Sometimes your brain does strange things to you.  Yesterday I spotted a squat predator crouching on top of its slaughtered prey, protecting its catch from others.  Sorry, yesterday I saw a digger atop a heap of rubble.

It's not even the first time it's happened.  When Bolton College was being flattened, I distinctly saw a pack of  similar predators delicately pulling the entrails out of the carcass of some much larger beast.  I wish it didn't happen because it can make me feel faintly nauseous.  I don't think I've been reading the wrong books and I know I actively avoid the wrong films, so what's it all about?  If this is what imagination is all about, couldn't I have one that comes up with something more, I don't know, more pleasant? 

By which I mean that - just as for every new year I can remember (a number which seems unaccountably smaller that it used to be) - I shall promise to lose weight, finish more artistic projects than I start (there being something of a backlog), know in advance about and therefore visit more exciting exhibitions, see new places, waste less time on utterly mindless computer games, learn about a whole load of new stuff ... actually there's a lot more in very much the same vein.  At this early stage I am, inevitably, brimming over with enthusiasm and the wide-eyed belief that this is the year, it's all going to happen in the next twelve months and I will become an all round better person in every conceivable way.

I will, of course, manage all of that (the Power of Lists - once you've made the list, the rest will happen as if by magic, right?) but I have a new(ish) intention, which is to go for being less apologetic about my art.  The recent source for this was an article by Laura Boswell, she of the amazing japanese woodcuts, in Artists and Illustrators magazine.  She pointed out that nobody wants to know how bad this bit here is, how wrong that turned out, how you're so uncertain about the other.  She's right, of course.  You get no points for putting yourself down all the time (quite the contrary) and it can never be too soon to try to ditch the habit, however ingrained it might be.  I consider that I've improved enormously - more often than not I can simply say 'thankyou' when offered a compliment about something I'm working on - but I need to try harder to believe it, too.  I suspect not valuing what I do is a sort of shield for thin skin - I'm very poor at accepting criticism, be it never so constructive - but I can surely learn to be, or at least to seem, more robust.      

Meanwhile, let me wish everyone a 

  Myself, I have every intention of working to make it an excellent one.