Admiral Adam Duncan

So happy was I with my success at rendering Desperate Dan so accurately in ink on Tuesday, I elected to continue in a similar vein today by drawing another of Dundee's famous sculptures. In doing so, I am not only sharing my Artisic gifts with the world but also providing an educational service to those readers of mine who have never been to Dundee and are thus ignorant of the many Artistic gems on offer.

Today's subject was the statue of Sir Admiral Adam Duncan, Lord Viscount of Camperdown Park (1731-1804), whose memorial sculpture is situated in an appropriately dignified location at the foot of the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. Just beside KFC.

As you can see from the photograph, the sculptor has chosen to immortalize the moment in Sir Admiral Duncan's life during the battle of Camperdown after he had been struck on the spine by Dutch cannon fire, to his severe injury. Both Duncan's arms were dislocated at the shoulder and broken in several places. Demonstrating some of the incredible courage and fortitude for which he was later to be celebrated, Duncan lopsidedly shrugged off his injuries and held aloft a large stick of Edinburgh rock, declaring it a prize for the first of his men to slay the Dutch cannoneer who so deformed his arms. You will observe that the sculptor has done a magnificent job of capturing the admiral's freakish, twisted arms valiantly holding up the Edinburgh rock.

In attempting to draw this complexly-proportioned structure, I had my work cut out for me. Nevertheless, I succeeded spectacularly, as you can plainly see:

£15.00 if you want it.

Desperate Dan

As you will doubtless have observed, I am very strong in conveying the correct proportions of the human body in my Art. Additionally, I have fully mastered the disciplines of still lifes and landscapes. However, I am not so blinkered as to think that I am the finished article as an Artist: one can always improve or hone one's skills. Admitting a weakness is the greatest strength an Artist can possess. For example, I have identified something lacking in my work which I have been striving to improve - shading. Experimenting with the effects of different lighting and shadowing in my work has yielded astonishing results. Readers, if it is not too self-indulgent, allow me to state without shame that I am proud of myself.

My extensive work on shading has culminated in the piece below. Here is a photograph of the original subject:

It is Dundee's much-loved sculpture of Desperate Dan. Here is my own interpretation of this famous statue, which I have entitled, simply, 'Dan' (by omitting the 'Desperate' from the character's name, I feel I have lent the image a warm and affectionate air):

As I trust is apparent, I have succeeded rather spectacularly in capturing the warmth of the sunlight glinting on Dan's manly jaw, and the soft and diffusing light against Dan's frame. Because this piece so obviously outshines my previous efforts at Art, I will accept no less than £10.00 for it if anyone's interested.

Landscapes

As part of my ongoing efforts to extend my Artistic talents, today I decided to attempt some landscape work. Images of local sights and scenes will surely sell well. I felt reluctant about going out of doors on a Sunday in case any religious types took offence at my failure to respect the Sabbath, so I searched the computer for photographs of Dundee landmarks that I might copy.

I found this image of the Tay Bridge:

I discovered that there might be problems in using this image because the 'C' stands for 'Copy Right', an imperative meaning that whoever uses this image for their own purposes must do their very best to copy it correctly, i.e., 'copy' it 'right'. Thus, before embarking on this project, I realised I would have to respect the photographer's wishes by copying his photograph right.

To this end, I believe I have done an excellent job. Here is my drawing of the Tay Bridge, which I have entitled, 'Tay Bridge':

Doubtless, the original photographer will be delighted when he views my drawing and sees what an admirable job I have done in copying his picture right. Readers, if anyone among you appreciates Art and would like to buy the drawing, it is yours for £5.00.

Still Lifes

As my portraiture is suffering at present, I have decided to remain indoors today and try my hand at still lifes. Taking my cue from famous artists of still lifes, I went for a simple arrangement of fruit, flowers, and wine lying on a piece of crumpled cloth. To this I added a mug of coffee and a cotten reel. This selection would allow me to show off my ability to depict numerous different textures.

