Here in Portugal, Agustina Bessa-Luís is one of the greatest authors.... and I had the privilege of illustrating this one.  The first edition came out in 2006 in big art book format.  And now this one, that I illustrated, which is in a smaller, more accessible form, and created in a really classy mid-20th century kind of book style, with cloth binding and hard cover, with my B&Ws inside.  It's out now.  It's a lovely object.

Fama e Segredo na História de Portugal

It's 20:10 and here's to a better year than 2009 for everyone.  What an odd year that was.  Some awfully good things happened (we moved, prof's big fat brick of a book was finally finished and got into the bestsellers and he has moved papers, this time to Expresso, I had a couple of nice jobs to do) and most of everything else was a speeding but damp squib, for us and an awful lot of friends.

This morning I saw a cedar tree with about 40 egrets sitting on it.  I was driving past it on a main road so I couldn't take a picture, but it was so weirdly beautiful.  My daughter was with me, she saw it too, so I know wasn't dreaming... and I was so annoyed that I hadn't got a picture of it, so I could stick it on flickr and say WOOOO, LOOK what I saw!  and then I berated myself for being annoyed... ten years ago it wouldn't have mattered to me whether anyone else saw it or not.... I was enough.  I think the internet needs to give me some space.

I'm going to spend a lot more time away from this internet thing this year.  I need to go back to the drawing board in more ways than one.  I may find that in a couple of week's time I have so much to write about that I go back to illustro-blogging daily, but I doubt it.  I feel rather spent.  Although my head is full, it is also stuck.... full of ideas and thoughts, but needing some space and time to get any of them out. I want to work on some bigger things, get a whole book done (god knows what about), get this house underway, work out where the hell it's all going.  It has much to do with the utter chaos that has abounded since we moved into this odd and quite crap house that we shall hopefully be demolishing this year.  The drains are abysmal, the lectrics are hanging by a forty year old thread, strange things happen when it rains, and it's full of the junk that I didn't have time to dump when I had to move us and 20,000 books all of a sudden in the summer.  I'm de-junking this week.  I used to live with an Aussie friend in London who used to say "I just going to de-spunk" when she was going to take a bath.  This didn't sound wrong to her sweet young antipodean ears.  Anyway, I'm not de-spunking, I'm de-junking.

Twitter has utterly done for my attention span, so that's going to be accessed only when I'm standing in a queue with nothing else to do, I am rather fed up with it.   After six years of an awful lot of blogging, my site will probably morph into more of a portfolio site... everything will still be here, just different and there will still be things to be writ in stoney gibberish, but gosh, sometimes I do feel like I've said everything.  The more outrageous or disgusting things I want to say or paint will go on Unkempt Women... which I created for just this eventuality, when a gel just wants to write from time to time or do something different.   I'm not giving up, just going a bit easier on my non-internet-self

So here's to a gloriously creative ten past eight for me as well as all of you.

I'd like to have done a retrospective of the year of my stuff, but if the year is anything to go by, I won't have time to sit down and DO a retrospective before 2009 is finished (well, I invented me livin' draws, I moved house while 'im indoors finished his book, which, brilliantemente is at #12 in the fnac chart and #1 in non fiction- WAHAY!, then a load of stuff to do with this house, like THE BLOODY DRAINS and the BLOODY LECTRICS (but it's alright, cos we're going to knock it down and start again), plus a few nice jobs to do, plus the re-invention of unkemptwomen.com, and probably a load of other stuff I can't remember, ooh, like my tenth anniversary of living in this place we call Portugal) and the noughties are over..... SO, before I have to run off to the next child's school Christmas party of doom, and say goodbye to school runs and hello to two hungry daughters for a whole two and a half weeks, I shall just wish you all a lovely, warm, happy Christmas/Winterval/Schminterval and an optimistic 2010.  Thanks for the visiting.

It's not just all the climate change denialists that are coming out of the woodwork, grasping at every straw to prove their point; nor the greenalists who don't believe that anyone can question their proclamations; nor the rest of us in the middle, who find it hard to be a reactionary for either side (how ludicrous to have SIDES in the face of such an important problem), worried that we will be laughed at if proved wrong; nor the detracting and pointless argument about whether this is man-made or not; nor the preposterous machinations that the politicians at the Copenhagen summit will go through to prevent them making a single damn decision, proposal, treaty, whatever.  It's a big fat combination of all of us filling a big balloon of stupid.

It's worth a punt, isn't it?

