ANOTHER INVITE

So, out of the blue, there comes another re-connection with my past…

There's another "gathering" of sorts of a group of people who used to work together, some of whom once worked with me back in the dark ages of slate and twigs and twine.

I guess that I ought to at least think about attending this, given that the invitations must eventually dry up if I constantly fail to show my potato-like face to the world at large, but the squirming turmoil of social angst will rear its own ugly head and beat me into submission and find another one-thousand-and-one excuses to prevent me from even stepping over the threshold.

I mean, there's the timing for a start. I've got a six o'clock appointment on that particular evening and then I'd have to head home and then head out again almost immediately, and if I wanted even a pint of the hard stuff, I would need to walk forever to the station to use the useless public transport connections to arrive long after they'd all moved on to somewhere more conducive, given the screaming, crowded babble of a Friday night in town which prevents even the most simple of conversations.

Almost as soon as I arrived, I would then have to turn around and head back for the last train, that terrifying cattle cart so full of bullying, vomiting drunks that you really wonder whether it is actually the handcart to hell that humanity seems to be loading itself into, before staggering alone for miles through the mean streets hoping that some young hooligan doesn't take a liking to the contents of my pockets and make threats against my person.

Naturally, the vast majority of the bright young things attending said gathering wouldn't know me from Adam, many of them not having been born yet when I last trod those particular boards, and so the misanthropic side of my personality, the very same 99.9% "side" which addresses you most mornings, is screaming at me to avoid such an event and just let them get on with it and bellow at each other in the raging madness and noise of a city centre public house.

After all, if I did turn up, not only would I be sucking away precious time for those who know me to be talking to younger, fresher and far prettier faces, but there would also be a fair old crowd of "who the hell is that?" people around resenting the fact that I even had the gall to consider myself part of their particular gang.

And then there's the other, far tricker, prospect that the people that I did once know might not turn up, leaving me floundering around all alone in a heaving venue, not recognising that the exciting looking party going on not five feet away from me is the very one which I was supposed to be attending, simply because I do not recognise any of them.

Strangely (because I have been sort of monitoring this event from afar), most of the faces that I might have known - including the one who mentioned it to me - had already announced their intention not to be there anyway, and so the point, such as it was, was already lost before the decision was made, and so another year drifts away without me seeing hide nor hair of any of them.

I miss the days when we'd meet up on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to be honest, and have a few hours in which to chat in the peace and quiet of the wide open spaces of the great outdoors, or even mulling over old times around a table in a restaurant, but I can't seem to persuade anyone to do that sort of thing with me any more, which is probably just as well, given that the 99.9% of me would still manage to talk me out of it anyway.

Mind you, when it comes to not taking no for an answer, my polite refusal to return to the murky waters of the rancid world of commercial illustration also seemed to fall upon deaf ears, at least for a while…

The peculiar thing about my own various ghastly failures to make it as a freelancing scribbler for hire way back in the day is that it has now taught me all about what I wouldn't want to do any more, especially as I'm far too old and well-fed to be at all ambitious to succeed in that general area.

I've always loathed doing artwork twice, and I've always really disliked having far too much of it to do in the time available. Also, because I never really had "a style" as such which I could stand by and say "Well, if you hire me, that's what you're going to get…", it was far, far too easy for me to bend to other people's will, or, perhaps even worse than that, try and fall back upon something that even I knew was a little bit rubbish in order to be able to meet the ridiculous deadlines set by people who think that artwork magically appears from nowhere and that you're having so much "fun" creating it that an hourly rate of less than a groat would be a perfectly satisfactory bauble to present to such an artistic simpleton.

The problem with this latest now almost certainly non-commission is that I could see all of the problems unfolding almost before I put pencil to paper; The endless rough drawings that never really quite hit the mark, the tinkering with details upon pieces that already represent days of work, the committees of people who wouldn't know one end of a pencil from another but feel that they have to make alterations in order to justify having called the meeting in the first place, the payments that never materialise, the contracts that mean I don't get a penny, the "final" round of changes that occur far too late in the day but which still need to be made and which still turn out not to be the final ones after all…

And so on…

Been there, done that… and I really did not like it.

Best to let it go, I think, despite the fact that one day I might regret missing the very last time opportunity chose to knock upon my door. It would be different, I think, if I felt that I had some control. That I was telling my own story and they could either like it or lump it, but when other people get involved and throw themselves and their opinions into the mix, then the whole endeavour can get far too frustrating and annoying and the right royal pain in the arse that really isn't conducive to that vague, abstract and presumably over-rated nonsense that we still like to call "creativity…"

Not that what I ever do is "perfect" but I do like to think that I do know what I'm doing and really, really, wouldn't want to start each and every one of possibly dozens of pieces over again just because someone takes a dislike to something in the way I drew the eyes, or something equally absurd.

So I think I'd rather not bother, thanks very much, if it's all the same to you, and just walk away with my head held high and my mind full of images of a jungle which the world will never see...