Blog TakeOver - Who, Me? I Live Here Don't I??

I'm a character out of Antonia's book, but I'm sure I existed and lived here before her anyway.

My name is Joe. I'm blonde, with a hint of strawberry - shaggy hair, blue eyes, icy if you must know, and a mouth that doesn't turn down too much at the corners despite being thin.

I laugh a lot, am a wiry, lanky twenty-nine year old with a passion for Lowry paintings. Antonia reckons I like to think I'm Lowry, but I don't, I just like to think I can paint like him.

See, I never was good for much at school; I could draw, but only stick-like fashion, and sketches that created childish scenes. Then I discovered Lowry and saw that he'd made stick-drawing fashionable. So I practised didn't I? I practised all the time, until I made those stick figures a bit livelier, yes, with personalities of their own, even though their features became muted and bland and sometimes even featureless, yet retaining a semblance of a self.

I learnt how to draw a group of people so that it looked like they were one, and busy, and industrial or poignant in some way.

So, I aint the ghost of Lowry, see. I could paint you, Antonia, and fashion you into stick and merge you with a crowd like a giant colourful mural; you could be on a street somewhere in the north, tiny red hat perched on your head, brown woollen coat clutched about you, lacy red brolly perched on the end of a slim, bony wrist.

What? You are doing that right now?

See, I told you I lived here. It was me that made YOU!