It all started last night. It was about quarter to two in the morning, and I went downstairs to lock up before going to bed. I went into the kitchen to get the key, and I was surprised to see an ambulance. Out the window, obviously - I’d have been even more surprised if it was in the kitchen.

There are only the two houses here, so I knew it was for Ian or Pam, the sixty-something couple next door. There wasn’t much activity going on, but there was an ambulanceman milling about, so I opened the door and said: “Is everything okay?”

Possibly a stupid question under the circumstances, but so much more polite than “What’s going on?", and liable to shed light on the same issue. As it turned out, not much light was shed. “Ehm, can’t really say,” was his reply.

So I went to bed with my book, but I kept getting up to peer out the window and see what was going on. Not a lot, by the look of it - the ambulance had been sitting there for ages, all shut up, which seemed very strange. After a while I found myself getting out of bed so often it didn’t seem worth going back, so I stayed up to see what else I could find out. I couldn’t see much without being seen myself, which I wished to avoid for fear of giving them the entirely erroneous impression that I’m a nosy neighbour, but the ambulance continued to sit there not doing very much. Then the police van turned up.

This was getting really weird. We don’t often see police round here, living as we do in an entirely crime-free area. The local constabulary send us an occasional newsletter, keeping us up to date on the latest misdemeanors to have occurred in the vicinity, and they always seem pretty desperate for material. Generally the best they can come up with is: “Someone saw a man who looked a bit shifty walking down the road, but then he left and it was fine.” So police presence was definitely a cause for red alert.

Twenty minutes later, they knocked on our door.

It was a pity I’d already gone up to red alert, because that left me with nowhere to go when I found myself stood in the doorway at quarter past two in the morning answering a policeman’s questions about whether I’d heard any noises, and how well I knew the neighbours, and - in more veiled terms - whether Ian likes to while away the long winter evenings beating Pam up with a baseball bat. “No", “Well-ish", and “Most definitely not” were my answers.

She’d “had a bit of a tumble” apparently. More than that they weren’t divulging, so I came back inside and went to bed, though not before seeing a second police van turn up. Curiouser and curiouser.

This morning, one of the vans was still there. I went next door to see if Ian was home, and make sure he was okay. I knocked, and someone called to me from behind. That was when I realised the police van was occupied. It turned out Ian was at the station, and the house was being kept under constant vigil, presumably so he couldn’t get one of his mates to go round and hide his baseball bat. I took the opportunity to reiterate my conviction that he’s a jolly nice chap and would never get up to such shenanigans.

This afternoon the van disappeared, so I suppose they’d decided after all that it wasn’t suspicious. Sure enough, there was another knock on the door this evening and it was Ian, released from the interrogation room. He started to tell me what had happened.

The short version is that Pam got up in the night and fell down the stairs. But as Ian told the story, I started to get the impression - though he didn’t say it outright - that the thing he wasn’t saying was that the fall had been fatal. I couldn’t bring myself to ask, but it gradually became clear that this was indeed the case.

With hindsight I suppose it was obvious, what with all the police, and the fact that the ambulance didn’t exactly hurry to get her to hospital, but it’s not the sort of thing you believe can be true. The one thing that happens to everyone is the last thing you expect to happen to anyone. Which, I suppose, it is.

Poor Pam. She was ever such a nice lady. And poor Ian. I wish there was something I could do to help him, but reanimating the dead has never been my strong suit.

It’s all terribly depressing really.

“So, tell us about Blobs,” you say, in a somewhat delayed response to my prompt.

Blobs was a comic me and my mate Jon made when we were eleven, which we photocopied and sold to easily pleased kids at school. We charged 10p, which was only marginally less than The Beano at the time, but it seems enough people bought it for us to make at least eight issues. See, I’ve been a professional illustrator for longer than you thought.

After five issues (or possibly more - issue 5’s the only one I still possess from volume one), we gave it a revamp and so began volume two. I say a revamp, but I’ve got one of those too, and looking at them now there are no obvious differences, so I’m not sure why we bothered. Aaanyway, at some point these childish comic strips - hilarious as they were - no longer met the needs of our rapidly maturing audience, so we relaunched it again, this time with more significant changes. For one thing - and I feel this shows our confidence in the new look - it was now only 8p. For another thing, it discussed serious issues of the day. The first edition includes an in-depth five sentence report on acid rain. To illustrate its consequences, there’s a picture of a dead fish on the cover. You never got that in The Beano.

Volume three didn’t last long. After the first issue the headmaster called us into his office and explained that he couldn’t let us hawk our comic in the school any more, or he’d also have to let people bring in videos from their dad’s shop and flog them in the foyer. We were never convinced by this logic - with hindsight, the true reason for the ban might have had more to do with our promise that future editions would feature shock exposés of teachers. Somehow I don’t think he needed to worry.