If I might be so indecorous as to boast, I must say that I have carried off this project very well and believe that this drawing, which I have entitled 'Still Life with Apple, Banana, Cotton Reel, Mug of Coffee, Flower, Wine, Fruitbowl, and a Bit of Cloth' (2007), will bolster my burgeoning portfolio nicely.

Here is the drawing:

Readers, if anyone among you appreciates Art and would like to buy the drawing, it is yours for £5.00.

I draw some graduands/graduates

This morning, I took up my now habitual spot outside H. Samuels at 4:00am and awaited passing trade. At 8:45am, the staff of H. Samuels arrived to open up their shop and asked me to leave. Affectionately telling me to 'p***' (piss) or 'b*****' (bugger) off each morning is starting to become a running joke between myself and those jewellers - they are a real bunch of characters. Of course, I refused, stating plainly that I had a duty to share my Artistic gift with as many Dundonians as possible for £5.00 each time.

Shortly afterwards the city square was filled with young people wearing long black robes. Druids of the Black Arts, I naturally assumed, before remembering that this was Dundee University's graduation day and these young people wearing robes were arriving at the Caird Hall to have various degrees conferred upon them by older people also wearing robes. This was an opportunity to draw some portraits and earn myself some money.

It was not long before a young girl wearing robes approached me.

"Hey, is that a portrait of Isaac Lidsky who briefly played Weasel Wyzell in Saved by the Bell: The New Class?" she asked. "It's a pretty good likeness if it is."

"Of course it is Lidsky," I replied. "What is more, my skill at capturing the likenesses of celebrities also works on non-celebrities such as yourself. For just £5.00 I can draw a picture of your face."

"That sounds like a blast," she said. "Will you do a group portrait of me and my two mates? They are also graduates."

Well readers, I could not let this lie pass unquestioned.

"Young woman, you misjudge me. I am aware that the graduation ceremony has not yet taken place. You have not yet graduated. Therefore you and your chums are actually graduands at present."

I allowed myself a smug smile at having outsmarted this graduand.

"Actually, this is my second degree," said the obvious graduand. "So, technically, I am a graduate. Sorry."

"Then you are a graduate of your previous degree," I countered, "But a graduand of your current degree. For you have not yet graduated in that one."

"Hmm, I suppose you are correct," the graduand/graduate admitted. "What we need is a term to describe someone who is simultaneously a graduate and a graduand. Any suggestions?"

"None at all. You are the graduate/graduand - you are better educated than me, so you should be the one to coin the term. Where would we be if we allowed un-degreed people to coin terms?" I said.

"I will give it some thought as you draw my portrait," she said, taking a seat beside two of her graduand friends.

Here is the finished drawing, which the graduands rejected as looking nothing like them:


They claimed that their portraits looked too much like The Munsters and refused to pay. Readers, I am afraid to admit that I myself can discern a certain Munsterousness about the drawing which was not apparent in the subjects themselves. I begin to doubt that street Artistry is my true vocation.

The female graduand/graduate (the new term she coined by the end of the sitting was 'gradiator', which I refuse to use) offered me a place at some evening Art classes that she runs so that I might improve. For you see, she was graduating with a postgraduate degree in Fine Art. I may take her up on the offer. In the mean time, readers, if anyone among you appreciates Art and would like to buy the drawing, it is yours for £5.00.

Celebrity Portraits

In an effort to attract more clients to my street Artist business, I decided that I would need to provide potential clients with examples of my Art. I have seen other street Artists show their own portraits of famous celebrities so that passers-by can quickly gauge how good the artist is at capturing a person's likeness, being as they will be familiar with what the celebrities' faces look like. I determined that I would also use this idea to show off my wares.

Below you will see my example portraits that I displayed to the Dundee public:

The famous celebrities whose portraits I chose to depict are, from top-left running clockwise, Isaac Lidsky who played the character Weasel Wyzell for one series of Saved by the Bell: The New Class; the novelist Charlotte Dacre who wrote Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer: a Tale (1805); Ronnie Duff who played Mr MacLeod in the weekly mini-soap Aig an Taigh (At Home) in the Gaelic language programme Speaking Our Language; Billy Quirk who played Zeke's Nephew in the 1909 film Oh, Uncle!; and Harriet Buchan who played Taggart's wife in Taggart.

