BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

I know I said before that it's bad form to reject blogospheric memes - but I'm fucked if I'm doing the self-portrait one.

Cease your YOWLING: the truth is, I can't draw for shit. I've always been notoriously rubbish at art, of any kind. When I was 10, I'd have given my left lung to be able to draw comics. It must be brilliant knowing that, with a bit of time and application, you can knock out an eye-melting comic about a squid-headed freak, with a giant lobster claw, running around Victorian London and slaughtering feckless orphans. Or one about Spiderman infiltrating the industrial music scene, to nail some Norwegian neo-folk fascists who're planning to blow up the Notting Hill Carnival, and having a big girly internal crisis (as usual!) when he accidentally develops an obsession with Ramleh and Grey Wolves...

Or even a strip about a lower league football team, whose skinhead goalie decides to get even with the local drug dealers when they turn the team's (West Millspur Athletic) Bolivian striker into a smack addict - punishing the pushers with a lethal combo of BIKE CHAIN, BOTTLE and BOOT! Or, let's face it, a load of old bollocks about Catwoman Commando! - the mog-faced paratrooper from Titan, who's crash landed in Libya on a mission to, to...oh, who cares...as long as she's a bit gothed-up and gets her clothes ripped a lot, all the teenage spods'll buy it. Get her body right and, plot-wise, it wouldn't matter if she rode the Milky Way on a fucking unicycle, looking for tins of Purina...

It's amazing, really. "Peanuts" gets turned into a series of animated TV spin-offs and becomes a money-spinning global brand - whereas no such luck befalls "George and Lynne" (Mai khao jai? - a reader in Lampang). Now, far be it from me to piss on "Peanuts" fans' parades, but I always thought it was badly drawn and fairly lame - a load of kids with 'issues', hanging around a junkie beagle's kennel - whereas "George and Lynne" was a stylish and sleek portrait of married life in the suburbs. Which seemed to consist of the duo lounging around, starkers, and rattling off grating sexual double entendres at each other. You'd always have at least one panel in which Lynne's breasts were visible, but what really fascinated me was the way the artist portrayed George's hair - for some reason, the top of his barnet was elevated at a 60 degree angle. Could this have been a fatal flaw in the artist's strategy? A possible reason for the lack of any "George and Lynne" tie-in movie?

Anyway, we're veering off topic - what I'm trying to explain is that, if you want a self-portrait, you're asking the wrong dunce entirely. Unless you want a matchstick man with a smiley face, but that's hardly worth uploading.

No, I'm afraid I couldn't draw a pair of curtains. However, yonks ago, when I worked at Parcelforce, there was a Filipino bloke called Alo and an Indian guy called Satish, who were both very homophobic in a "protest too much" kinda style. You know, like if there was a 'Gay Vicar Leaves Wife' story in The Mirror, they'd suddenly come out with stuff like, If I was asleep on the train, and a man tried to put his cock in my mouth...I'd kill him!. Obviously a reference to the terrifying Gobjob Killers, who brutally terrorised the Thameslink between West Hendon and Cricklewood in the late '90s, preying mercilessly on paralytic straights. Anyway, one boring day at the counter, I doodled a picture of these co-workers nestling under a duvet, gazing into each others' eyes and grinning like cats on MDMA, with "SATISH AND ALO IN BED TOGETHER" scrawled underneath. I was oddly proud of this picture, and showed it to Kelly, who used to handle phone enquiries upstairs. Unfortunately, she laughed so much that Satish came over to ask what was going on. He went bananas, and was convinced that I'd purely drawn the cartoon to insult his manhood. He sat me down and explained to me that his wife had bore him three brats, and you don't get much straighter than that. I suppose it must be a bit of a shock for a proud, married man to see himself bedding down with another geezer - in biro, no less - but, Buddah in a wok, it was only a joke...

Subsequently, I've never attempted to draw anything since, which is no real loss....so I'll have to bat this back to Kid Shirt. Sorry, old cock! But, rather than leave you with nothing, here's a beautiful picture of Burnt Oak station in the snow which I nicked off the internet...if anything's close to a portrait of my soul, it's probably this...