139 23 December 2025
Dear All - Once more I feel I need to apologise to you all for miserably failing to meet the intentions I expressed in my last mailing. I said I was aiming to focus back onto artwork listings in early Autumn when the weather began to make outside tasks less sensible. Apart from the fact that we have had an unusually dry year I am casting around for other excuses ! I have probably mentioned in the past that from time to time I get roped-in to doing bits and pieces for the local Community association ... signs and banners and other stuff like their website - https://www.ogafcap.co.uk On this website is a section on local history, most of which is researched and written by one person - Sarah Grace. Sarah decided to do an extensive project on the history of the Head Teachers of the local Primary School to coincide with the retirement of the departing Head. I of course found it impossible to say NO when asked to put this together for printing and it turned out in the end to be a hard back A4 with 115 pages of text and images. There were a lot of news clippings from the local newspaper's archive and of course all ridiculously low resolution to the point where the text content was pretty much unreadable. I found it quite interesting looking for a solution as OCR software failed. In the end I found a free online AI site that worked brilliantly with only the need for a few corrections. Anyway - as usual these days it took me several times longer than it would have done in the past or even should do these days. Old age. About half way through November I started working on a new Santa card expecting to have plenty of time to complete it. But I was on an NHS waiting list and suddenly a stand-by slot came up at the very end of November. It was an offer I really could not refuse so instead of completing the new Santa card in time for the Festive Season Dr Shah and his amazing team got their power tools out and chopped out my right knee instead ! Aftermath was excruciatingly painful and if I had known what was coming I may well have chickened out. But time goes by ... 3 steps forward and 2 steps back and progress is generally onwards and upwards. Now at the clunk-click every step stage ! I have to say that contrary to everything I hear about an apparently failing NHS I found the hospital was run impressively well and the people lovely and brilliant at what they do. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged that we have such skill and care available to us. So long story short is that I have had to nick a Santa from the distant past from a time when this one was used for invitations when we still had Xmas parties. I do intend to get back to the artwork and to build a browseable full archive of artwork that has been listed since number 3 in 2010 up till today. I will also be looking at some of those items with the intention of adding them into the list of available prints. But in the meantime I hope you are all doing OK in this crazy world that seems to get crazier by the day and hope fervently that we all survive the coming year to send love and best wishes this time next year ! Have a great Festive Season - Rod To be taken off the mailing list please reply with REMOVE in the subject or content. |
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