I’ve got to learn to draw properly. In terms of drawing skills, I’m about halfway there: not at the beginning, not at the end.

I never used to draw. I drew like anyone creative draws: occasionally, badly, for fun. Then one day, a very bad thing happened.

In January of 2020, I went climbing outdoors in the countryside of Wales with my friend Dom.

[Author’s note: You know, I just tried to write a detailed account of what happened, but I can’t. You’ll have to suffice with this: Dom fell, and the accident was very bad. Dom was in a coma for a month; I was in shock, with guilt and confusion and loss.]

I withdrew into myself. The centre of me was hollowed out. I spent a large part of every day, for a while, crying my eyes out. At the time I was between jobs (genuinely, between two jobs with a gap of three months), and so my days were empty affairs of self-loathing and pure, raw, hopelesss hope that Dom would come out of his coma, and that he’d be alright, and that he’d still be Dom.

My days were rather blank. However, if I’m not anything else, I am at least very energetic. The energy has to go somewhere.

So, I went out and bought an A3 height, 20 metre paper scroll. I bought a whole bunch of pens and pencils. And I drew.

At first, the drawings were terrible.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was doing it for 4, 5, sometimes 6 or more hours a day. So, I progressed. If there was any quality in any of these drawings, it was not due to skill. Rather, it was due to ridiculous perseverance and silly levels of obsession.

I started taking the scroll to life drawing classes. I read “how to draw” blog posts. I watched some videos on form and shape and structure, and I followed the advice given. And, with time and effort, my drawings began to improve.

By April of 2020, I had lost my brand new job (Covid), and Dom was out of hospital and into a physical rehab facility. He had a rather serious spinal cord injury, and now uses a wheelchair. From a completely mad coincidence, his job before the accident was designing and building wheelchairs, and establishing a factory to do the same in India. When he first joined that job, he used a wheelchair for a month (at work) to learn how to use it, and how a wheelchair uses experiences and gets through their environment. He’s now doing very well. Dom is indomitable.

The scroll was finished that April. The scroll was 20 metres long – as long as two London buses, or one blue whale, or one standard Bleep Test. I filled every bit of space that I could. A lot of the scroll was half-mad ramblings, diary entries, poems, observations, idiocy. I did some final drawings, which were of a significantly higher quality than the pictures you see above. I looked at the scroll one last time, then rolled it up and sent it to Dom. The pictures in this blog post are all I have, taken from phone photographs I took at the time. I haven’t seen the scroll since then.

I drew here and there, but I never gave drawing the lunatic focus and free time that I had available to me during the first few months of 2020.