Shameful Secret
Using the literary sleight of hand of an expert wordsmith this newsletter may have given you the impression that you know everything about my life. That every trial and travail of my existence is opened up in excruciatingly honest detail week after week. Or week after fortnight, depending on how things are going. You may have been left with the carefully crafted impression that I live an inconsequential life in the suburbs of a small English city writing a newsletter that few people read and making comics for even fewer that that.
Not so. Behind this dark horse is a duck furiously paddling beneath the surface (only an expert wordsmith can confidently mangle their metaphors in such a way). I have depths and dimensions. I contain multitudes. I have secrets.
Yes, it’s true. Secrets. Why, I have drafted a newsletter which I cannot publish because I have been sworn to secrecy. To break such a sacred trust would bring about serious consequences. I might end up sleeping with the fishes. So I can’t publish the thing I wrote because the head of that aforementioned dark horse might end up on my pillow, Godfather style. Only an expert wordsmith can mix their metaphors and foreshadow simultaneously. Next level stuff.
A cynical reader may have a sneaking suspicion that the expert wordsmith may be desperately padding their newsletter at short notice due to an informal embargo on the thing they had already prepared and assumed it would be okay to mention by now. Oh, cynical reader, shame on you and your jaundiced view of your humble newsletterer.
It is absolutely true there are things I would rather not reveal in this public forum (I have promised Alan I would never again mention the thing about the fungal infection.) For instance I am ashamed to disclose that I recently watched most of series 21 of Made in Chelsea. Not through choice, I may add, but due to crushing peer pressure from my family. This is my first, and I hope, my last encounter with scripted reality television.
It gives me no pleasure to reveal I now know some of the cast’s names. Not having seen the previous 20 series, their relationship to each other remains opaque. I am guessing they are all related/slept with each other/parents have villas in the Seychelles/inherited a digestive biscuit empire. Probably all at the same time. It’s a bit like a horror film I remember from the 80s. Only grosser. I have no idea how the series ends but I sincerely hope it involves a poisoned nebuchadnezzar of champagne and a dozen bodies floating face down in the heated swimming pool.
I will leave you with that disturbing image. A shocking confession and a shameful secret revealed. There is no dark corner of my soul left unexposed to the blinding sunlight of this newsletter.
Be thankful I am not writing a brutally frank autobiographical comic about it.
I have a new mini comic to stick in the mini comic box over at my store. Buy my not mini books, Kerry and the Knight of the Forest and The Book Tour. Salve my conscience by supporting my store/digital comics/patreon or leaving a positive review online.
take care,
andi