I drew some stars around the celebrities' portraits and employed a 'snazzy' font to lend the portraits the glamour they deserved.

It was a slow day's work however, because I gained not a single commission today. It is depressing having to live in a cultural vacuum like Dundee where no one appreciates Art. Readers, if anyone among you appreciates Art and would like to buy the drawing, it is yours for £5.00.

I begin my career as an Artist

My dearest and flabbiest of readers, I must tell you of some interesting events that have happened to me today. This, after all, is the purpose of keeping an electronic diary.

Of late, I have become more comfortable with the idea of leaving my Blackscroft home and venturing out into the streets of Dundee, populated though they are by strange and unnerving people. Additionally, through my recent pretences described in earlier entries, I feel I have become very well aquainted with the world of Contemporary Art (CA). Given these circumstances, the most logical thing that I could do was begin a career as a street artist. Thus, today, I began my career as a street artist.

Flushed with the enthusiasm of youth, I bought a pen and some paper from Woolworths and set up a chair outside H. Samuels, beside the Desperate Dan statue for which Dundee is so famous. I advertised my skills via a sign with words on it. If you are interested, the words used were as follows: "Portraits Drawn By Famous Local Artist, Horton Carew - Only £5.00 Per Portrait". I capitalised every word on my sign because I felt that this would emphasise the seriousness of my endeavour.

After a while I received my first client: a mother who asked that I draw a portrait of her four-year-old son. The boy had just been to his playgroup prizegiving where he had been awarded a copy of Topsy and Tim Go Large for Excellent Attendance, and his doting mother wanted a special keepsake of the day. I was deeply honoured that she selected me to immortalize her son in this way, but I charged her £5.00 all the same. The little tyke was hard work, being unable to stand rigidly still in the rain for the three hours it took me to draw his miserable face. Furthermore, the sullen imp refused to smile despite my efforts to elicit a smirk through my recitation of 'The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb'.

I did my best despite such hurdles, and after three hours I had produced a portrait on which I was proud to put my signature. With a flourish, I spun the page around to show the boy and his mother the finished article, which you can see below:

Readers, I am sorry to report that the customer was no Art lover. On viewing the portrait, she lauched a torrent of abuse at me, cursing my supposed artistic ineptitude, before crumpling the paper and stamping on it. She claimed that the picture in no way resembled her son and looked more like, and here I quote directly, "Eddie f***ing Munster!" The harridan then threw a can of Tizer at my temple. She stormed off, refusing to pay me the £5.00. Disgusted at her ignorance and ingratitude, I retired for the day.

Readers, if anyone among you appreciates Art and would like to buy the drawing, it is yours for £5.00.

Short entry for balance

Again, I present a short entry in an effort to break up the tedium of the previous two lengthy entries.

The Second Interview with the Postgraduate Kennie Pome (Part 2)

Readers, as promised I will now continue with my account of the second interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. It is some time since that interview took place so naturally I have forgotten most of it. Rather than writing down only what I can remember, which is not much and would make for a stilted and aggravating transcript, I will ensure you have something enjoyable to read in this entry by making something up whenever I cannot recall exactly what was said. I am sure you will agree that this option is preferable.

Kennie Pome: Well Steve, I have to admit I've enjoyed the way in which you incorporated our last interview into the blog. It was interesting to see the way you chose to characterise me and the manner in which you distorted reality so readily. You obviously see yourself as more lamp than mirror, to borrow M.H. Abrams's dichotomy. Though in your case, the light from your lamp serves to thoroughly warp its subject through ghastly underlighting. Would you say that's a fair comment?

Me: No.


Pome: Really? That's interesting. Why not?


Me: Because I don't know what you mean.


Pome: Apologies. I did phrase that rather badly. Really, what I'm essentially asking is how much of your blog's content do you draw from real life experiences?


Me: [forgetting momentarily that I was pretending to be Steve M. R. Tubbock and was supposed to be humouring Pome's misperception that my electronic diary is fictional] Why, all of it of course.


