I went to the Apple store in London.

The worship space was brightly lit, and row upon row of devotees stood at wooden benches gazing in adoration at white machines of varying shapes and sizes. A glass staircase lead upwards, where further rows of worshippers were doing much the same as those downstairs. People wearing bright shirts stood behind other desks, and names appeared on large screens. In the upper sanctuary a gathering of the faithful sat on wide comfortable pews and listened to a sermon.

I found the whole experience quite baffling. I could not see any orders of service anywhere, so it was rather difficult to know what I should be doing. Eventually I plucked up the courage to approach a sidesman, who explained what the worshippers were all doing and answered some of my questions about the basic tenets of the faith. He took me over to one of the white machines and explained some of the ways in which I too could become a follower should I choose. There would of course be very real costs involved.

Wary of making a commitment on my first visit I thanked the sideman and explained that I was in a bit of a hurry. To his credit he did not seem to mind.

I left clutching a parish magazine and thinking that returning on another occasion might not be entirely out of the question.

Posted by Dave at 11:52 am on January 3, 2009 and filed under Technical, Utter nonsense.

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Hello everyone. Happy Christmas! (I had planned to post this before now, but was prevented from doing so by a glitch - see diagram above, which has little to do with to do with the topic of this post, but it is one of my favourites from the year which I don’t think I’ve made public anywhere.)

Anyway, this is my end of year blog post, which I have a tradition of doing (I did one last year).

2008, brief review of

• It hasn’t really been a very good year on this blog, has it? Looking back at my list of blog posts show that things have declined somewhat.
• In February I started to write the Church Times blog, which has meant that I’ve had less time to devote to this one, but this site has, if truth be told, suffered rather more than I had intended.
• I will remember 2008 as the year of the Lambeth Conference. I was immensely privileged to be asked to be part of it doing my drawings in my medium-sized tent. I still have, if the truth be told, not really recovered.
• Canterbury Press very kindly published My Pew: Things I have seen from it in the summer. Other projects during the year included cartoons for the What am I doing here? book, the Autism and Asperger syndrome guidelines for churches and the Youthwork cartoon series which I hope will be fully revealed shortly.

2009, plans for

• I intend to spend most of January worrying about my tax return.
• The end of February is my deadline for the 2010 Dave Walker Guide to the Church Calendar, so if last year is anything to go by the month will be spent looking out of the window trying to think of ideas for it. (Aside: This years is still available).
• In April we’re going back to Spring Harvest… I know, who would have thought it? Purely as an in-depth reporter you understand, not because I’m turning Evangelical on a closet basis.
• 2009 might turn out to be the year of cartoon canvasses, new greetings cards and the sorting out of shambleses. We shall see. (I’m fully aware that ’shambleses’ isn’t valid English in most places by the way, but here in my computing office it is a well-understood and appropriate term).
• I’ve no other plans as yet. I think the Bible advises not to make too many. We live in uncertain times, so who knows what will happen, but if I have one resolution it is to try and enjoy myself a bit more doing what I am so fortunate to be doing rather than being so continually anxious about it all.

All best wishes to everyone reading - Happy New Year.

(Posted this time last year, but I doubt anyone will have really noticed.)

Posted by Dave at 6:54 pm on December 31, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, CartoonChurch.com newsletter, Sent via mobile telephone.

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A brief moment of joy in Chelmsford yesterday.

Apologies to passers-by who were obstructed by a cameraphone-wielding idiot loitering outside Debenhams on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Posted by Dave at 12:02 pm on December 21, 2008 and filed under Photographs, Signs.

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Hello.

Just to let you know that I will be auctioning the five Lambeth cartoon canvasses as previously mentioned, but that it will now happen in the New Year. Apologies to those who might have wanted to buy one as a Christmas present - I’m afraid that it has been the usual story of my spending all of my energy trying to get my creative work done and not having any time left to organise the administrative aspects. Sorry for any disappointment caused.

Meanwhile on my eBay site there are five more ‘Dave Walker Guide to the Church’ books up for sale - the auctions end just before midday UK time today. (Auctions now ended)

Posted by Dave at 8:50 am on December 16, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Books.

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This afternoon I made myself a cartoonchurch eBay account so that I can start to think about selling these canvasses. However, I decided to start off with something a bit smaller and more manageable, so I’m now selling some signed copies of my books. My brand new shiny eBay account is here: cartoonchurch (0).

Now, I don’t really intend to make a long term thing of selling my books on eBay, as (a) I’d like to support local bookshops and (b) I’m too lazy to keep going to the post office. However, I do have a reasonable amount of stock that I need to shift, so I may well add some more if it works and people buy them.

I’d wanted to sell the books with a ‘buy it now’, but apparently I need to have more of a feedback score than my current ‘0′ before I’m allowed to be let loose on the ‘buy it now’ button. So the books are being sold as an auction, starting at 99p and hopefully ending up not too far from the £5.99 mark.

I might add more books, so please don’t bid huge amounts (not that you were planning to, I know) for a rare signed copy, because If I sell more they will become rather less rare. I will sign them saying anything you want (within reason) - so an ideal opportunity to pick up a unique(ish) Christmas present.

As an aside: I do have a personal eBay account, so the whole business is not entirely new to me. But my score on my personal account is (2) meaning that I am still really a novice. I’ll write about the not-terribly-but-a-little-bit-exciting story of my (2) purchases another day.

So… anyone like a book?

Update (Saturday midday): Have added another 5 ‘Dave Walker Guide to the Church’ books. These are a 3 day listing again, so will end midday on Tuesday if my calculations are correct.

