Someone’s burglar alarm has gone off! I bet they’re not even being burgled, I bet they’ve gone and done something stupid and now all their neighbours will be annoyed with them and they’re going to look like a fool!”

And I was right too. Shame it was me.

On returning to Leicesecesestershire after another weekend up north, I discovered that I seem to have left my phone charger at the farm. My battery had almost run out, and I didn’t think a week of phonelessness would be good for business, so I went to Asda to buy a new charger.

Unfortunately I wasn’t sure what model my phone was, but I found a Universal Phone Charger kit that listed a million models of phone it will charge on the packet, many of which were from the manufacturer of my phone, and some of which sounded very familiar. I was pretty sure one of those model numbers was my phone, and one of the adaptors in the packet looked exactly the right size to stick up my hole, so I purchased it.

I took it home, failed to cunningly find out what model my phone is and make sure it was one of the ones listed on the packet before hacking said packet apart to get at the contents, and discovered that the Universal Phone Charger wasn’t quite universal enough. So I went out again to buy another one.

This time I went to The Carphone Warehouse, armed now with the knowledge of what my phone is. They had a charger for it, but only an in-car one. That was good enough for me, so I bought it, plugged it into the cigarette lighter adaptor, and got charging.

The only downside is that for the rest of the week, the battery’s going to keep running down, and I’m going to have to keep thinking of excuses to go for a drive.

In other technology-hates-me news, last year my camera, a Sony Cyber-shot 3.2 megapixels, stopped working. The splendid Loretta helped me out by donating her old camera, a Sony Cyber-shot 2.0 megapixels, which was more than adequate for my needs. But after a while that stopped working too.

Some web-based research informed me that these Sony cameras often suffer from the problem of not working unless the batteries are brand spanking new. Experimentation with suitably virgin batteries led me to discover that both cameras would work, sometimes, if they happened to like the look of the latest batteries offered to them. It was very hit and miss, but by carrying both cameras around, the odds were good on any given occasion that one or the other of them would work.

Later, when Jess and I were preparing for our holiday in Italy, I decided it was high time I got a new camera that would actually work on a less arbitrary basis. So I bought myself a Kodak something-or-other, and all was well. Until we got to Italy, at least.

At that point I discovered that it suffers from almost exactly the same problem as my Sony ones. It will decide not to work with particular batteries - often previously unused - but spring to life if you swap them for others, or sometimes just turn them around. It’s most inconvenient, and I’m not entirely sure what I ought to do about it. Any ideas?

Yaarrr.

I be returned from up north, so I be, and the big news that I be havin’ for ye is that me bum pox be miraculously cured! It be seemin’ that the mere threat of a-visitin’ a medic were enough to fright it into makin’ a retreat. What be partic’larly remarkable about this turn o’ events be that there is now precisely nothin’ wrong wi’ me at all, exceptin’ me partial deafness and an excess o’ lard, neither o’ which is likely to go away any time soon so for the moment I not be countin’ them. Usually there be something’ ailin’ me, howe’er slight; this be the first time in many a moon that I can’t be thinkin’ o’ a single thing wrong wi’ me. I be the perfect specimin o’ physical health! I be hopin’ that ye be bein’ as envious as ye ought to be bein’.

That be all I be having to be sayin’ about that. Yaarrr.

So on Monday evening I called the surgery in Billesdon to make an appointment. But they couldn’t fit me in until Friday, so I asked when they have a free for all instead. “Between 8:30 and 10 in the morning,” they said.

On Tuesday I crawled out of bed at about five to ten. “Oh dear,” I thought to myself, “I appear to have missed my window of opportunity. But wait - I seem to recall that the surgery in Bushby has a free for all immediately after the surgery in Billesdon. I’ll go there instead!”

So I got in the car and drove to the surgery in Bushby. Unfortunately, since my last visit it’s turned into a building site. I showed my bum to the builders, but they weren’t able to offer any useful advice, so I came home again, with a view to getting up earlier the following day and going to Billesdon.

On Wednesday I got up in plenty of time. But then I looked at my bum in the mirror, and discovered that it had made a shock recovery overnight. My pox hasn’t entirely subsided, but it looks an awful lot better than it has for several weeks. I decided to postpone my visit to the doctor for a couple of days to see if it clears up by itself.

Meanwhile, this morning I had a chat with one of my clients who produces greetings cards, and he gave me a lot of jolly useful advice with regard to my plan to do the same thing myself. I’m now feeling quite confident that it will pay off, but I haven’t got quite as many designs as I’d like just yet, so over the next couple of weeks I might do a few more cartoons. Look out for them appearing at random intervals over in the sidebar like wot they used to do when I used to do them. Or don’t, depending on whether you care.