Pome: That is very interesting. All of the strange events described in your blog have real life origins? What of some of the more outre posts? Some are really quite outrageous: what about the episode where Horton's dead mother returns as the scottie dog from Monopoly? What inspired that for instance?


Me: [panicking slightly, because of course, the actual event that inspired those diary entries was the fact that my dead mother returned as the little scottie dog from Monopoly] Oh yes Kennie Pome, I always take inspiration from everyday events. It is part of my gift. In fact, friends tend to watch what they say around me lest it end up in some character's mouth in a future book! [here I feigned a knowing chuckle] Yes, that's the life of an author - always squirreling away observations and conversations for use in some future project! It is a gift and a curse! Horton's encounter with his dead mother was inspired by a meeting I had with a cat.

Pome: A cat?

Me: Yes Pome, a cat. One Friday morning, I was in my Broughty Ferry art shop adding up columns of numbers in a jotter, when I noticed a stray cat had somehow made her way into the back of the shop. Every bone in my body told me that this cat was blessed in some way. This was a special cat. It marched boldly over to my desk and laid its paw down on a pile of papers, directly beside the name of a local artist. As it happened, I was currently debating whether or not to buy some of this artist's work to sell in my gallery. The cat seemed to nod, then bolted from the shop into the street where it ran directly under the wheels of a Vissochis ice-cream truck. I knew this cat was giving me a sign. At once, I phoned the artist and bought up twenty of his paintings. The next week I put them on display. Well, Kennie Pome, let me tell you this - so far I have sold two of them, at a little under the asking prices. That is a personal record for me. That cat gave me a sign. I truly believe that. Real life is often much stranger than fiction can ever hope to be...

Pome: And how exactly did this event inspire the fictional episode where Horton's dead mother returns as the scottie dog from Monopoly and encourages him to commit evil acts?

Me: Well Kennie Pome, I should think that that is plain enough for anyone to see.

Pome: But the two events share little, thematically, in common.

Me: Ha! Spoken like a true Hamiltonteed.

Pome: I'm sorry?

Me: In the authoring world, that is the word we authors use to describe non-authors. You simply cannot understand the world of authoring. It is not your fault. I will explain it. An author can be born of two Hamiltonteeds. Similarly, a Hamiltonteed can sometimes be born to an authoring family, though in such a case, the Hamiltonteed is more properly called a Christophertolkien . And a dark author can sometimes split up his essence and house the pieces in different objects: in the authoring world, we call such objects Horcruxes.

Pome: Fascinating.


Readers, here I will end my account of the second interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome, because I can remember no more of what transpired that day and I fear that anything else I tried to add would be mere fabrication. I will simply say that I got another £5.00 for my trouble and the promise that for future interviews, I will get £25.00. Readers, just think of all the cream I could buy with that!

The Second Interview with the Postgraduate Kennie Pome (Part 1)

There now follows a transcript of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. It is not verbatim, but where I have forgotten the exact wording I have done my best to invent something that looks like it fits.


Kennie Pome: Okay Steve, once again, thanks for agreeing to the interview. Can I start by asking what you thought of the exerpt from my thesis that I sent you?

Me: [having not the first clue what he is talking about] Did you send it by post? I'm afraid I have not seen it. I am sure it is tremendous though.

Pome: I posted it on your blog earlier. No matter, I have my laptop with me: I'll let you read it now.

[here he showed me the excerpt from the thesis, which you can view by clicking this weblink with your mouse cursor]

Pome: What d'you think? Obviously, it's still in the preliminary stages, but you can see where I'm going with it I trust?

Me: ... yes?

Pome: Basically, I'm touching upon Betsy Friedrich's work on blog fiction where she analyses your blog, but I'm really extending it. She's on the right lines, but doesn't quite push it far enough. Friedrich interviewed you too, didn't she?

Me: No. I have never heard of Betsy Friedrich.

Pome: Well, someone claiming to be you has certainly spoken to her. I can show you the website.

[Here I became cunning]

Me: Oh Friedrich? Betsy Friedrich? Of course! Oh yes, yes. She interviewed me. She gave me £10.00 per interview I should add.

