101 23 December 2017
Dear All, I have just seen that you have heard absolutely nothing from me since the end of March. I feel very bad about that and I suppose the only excuse I have is advancing years ! Things seem to take me two or three times longer than they ever used to. That's partly to do I suppose with the fact that I no longer have clients leaning over my shoulder imposing deadlines ! Whatever the reason I do feel as if I spend my time running to keep up these days and wonder how I ever managed to find time to do any proper work. I do actually have a commercial(-sh) project now in progress which involves building a very large 3D digital model and eventually some fly round and-or through animations. But generally the rather tiny pensions do not quite make the annual budget balance so my new career over the past two or three years has been as a garden labourer for the team of Horticultural Ladies my wife Val is a member of. Quite challenging physically which is good but sometimes leaves me less than enthusiastic at the end of the day about restarting to try and extract stuff from the remaining boxes of H2G2 artwork. Having said which I had thought it would only be a short gap but it's turned out to be quite a long time ! My apologies and I am going to do better from mid January. There were two things I always wanted to do if I ever found I had a bit of time to myself again. One was to try and indulge my enjoyment of actual drawing with "real" media again, and the other was to rediscover my enjoyment of playing the guitar in the hope of trying to get a bit better at it. Since giving in to the threat of expulsion from St Martins in 1966-67 if I didn't give up the band and knuckle down to some "proper work" this has been something that has been pushed into the background ever since. Last year's Christmas card was prompted by my new "career" … this year's is prompted by my pleasure in being able to finally achieve one of those items on my list thanks to my Thursday afternoon jamming partners Brian and Steve (who look absolutely nothing like any of the Santas !). We played our first (unpaid) gig last month ! So all I need to do now is summon up from somewhere the courage and confidence required to pick up pen and brush and make that first mark on a virgin piece of paper. Will get there eventually ! In the meantime I wish you all a very HAPPY CHRISTMAS and a Great New Year and may 2018 be good to you all Best wishes to all, Rod To be taken off the mailing list please reply with "REMOVE" in the subject or content. 
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