And then this evening I visited MCL, who suggested that I also do some groovy drawings and see what I can get for signed prints on ebay. It might work or it might not, but it’s got to be worth a try.

Soon I shall be rich and have a pox-free bum. What more could one ask for in life?

Several months ago - well, I suppose it was only a month and a bit, but it seems like longer - Jess and I were trundling down the motorway in my automobile when I espied a lorry in front of us which said upon its rear:

NOVELTY CAPSULES

There was more writing, but that was all I could make out from that distance.

I didn’t know what a novelty capsule was, but they sounded like the most amazing invention in the history of the world, and it was clearly essential that I find out more. Unfortunately, the lorry immediately decided to change lane and speed up, and there was suddenly a whole row of vehicles separating us.

I spent the next five minutes trying to catch up with it. I changed lane, sped up, slowed down, darted this way and that, and finally I found myself in the left lane, with the lorry in front of me, and nothing between us. It was still too far away to make out any more than NOVELTY CAPSULES, but all I had to do was speed up a bit and everything would be clear.

As I started to pick up speed, the lorry began to indicate. We were approaching a junction.

I very nearly made it. But just as I was almost able to discern the small print, it pulled off the motorway and vanished into the distance. Foolishly, I didn’t follow it. It would have taken me to somewhere I had to interest in going to, but at least the mystery would have been solved. As it was, I’ve spent every moment since wondering what a novelty capsule is. I have been unable to eat or sleep, so utterly has my mind become immured in this obsession. True, novelty capsules have never once crossed my mind when I’ve been sitting at a computer and in a position to do a quick google and resolve the issue once and for all, but at all other times, novelty capsules have haunted me like something jolly haunting indeed.

This morning, as I was driving home from up north, I stopped at a service station for some nutritious and healthful breakfast in keeping with my super healthy lifestyle, and as I was waiting in the queue at KFC, I noticed a machine beside me. And on the front it said:

THE
NOVELTY CAPSULE
COMPANY

I dare say you can imagine how excited I was. Well, not very excited at all, actually, because it turns out novelty capsules are rubbish. They’re like oversized Kinder surprises without the chocolate. This comes as a terrible blow to me, but I’ll try not to let it affect me too much.

Meanwhile, I’m going to take my bum to the doctor in the morning. I shall plonk it down on his desk and say “What are you going to do about that, then?” I know you’re all keen to learn the intimate details of my bummial inflamation, so stay tuned for the medical world’s reaction.

I’ve got a rash on my bum. It - sorry, are you eating? I do apologise. We’ll wait for you to finish before I carry on.

No rush. In your own time.

Actually, that looks quite nice. Can I try it?

Ooh, it’s yummy! Can I have some more? That bit looks nice. No, not that, I meant the bit you were about to stick in your mouth. Can I have that bit? It looks nice and crispy. Mmmm! This is de… oh my god! There’s something in this! Quick, give me something I can spit it out into, I think I’m going to be sick! Ack… now give me water. Water! I must have water! …That’s better. Now what was that? It looks like… it’s a beetle! You gave me food with a beetle in it! What the hell were you thinking? Are you insane? No, don’t bother apologising. I don’t even want to talk to you any more. Just finish your beetle stew so we can get on with the blog.

Have you finished yet? Good. Now, where were we? Oh yes, my bum. It looks like I’ve sat in a strawberry blancmange. It really is a very unpleasant sight - until further notice, if anyone offers to show you my bum I strongly recommend that you decline politely. “Thank you very much for the kind offer, but perhaps some other time?” might be a suitable response. No need to cause offence, but I would make it very clear that you don’t presently have a window in your schedule to engage in bum viewing.

I’ve been meaning to take it to the doctor, but I never seem to get round to it. I’m not quite sure what to tell him - I feel I should say something a bit more medical sounding than “Doctor, I have the bum pox!” but that seems like the most concise way of describing the problem.

I hope he doesn’t amputate.

The question you’re all asking, of course, is “What ever happened to all those fantastic cartoons you did ages ago? I keep opening my newspaper fully expecting to see them splashed across page 2, only to be disappointed and heartbroken once again. What the devil are you playing at, man? Why oh why aren’t your fantastic cartoons in my newspaper? Tell me, damn you!”

Well, I sent them off to lots of local papers from around our green and pleasant land, but none of them were terribly interested. Mostly they said they either hadn’t got the budget for that sort of thing, or they already have a cartoon done by someone local. One newspaper I haven’t sent them to yet is the Leicesescesesecester Mercury, which doesn’t have any cartoons at the minute, and I am someone local, and someone who works for it said to my dad a while ago that they’d quite like one, so that would seem like a fruitful avenue to explore, but I’ve been hesitating to do so. Reason being, my hope had originally been that I could get them in several papers, for reasons relating to eggs and baskets. The Leicesescesesecester Mercury, as the arithmetically inclined of you will have already worked out, is only one basket.