Pome: Steve, I will give you £15.00 per interview in future if you agree never to speak to her again. I would like exclusivity on my research into Horton's Folly.

Me: [inwardly guffawing at my guile] Okay Kennie Pome. It is a deal.

Pome: Thank you. Okay, so do you agree with my basic point in that excerpt?

Me: [having, of course, no idea what his basic point was or, indeed, what any of his points were] I surely do.

Pome: I'm glad you're on board with the idea. I suspected that might be where your brain is at when you're writing the blog! You think my notion of metaheteroglossia is a sound one? Can you see it proving fruitful to further research into Horton' Folly? What I'm asking, essentially, is 'Is this going to be a sound theoretical framework for me to pursue, or are you going to be changing you style in the near future?'

Me: To that I would reply, 'Pursue away, my boy. Pursue away!'

Pome: Good. You don't have anything planned for future blog entries that will ruin my argument?

Me: Certainly not.

Pome: I would ask, if it's not too much trouble, that you keep up the same meandering style of writing and continue in much the same way for the next few years so that my argument regarding your blog remains accurate. It'd be really annoying to write up my thesis only for you to radically change your style immediately afterwards, or even go back and edit previous entries, and completely discredit my thesis.

[Here I became even more cunning]

Me: £20.00 per interview did you say?

Pome: That can be arranged. Honestly, blogs are so nebulous and malleable that it makes researching them difficult - it's not like people who research books. Books are fixed - if you're doing a thesis on Dickens, you don't have to worry about Great Expectations changing its content every bloody day! I wrote the best part of a chapter on Arabella Morte's vampire-based blog fiction, Sumptuous Agonies, only to find she'd gone back and edited all her previous entries and completely changed the storyline. I had to bin the lot! Can I rely upon you not to do the same?

Me: Of course you can Kennie. I consider you a friend now and am only too happy to help you out. After all, you are paying me £25.00 per interview. It would be churlish of me to mess you around.


Readers, here I will break off my account of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome because you will doubtless prefer to see it broken up into several smaller entries rather than one very long one, so vapid and attention-deficit are you.

A short post with a picture

As the last diary entry was lengthy, with the words unbroken by colourful images, I will slip in this short entry which includes an image, so that casual visitors to my electronic diary are not put off by a series of word-heavy entries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dentures

My improvisation skills are tested

The postgraduate Kennie Pome bought two Belgian beers from the downstairs bar of the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) and invited me to join him in a pre-interview drink. By way of small talk he asked if I had enjoyed the art exhibition currently running upstairs, a series of tartan wheelie-bins filled with garden gnomes painted blue, by the Edinburgh-based artist Farelly Rastapap. Of course, I had not seen any of this work, but I replied in character as Steve M. R. Tubbock and declared the exhibition a triumph. Pome suggested that my verdict vindicated his own, for he too had found the exhibition a resounding success on numerous levels. He claimed to follow the CA (Contemporary Art) scene in D (Dundee) closely and would review this exhibition favourably in the Stoodent Nyoos, Abertay University's student newspaper, of which he is the Arts correspondent.

"Did you get a chance to see the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show?" he asked.

I should explain to those ignorants amongst you that Duncan of Jordanstone is Dundee's Art College and the Degree Show is the annual exhibition of graduating students' work. You could easily have worked that out from context. You are wasting everyone's time.

My alterego Steve M.R. Tubbock, the talented author of the fictional 'Horton's Folly', would certainly have gone to such an event, so I had to quickly draw upon all my skills of improvisation and rapid adaptability.

"Yes," I said.

"Did you like it?" he asked.

This deviation from the anticipated script forced me to ad lib wildly once again. I felt Tubbock was the sort of person who would enjoy the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, so I had to somehow indicate this, completely in-character, to the postgraduate Kennie Pome despite the fact that I, Horton Carew, had not actually been to the Degree Show at all.

"Yes," I said.

"Any favourite pieces?" he probed, infuriatingly.

