Happy (belated) New Year

First post of 2016! Here's my newly arrived copy of Felix Frost - Time Detective - Ghost Plane, written by Eleanor Hawken & illustrated by me. I'll post some more when it's published on January 14th. It's published by Quercus books

Guardian All Ears 14th June

(Article by Michael Holden)
As far as I’m concerned people who are up out of their aircraft seats before the seat belt sign has been turned off are a sub species that ought to be destroyed. Within that though, skulks an even uglier demographic, people who get out of their seats too quickly, and immediately begin to use the phone. If any of these people looked like they had anything urgent waiting for them outside the aircraft, other than their own demented self obsession, it wouldn’t be so bad. Likewise the vocal among them, have nothing to say. This proved itself to be true again last week when I watched a young woman get up and start bleating loudly into her mobile at the end of a long haul flight from California.

Woman: “There were a lot of history, too much history really. It were quite boring. We saw Hollywood and that…yeah…went to Vegas, stayed at the Luxor. It’s like a pyramid, a black pyramid that you go inside of.”

I prayed for her to be admonished by a steward but no one came. And so she continued.

Woman: “I got her a solar-powered key ring, it’s pretty good…and I got him some nails scissors…nail scissors that have ‘California’ written on ‘em…”

The light went off and everyone started standing up.

Woman: (anxious, as though this might be an affront to her unique status) “Everyone’s standing up! Yeah, I’m still on the plane. It’s hot over there. You can get sun burned in an hour. I did…I’ve gone brown now though. Yeah, I got him an ashtray.”

As she moved out of earshot I realised that whoever said travel broadens the mind wasn’t catching many planes.