At the minute I’m earning a sort of vaguely reasonable amount of money most of the time, but it’s very variable. That’s all very well while I’m living with my parents, but I don’t intend to be doing that forever - just over another year is the plan - and when I’ve got regular rent or mortgage payments to make, I could do with a regular income stream so the landlord doesn’t boot me out every time I have a dry period. I had hoped that newspaper cartoons might provide such an income stream, but it’s occurred to me lately that those same cartoons might work quite well as greetings cards. So what I think I’m going to do is get onto a few independent shops that sell such things and see if they’d be interested in stocking them for me. If it works out, this could be just what I need to keep me solvent during those times when no one wants any freelance illustrating doing.

Failing that, I’ll rob a bank. Either way works for me.

For my lunch today I decided to wander down to the petrol station and purchase some sandwiches. This I did, and on the return journey, just as I was approaching the house, a woman on the grass verge up the side of the road called out to me. I changed course to find out what she wanted.

What had happened was she’d rather carelessly mislaid her dog. She thought it was probably somewhere in our road, but the road’s a big circle, so she needed an assistant to go round in the opposite direction to her so it couldn’t get away. I was happy to oblige, so she handed me its lead in case I found it, and we set off, she clockwise, me anti.

I had expected, at some point on my route, to either locate the dog, or else meet the woman going the other way. But I completed the circuit, and neither one of them was to be seen.

I said that our road’s a big circle, which is true, but there’s more to it than that - it’s a sort of figure of eight with a couple of bits sprouting off, so there were various places she could be hiding. All I had to do was find her.

So I found myself playing an impromptu game of hide and seek with this woman, all the while carrying her dog’s lead and wondering what on earth I was going to do with it if I never saw either of them again. As time went by, I began to wonder if it could all be a big trick. Possibly she was a con artist, and while I was safely out of the way wandering the streets with her dog collar, she was breaking into the house and stealing the family jewels. Except she had no reason to think there wasn’t anyone else in, nor could she have banked on me telling her which one my house was (though in fact I had), and she knew that I was still in the vicinity and bound to pass by sooner or later, and we haven’t got any family jewels, so all in all it would have been the most rubbish con trick ever. But women don’t just vanish, do they? She was surely up to something, if only I could figure out the angle.

Then I rounded another corner and there she was waiting for me. Neither of us had found her dog. But on the plus side, she hadn’t burgled the house.

Elsewhere in the news, my aunt did something silly and was terrified that I’d tell the world about it on my blog. To her I say: your secret is safe with me. I’ll just let everyone imagine what it was, I’m sure they’ll invent scenarios far more embarrassing than the truth.

Oh, and the woman came round the house later in the afternoon to give me an update on the dog situation. She’d gone home to find it waiting there for her. So that was alright.

So I said I was going to blog about Italy. I suppose I’d better do that then.

But first, in case you missed it, Jess has already blogged all the best bits here, and today I’ve uploaded and annotated my favourite pictures wot we took, which are here. Most of the interesting things that happened are covered on my annotations of them there piccies, and I’m jolly well not repeating myself here, so you’ll just have to go and look at them I’m afraid. I’m sorry, there’s no other way. Yes, I know other people’s holiday photos are boring, but I’ve tried to limit myself to uploading the best ones (which mostly means the ones where Jess is looking stupid).

So, let’s see. What is there that I can tell you that hasn’t been covered elsewhere? Well, I can start by telling you in more detail what went wrong.

To recap, then, we’d booked flights to and from Manchester, but the confirmation email said Heathrow. I phoned cheapestflights.co.uk to clarify the issue, they spoke to their Internet Department and confirmed that we’d selected Manchester on the website, and said they’d post me the flight details with the error corrected.

Three weeks later, Jess’s stepdad dropped us off at Manchester Airport, where we looked on the Departures monitor for our flight. Oddly, our flight number wasn’t listed, but there was a flight to Milan, where we were to change, at the correct time. We got in the appropriate queue.

The woman at the desk seemed confused. She went and talked to someone, then talked to someone else, then informed us that our flight left from Heathrow. We explained what had happened. She said it looked like cheapestflights had just reprinted the details of our Heathrow flights, substituting the word ‘Heathrow’ with the word ‘Manchester’.

At this point it looked like we were stranded at Manchester Airport - for Jess’s stepdad had now left - with no plane to get on. Fortunately, the flight from Manchester wasn’t full, and they were able to get us on it. “But I can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to do the same thing on the way back,” said the woman - a different woman to the one who looked confused, if you’re interested, but we can pretend it was the same woman to keep things simple if you’d prefer. “You’ll have to phone the travel agent once you get there and sort it out with them.”