Readers, when next you find yourselves in a situation where you are pretending to be an author of a fictional electronic diary in order to earn £5.00 and are obliged to present as true the claim that you have been to an exhibition of Contemporary Art (CA) showcasing the work of recent graduates of Art College (AC), when in fact you have not, and you are asked to comment upon your favourite piece, you might like to borrow my catch-all response because I found it worked quite convincingly.

"I forget the artist's name, but I particularly liked that dark series of paintings - the meditations on death. Very effective," I said. I waved my hands and nodded as I said this. I have seen the mentalist Derren Brown use such a technique to bamboozle proles so I thought I should mimic him.

"Oh yes! I agree," replied Pome. "Janet Peevie's work was well received. You're right though - very dark subject matter. Paintings of dismembered corpses are not for everyone! What else did you like?"

I was starting to become uncomfortable. All Degree Show exhibitions are bound to have some sort of thing about death in it, but what else might it include? My knowledge of the Contemporary Art (CA) scene is limited to three art galleries, a handful of exhibitions that I attended in order to procure free wine, and to seeing Tracy Emin once on Have I Got News For You. If Pome continued this line of questioning, I would doubtless be exposed as a fraud before long.

"I also liked that series of collages," I said, "I forget the artist's name I'm afraid, but his collages were a sort of dissection of popular trash culture. He made use of gaudy kitsch images from advertising to great effect."

"Oh yes! You're right," said Pome. "Dexter Sing's pop-culture collages really revel in the mire of tackiness, don't they? Loved his stuff with the retro Creamola Foam graphics. Anything else that you liked?"

Readers, if Pome had asked me to describe another piece of work at the Degree Show, all would have been lost. As it was, he stopped at just three and I was able to bluff my way through. Every Scottish art exhibition I have ever been to has always had a series of paintings or photographs of weather-beaten North East women who look like they've had a rough life of fishing or weaving or some such. The artist or photographer seems invariably to be called Mhairi something. I hoped that the work of such a Mhairi was similarly present at the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, because I said to Pome:

"I also liked the series of black and white photographs of aged weather-beaten North Eastern fishwives by Mhairi...someone. I forget her surname. Each photograph had a caption telling us a little about each woman. What rich yet melancholy lives they led, reflected in each portrait."

"Oh yes!" said Pome (thank goodness!) "Mhairi Luthermuir's photos were wonderfully evocative. Each wrinkle on each face told a story. Marvellous! Well, shall we start the interview proper now?"

"Do I still get £5.00?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied.

"Then let us begin," I said.

Readers, I have given too much preamble today, so will leave off my account of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome until a later date.

An interview conducted in the DCA

The second of my interviews with the postgraduate Kennie Pome was conducted in the DCA building. In this acronym, the letters 'D', 'C', and 'A' stand for 'Dundee', 'Contemporary', and 'Arts', which is lucky because the full name of the building is 'Dundee Contemporary Arts'. The building is in Dundee's fashionable West End, around the corner from Dundee Rep Theatre, where last week they were showing a production of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, the time traveller from Quantum Leap. I wonder who they got to play the Fonz. Further up the road is the University of Dundee, which is the better of the two universities in Dundee because it is more conveniently situated for buses, etc.

For those of you who do not know, the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) is a building that has the following things in it: a cinema, an art gallery, a restaurant/bar, a gift shop, and toilets for male, female, and disabled patrons. Its cinema is not up to much because it can only afford films in foreign languages - if you want proper films in English, you are better off going to the Odeon. The DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) only has a bar downstairs, unlike Dundee Rep Theatre which has one bar downstairs and one bar upstairs, so if you are looking for a building with more than one bar, you would be far better served by going round the corner to Dundee Rep Theatre. The art gallery in the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) is quite nice, but by plumping for the 'Contemporary' part in the name 'Dundee Contemporary Arts' (DCA), they are obliged to only show art that is contemporary. They are missing a trick here because if they omitted the 'Contemporary' part and just called themselves 'DA' (Dundee Arts), they could also be showing old art too, which is better.