But of course what you’re all thinking now is: “Blobs sounds fantastic! I can’t live another day without reading it!” Well you’re in luck, because volume 2 issue 2 can be found right here.

You can owe me the 10p.

I’ve decided I need to start blogging more regularly again, but of course I can’t think of anything to tell you about.

Mostly these days potential blogging time gets used as novel writing time, because that’s the only way it’s ever going to get finished. But at the minute I’m on Jess’s computer because she’s nicked mine, and this hasn’t got the latest version of OpenOffice on, which means it will only open my novel as read-only, and while I could write it anyway and save it to a new file, I’d then lose all the interesting statistics about how long I’ve spent on it so far (a hundred and eight hours, eight minutes and eighteen seconds), unless of course I then cut and pasted it back into the original document once the new version of OpenOffice has finished downloading. Which I could do, but I decided to come and write a blog instead.

I’m still very tempted to serialise my novel on here even though I don’t think anyone would read it, because I neeeeeed feedback if it’s going to be the publishing sensation of the century. Of course the benefit of that for you would be that I’d have to do more proper entries as well to prevent my site from just turning into a novel and losing its identity as a hip and happening blog. And that would be a benefit for you, because you love reading my blog more than life itself.

I don’t actually have anything to tell you. Did I mention that?

A few people have asked me lately if the credit crunch is affecting the demand for freelance cartoonists. You’d think it would really, since that isn’t exactly a vital industry, but inexplicably it doesn’t seem to have (yet). But before you start writing me begging letters, that doesn’t mean I’m rolling in oodles of cash. What I earn now is a decent amount for one person - more than I got paid when I had a proper job, to my continual amazement - but not all that much for two people, which is what I am, with the result that we do tend to have more money going out of the bank than going in. Over the last few months I’ve been conducting experiments with my ads which should allow me to reverse the trend, but it will take a while for the changes to filter through to my income, and in the meantime a festive season celebrating the birth of a Jewish carpenter didn’t help matters. So I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks working long hours to claw my bank balance back to something respectable so Jess and I can afford to do something special on the 4th of February to celebrate our third anniversary.

We might spend it at an open day at the University of Newcastle, where she’s thinking of doing an MSc. How romantic.

And finally, several months ago we bought a Make Your Own Morph kit. I’ve been meaning to show you the results for ages and never got round to it, but this seems like an appropriate time in the light of Tony Hart dying, and I don’t expect he’s going to do that again any time soon, so I’d better not let the opportunity pass.

See if you can guess which is Jess’s and which is mine.

That’s right, mine’s the one on the right*. Well done!

*Their right.

When I did that bone marrow thing three years ago they asked me not to give blood for a year so I’d remain in a fit state to give the guy an emergency top-up if necessary. I did better than that, and haven’t donated since, despite the recipient of my bone marrow being unlikely to need any more in light of subsequent events.

So when I got a letter telling me there’s a session transpiring today just down the road from us, I thought it was about time I got back into the habit. I say it was just down the road, but it was in some place called Wilberfoss that I’d never heard of so I tapped the postcode into the satnav and did as I was told. The silly thing took me all the way up to the roundabout where the A166 meets the A64, and then down the A1079, when I could have saved a lot of time nipping through Dunnington. Or even, now I look at the map, setting off in the other direction and going via Stamford Bridge, but I didn’t know that at the time. “Foolish device!” I cried. “On the way home I shall take matters into my own hands and outwit you.”

I arrived nonetheless, and the woman who probed me about my medical history wanted to know my ethnicity for their records. The options on her form were things like “White - British” and… well, I didn’t read past that one, so your guess is as good as mine. “I’m British,” I told her, then adding helpfully: “White.” It wasn’t until later that I realised she could probably have worked that bit out for herself. She must have thought I thought she was an idiot. Or maybe she just thought I was an idiot.

So I went and filled a plastic bag with A Rhesus Negative and then sat down for my free biscuits. A girl who finished donating shortly after me came and deposited herself at the other end of the table. She sat there silently for a couple of minutes, then muttered something to a nearby nurse, which I presume went along the lines of “I’m feeling a bit woozy” because the next thing I knew a rapid response unit was tearing across the room with a bed, and thirty seconds later she was lying on it with a wet towel on her forehead and a nurse fanning her with an I Gave Blood Today! Aren’t I Fantastic! bumper sticker. The bed was quickly followed by a screen which was hastily erected around the two of them. It all seemed like such an overreaction I wasn’t entirely certain whether the screen was for her privacy or so the rest of us didn’t have to look at a corpse while we ate our hobnobs.

Then I drove away, ignoring the foolish instructions coming from the satnav and taking a shortcut through Dunnington. The road was closed.

It wasn’t difficult to get around, but it’s the principle of the thing. I could feel the satnav smirking at me all the way home.