So that was what I did. I phoned cheapestflights from Italy, waited in a queue for ages at five million quids a minute, and finally explained our situation to their representative Sam. Sam went away and spoke to their Internet Department. Once he’d done that, I was confident, he would leap to our assistance, for the Internet Department would confirm, as they had previously, that we’d selected Manchester on the website.

Unfortunately, on this occasion the Internet Department chose to confirm that we’d selected Heathrow. That being the case, Sam regretted that the best he could do was see if he could find us some cheap flights from Heathrow to Manchester. I pointed out several times that they’d assured me previously that the error was indeed on their part, but Sam didn’t seem to believe me. Eventually I hit on the cunning scheme of telling him to go away and listen to their recording of my previous phone conversation. He did.

That seems to have been the right thing to do, because when he got back to me later in the day he was extremely apologetic and promised to put us up in a five star hotel at Heathrow and fly us to Manchester the next day. He also promised to email the details of the flight and hotel to me over the weekend, which he didn’t do, so I had to spend an hour in a queue on Monday to find out what was going on. Sam answered just as I was about to give up waiting, gave me the details, and from thereon in everything went smoothly. Still, I reckon we’re due a few quids’ compensation.

Apart from that, everything was great! Unless you count our accidental trip to Livorno, which was rubbish and wasted most of a day, but it’s probably best not to dwell on that.

And we saw lots of statues and et lots of ice creams and did lots of other things and that was our holiday.

I’ll take it as read that you’re all as familiar as I am with possibly the greatest musical work of the twentieth century, the Supergran theme tune by Billy Connolly. I therefore won’t have to remind you that Supergran was a children’s television programme in 1985 which, in the words of the Internet Movie Database, centered upon “[t]he adventures of a superpowered grannie who fights crime in her commuity (sic).” Nor will I have to explain that the tune in question features a couple of bars - if bars in the right term, for I’m not very musical - that occur thrice, with different lyrics each time, thusly:

She makes them look like a bunch of fairies,
She’s got more bottle than United Dairies.

After her they’re all big girls’ blouses,
She’s got more front than a row of houses.

She comes on strong like a Bengal lancer,
She makes y’all look like a bunch of chancers.

What you will observe here is that the first two occurrences demonstrate a pattern - roughly “She makes them look like X, she’s got more Y than a Z", where X is a colloquial expression indicating weakness of character and Y is a pun relating literally to Z and metaphorically to Supergran’s ample supplies of the strength of character lacking in the lesser superheroes alluded to in the preceding verses - which the third occurrence doesn’t follow, presumably because Mr Connolly couldn’t think of another one. This, in my view - and I daresay many of you have thought the same thing at one time or another - is the one weakness in an otherwise excellent song, and I’ve been putting considerable thought recently into a suitable alternative. So far the best I’ve come up with is:

She makes them all look like real pushovers,
She’s got more balls than Roy of the Rovers.

This isn’t entirely satisfactory, since ‘pushover’ is a different flavour of insult to calling someone a fairy or a big girl’s blouse, but I can’t think of a suitable rhyme for ‘wusses’ or ‘wet blankets’ - apart from “balls than a cannibal’s banquet", which is too contrived, arguably too rude for a children’s programme, and isn’t a perfect rhyme in any case.

I will continue to apply brain power to the problem until I’ve come up with a couplet that fits the bill. Then all I have to do is invent a time machine, befriend a young Billy Connolly, and propose it to him at the appropriate moment of composition. I can’t see any major difficulties with that.

I’ll do a proper blog about Italy tomorrow.

Dear Simon,

I thought you would be pleased to learn that we have received some good news from your recipient’s transplant centre. Following recent blood tests carried out at the transplant centre, the doctors have been able to confirm that your donated cells have successfully engrafted. This means that your cells are now in place and producing healthy blood cells.

These are, of course, very early days and there is still a difficult recovery period ahead, but it is certainly encouraging to hear that these first major hurdles have been overcome.

Our next report request will be sent off to the transplant centre on 4th October and notwithstanding too many delays, I will be back in contact with you about 3 to 4 weeks later. If we experience delays receiving the first report and you feel concerned about the delay, please do not hesitate to phone or write to me.

With best wishes
Yours sincerely

Sharon Armsby
Donor Welfare Officer

This one’s from wednesday, originally uploaded by simongoodway.

Today we went to siena, which is apparently one of the most beautiful towns in tuscany. Except the train seemed to do something wrong and we ended up in livorno, which is rubbish. But then we came back to florence and had ice cream on the ponte vecchio, so that was okay.