Here is a picture of the DCA ('Dundee Contemporary Arts' (DCA)):

As you will see from the image, immediately outside the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) is a sculpture by Lochee artist Bilko Dervish entitled 'Man 'n' Cone', which is a photorealistic piece depicting a man and a traffic cone. It is universally hated.

I went into the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) and proceeded downstairs to the bar, because as you will remember, there is no bar upstairs. There I met with the postgraduate Kennie Pome who greeted me convivially and offered to buy me a fine Belgian lager to keep me refreshed during our interview

I will describe the interview in greater depth tomorrow, for this entry has already become overlong and I imagine your attention is beginning to wander.

A recap for the hard of thinking

Now readers, I will proceed to tell you about my second interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. It has become increasingly obvious to me that the majority of my readers are what I might charitably describe as subnormal, which necessitates a certain amount of tiresome recapping in my narrative so that these readers do not become confused by the relatively simple chain of events I have thus far described.

Kennie Pome is a postgraduate student at The University of Abertay's English department and is researching fictional electronic diaries, or 'blogs' as he unpleasantly insists upon calling them. For some reason he has mistakenly come to believe that my electronic diary is fictional and that Horton Carew is a fictional character. To aid his research, he has requested a series of interviews with the author of this supposedly fictional 'blog'. Ordinarily, I would ignore such requests until the requester grew tired and left, but this requester has promised to pay me £5.00 per interview so I have done my utmost to accommodate this requester's requests. To this end, I have pretended to be one Steve M. R. Tubbock, the author of a piece of 'blog fiction' called 'Horton's Folly' and have maintained the pretence that I (Horton Carew) am (is) a fictional character. So far I have duped the postgraduate Kennie Pome twice and secured £10.00 altogether for myself. The first occasion in which I hoodwinked Pome was described earlier. I will now describe the second interview he conducted with me where I was once again successful in convincing him that I am an author by the name of Tubbock and that 'Horton's Folly' is a work of fiction.

That is the end of the recap. I am sure you will agree that it was scarcely necessary. Do not blame me, however - blame the dimwitted readers who cannot hold information in their heads for more than four minutes. Now that those lummoxes are suitably reminded of the salient facts, we can continue.

Readers, I must apologise. In my ire, I have now forgotten what I was going to write in this entry. I will continue tomorrow when I have had a chance to calm down and collect my thoughts.

An update on the past few weeks

Dearest readers, I suppose you will be curious as to what I have been doing with myself for the last few weeks while I have been unable to update my electronic diary. Alas, I fear I do not have the time or space to relate in full the many strange and upsetting situations in which I found myself.

The images below will explain the miserable and occasionally horizontal events of my last few weeks far better than screeds of detailed written explanations wherein I would describe precisely what happened to me, illustrating my anecdotes with numerous examples of my thoughts and reactions, using a variety of literary devices to engage and captivate the reader:

I am sure you can see what I am getting at. "A picture paints a thousand words," some people will tell you, if pressed. I have given you five pictures so you now have five thousand words' worth of explanation. I can do no more.

Aside from the terrible events fully explicated above, I had a further meeting with the postgraduate Kennie Pome a week ago, which I will tell you about in tomorrow's entry.

I make a triumphant return to my diary

Readers, I finally have access to my E-Blogger account again. The bigwigs at E-Blogger have allowed me to continue my career as an online diarist only on the understanding that I formally retract my denigrating comments about carob and agree to champion it in this diary whenever the subject comes up in future. To these demands I have reluctantly agreed. I must be humble and bite my tongue so that my readers do not suffer any longer from my absence. However, rest assured that this diary will not become a protracted advertisement for carob. I will not kowtow to these fatcats and betray my artistic integrity.

Apropos of nothing, I will take this opportunity to recommend some products that I have enjoyed recently and hope that some of my readers will likewise find pleasure in. They are delicious. Carob-based treats.

As a small reward to my patient readers who have endured a full month without my electronic diary to sustain them, I present a final image of a monkey. Cherish it for it will be the last. I feel that you can have too much of a good thing.

This monkey believes that pursing his lips and staring vacantly will draw

attention away from his ludicrously elongated arms.

He is incorrect.