JerryChicken

Dan at All That Comes With It has set the questions, I simply have to supply the answers, so...

With the help of your handy time machine you are putting together a supergroup of musical artists.
What's the lineup and the band's name?
Vocals : Rod Stewart 30 years ago
Lead Guitar : Keith Richards
Rythmn and Lead : Ron Wood
Bass Guitar : Guy Pratt (only because I've met him)
Drums : Zak Starkey (who plays like Animal off the Muppets)

Accompanyment on specific tracks : The London Symphony Orchestra, Lothian and Borders Pipe Band (I cried when they played Amazing Grace recently), and The Nolans (they are nearly family).

Name of the band ? Time for Cocoa Mr Robinson

What time do you write you blog? Judging by when it gets updated you must be getting up at 4am every day.
Well, just recently, ie during the school holidays, I've been the only one to get out of bed at 6am, so I sits with me coffee and corn flakes and I writes - and now that school is back this year there is only one daughter that needs the bathroom at that time so the timetable is not so tight and I have time to write.

But sometimes I write at night too and just post it in the morning

You paint, you write; and do both extremely well. Do you ever feel you missed your calling or are you satisfied with these being hobbies?

Flattery will get your questions answered :)

I'm extremely happy to have painted all my life, its filled in many empty hours and I've spent whole days in blissfull ignorance of anything at all around me when hours pass like minutes but to do it as a job I'm not sure.

I'd love to earn enough from selling artwork to make a living but it would then bring its own pressures and deadlines and that isn't what painting is all about for me, in fact its all about the exact opposite and if a painting turns out crap (which lots of them do) then I just throw it away and its only my leisure time thats wasted.

I came within "this much" (holds thumb and forefinger very close together) of starting out my working life as a graphic artist in the days when you altered photographs for advertising purposes with a brush and a jar of chemicals, but I'm pleased that I didn't if only for the fact that the company went out of business the following year.

Writing is something that I've only been doing for a few years and yes, I'd love to do it for a living, but then again the deadlines come into the equation and where do you cross the line between enjoying something and it becoming a chore again ?

Do you have your chips wi' bits?

No, never have done, even as a kid, you get more chips in the bag without and anyway I don't like the idea of eating stuff thats dropped off someone elses food. My chips, and especially my fish have to be soaked in vinegar though, absolutely soaked through, I have annoyed lots of chip shop owners in the past for emptying their bottles.

Who will be first against the wall come the revolution?

TV producers who think that I'm a fekkwit, treating me to prime time huge dollops of celebrity dancing or celebrity cooking or celebrity singing or celebrity sitting-in-a-fake-house-for-two-weeks or non-celebrity sitting-in-a-fake-house-for-twelve-weeks or non-celebrity stranded on a desert island etc etc etc

Or TV producers who think that Coronation Street is a gritty northern drama because of course we all live on cobbled streets oop north, shop for everything in a tatty corner shop and work within fifty yards of our own doorstep.

Or TV producers who expect me to believe that people in London spend all of their lives in one pub in a tatty little square and never think of catching the tube into the city and alternative entertainment, who simply buy the tatty pub when the landlord walks out regardless of the fact that they don't hold a licence and have never run a pub before, and that all Londoners live, eat, drink and work no more than twenty yards from their houses - and fight often.

So it would be TV producers then