[now, AFTER you have read this, don't forget to go and visit http://unkemptwomen.com that is has opened TODAY]

you know how sometimes think of something that irritates the crap out of you when you're sitting in a traffic jam or you're stuck in the loo or you're waiting for a bus, and then you remember loads of the things that irritate you and you just feel like getting it all down in a list in your blog will make you feel better?  ... ... DOT DOT DOT ELLIPSIS

1. that horrible way actOrs read out other people's words, when it's a letter or a diary entry or a transcript of a foreign speaker, and they do that stupid faux faltering and stammering at the beginning of sentences.... a perfect example is Pat in the Archers who does that THING for her whole rôle.

2. People.

3. People who CAN'T agree with you, on ANYTHING... you converse with them and EVERYTHING you say they deny or negate or just say no, "The sky is blue today" "NO, it's a duckegg green", "So, you work for a living?" "NO, I work to commune with the universe, money is just a by-product" etc., etc., etc., Oh, bugger off.

4. Magicians, especially magicians of the "wwooooo, look at me being all mysterious and waving my arms about with a big hairdo" genus.

5. People, usually middle-aged women, who have to make a fuss about EVERYTHING when in long queues in shops or cafés.

6. People.

excuse me while I just employ HYPNO-FROG....

*hypno frog* FORGET ALL REINCARNATIONS OF "UNKEMPTWOMEN" THAT LUCY HAS MASCARADED BEHIND FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS, THIS IS THE REINCARNATION THAT UNKEMPTWOMEN.COM WAS REGISTERED IN THE ETHER FOR, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO */end hypno frog*

On 7th December, I'm opening a brand new website.  I'm telling you about it now so that I absolutely HAVE to finish it.  This new website is a website full of big internetty WOMEN.  They are quite UNKEMPT, mouthy, not-normal, and lovely.  Every last one of them.  Some of them you have already heard of.  Some of them you haven't.  Some of them will remain anonymous.  All of them are writers, journalists, novelists, long term proven bloggers and/or artists.

You see, sometimes, I get an idea in my tiny mind and I want to blog about it, but that idea is a bit different from what I normally do - maybe it's me being SERIOUS, or maybe it's a recipe - sticking a recipe in the middle of my blog just wouldn't work.  It would break the flow of idiocy... and that's what you come here for, isn't it?  Sometimes, I just fancy being really REALLY disgusting. I did have a separate area for some comedy p0rn once, but it instantly got listed in p0rn listings along with my name.  Since I published my recipe book for kids a couple of years ago, I do get some squidlets coming to my site.  Obviously, squidlets and p0rn don't mix, so I had to shut down Harriet Hole and her Farm-Based Filth.  I didn't do her often enough to justify her own website, but it would have been nice for her to have somewhere to do her business (I have a feeling she'll soon be back).  I thought that MAYBE, other lady bloggesses and writers and things might feel the same.  So, I asked.  And they did.

Blogging itself has changed, too.  So many of us just don't keep up the steady stream like we used to, much of the time because blogging has brought us real work to do....and as your posting rate goes down, so does your findability... findableness... er... visibility (living in forrin for too long does this to a girl's inglish).... some of us have given up blogging almost completely, but still get the occasional urge to put something somewhere and have it read.  Just sticking it into a page floating about in space isn't going to have it read by anyone.  Sticking it in a vibrant, buzzy, loud kind of website, populated by a disparate bunch of lunatics lovely set of ladies, however, will help it to be read.  So THAT'S what I've turned Unkempt Women into.

You may wonder why it's just a WOMEN thing.  Well, I keep hearing that the internet is chock full of men with hardly any women.... and that we're all housewives blogging in little support groups, saving each other from madness and suicide.  This is utter HOGWASH, but the myth won't die, so I thought a loud concentration of the boobed sex will help to quash it.... and, anyway, "unkempt people" doesn't sound so good.

I'm not telling you who's contributing yet, because a. some will be anonymous, and b. the contributor list isn't complete yet... although we already number over twenty splendid lovelies, bursting with talented-bloggish-writery goodness.

So, there you are.  http://unkemptwomen.com opens 7th December.  Follow @unkemptwomen for reminders and teeth-kicking on twitter.

something I'm going to expand upon one of these days, but for now you can expand it by clicking on this.

you need glasses from lucy pepper on Vimeo.

Pot, kettle. from lucy pepper on Vimeo.

...or you'll end up a little touched.