Posted by Dave at 10:04 pm on December 11, 2008 and filed under Cartooning, Books.

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I have a number of the cartoon canvasses that I did for the Lambeth Conference sitting in my office. They are in the way. I have to dodge them in an awkward manner whenever I go from my computing and drawing area to my coffee-making, cat-feeding and procrastination areas, a journey that is undertaken frequently. Therefore I need to get rid of them.

The canvasses in question are some of the non Lambeth-specific cartoons - ‘Bishops meetings‘ and the Peace (pictured above), also How Christians can work together across the divide, Church Kitchen and the final panel of this cartoon, (’Meanwhile, the vast majority…’).

I’d sell them on ebay, but my problem is knowing how to package them up and send them safely. They are 30 inches by 24 inches, or 762mm by 610mm in the metric. I’ve already had expressions of interest from overseas buyers (well.. one), but I fear the cost of packaging and sending safely might be prohibitive, if I can work out how to do it at all. I’ve done a search for cardboard boxes of the correct size, but no joy so far. Obviously people who could pick them up could pick them up (Near Basildon, 15 minutes from M25), but that would rule out most people who might be interested.

I do also have a lot of other blank canvasses, so might, if the interest is there, draw more cartoons on them in the future (it probably won’t happen before Christmas I’m afraid).

Any thoughts or expertise on the subject welcomed.

Posted by Dave at 12:10 pm on December 11, 2008 and filed under Cartooning, Art, Lambeth Conference.

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My ‘Dullest blog in the world‘ has received an unexpectedly large number of visitors today owing to an article that was on the front page of MSN for a while today. ‘The 11 lamest blogs on the Internet‘ originally appeared on a website called ‘PC World’ (not the shop we have in the UK) a week or two ago.

I’ve been busy moderating comments - in fact today was the first time I’ve moderated the comments on the site since I moved it onto its own domain at dullestblog.com, so there were about 1800 to do. [Uninteresting aside: 1800 is too many comments for Wordpress to display all at once, so I had to use cunning means involving searches for spam words to weed out a lot of the spams several hundred at a time. All terribly tricky, I can tell you.]

Anyway, the dullest blog should now accept comments. It is odd that it is getting all of this attention nearly six years on. I am, by the way, thinking about putting a webpage together that will link to all of the various websites that I run in some way or other, as there does seem to be quite a lot of them now and there isn’t a page that links to all of them. I’ve even got a few yet-to-be launched websites milling around in the background in various states of non-completion. I did have a ‘portfolio’ website but it is out of date and doesn’t work, two reasons not to look at it.

Posted by Dave at 8:57 pm on December 2, 2008 and filed under Blogging.

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Just a sneak preview of part of a cartoon from a project I finished a week or two ago. I’ve done a set of youthwork-themed cartoons to go on a set of seven postcards which are part of a campaign to encourage churches to think about the way they employ youthworkers.

The ‘We love our youthworker’ campaign isn’t launched until next year, but I think the postcards were available at the recent Youthwork conference in Blackpool and Eastbourne, so some youthworkers will have seen them. This info has been posted on the Schoolswork site, which is why I’m posting about it.

Early in 2009, Youthwork the Partnership and Amaze will be launching a brand new project called ‘we love our youthworker’. simply brilliant! It’s a campaign to encourage churches to think about the way they employ a full-time worker. It’s based on a set of seven promises that churches commit to follow:

1. we will pray and support
2. we will give space for retreat and reflection
3. we will provide ongoing training and development
4. we will give a full day of rest each week
5. we will share responsibility
6. we will strive to be an excellent employer
7. we will celebrate and appreciate

Each of the promises has a little card with a purpose drawn cartoon from Dave Walker of Cartoon Church. Very funny. The reason for the project comes from the belief that keeping full time workers positive, productive and living balanced lives makes for great youthwork. And that’s an important step towards building God’s kingdom among young people. more details will follow shortly…for now, do get in touch if you’d like more info or a set of the postcards.

No doubt the full set of cartoons will appear online somewhere at some point.

Posted by Dave at 1:49 pm on November 28, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, Church, Cartooning.

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[See a larger version here]

I have uploaded this cartoon to the CartoonChurch.com cartoons section so that it can be used by people needing Christmas cartoons for things. I realise I’m probably too late for most parish magazine editors - I’m really sorry. Licence info can be found by clicking the links above.

This cartoon was my Church Times Christmas one from last year. It is taken from the book My Pew: Things I have seen from it.

Posted by Dave at 1:24 pm on November 28, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, New CartoonChurch cartoons.

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Hello.

As you may or may not have noticed this blog has been silent for around 44 days. Giving an account of the causes would risk a drift into the realms of the tiresome, but in summary I’ve been a bit under the weather for one reason or another. I have been keeping my paid commitments going, but some other things have been allowed to drift somewhat.

Thank you for a number of kind messages expressing good sentiments of various sorts.

Anyway, I fully intend to start this blog going again. I’m not putting any pressure on myself to do it daily, but hopefully there will be new things a number of times a week. This blog may well go back to being the place where I post any old nonsense, which in the past has tended to produce the best results.

(New cartoon from my We Blog Cartoons site, where you’ll find some of my cartoons that can be freely re-used on blogs.)

Posted by Dave at 7:54 pm on November 23, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, CartoonChurch progress, New Weblogcartoons cartoons, CartoonChurch.com newsletter.

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I have written 7 ‘notes’ on Facebook during the last month, which the website owners consider ‘abuse’ as they have blocked me from posting any more. I had been using a facility whereby when you write blog posts they are imported into Facebook as notes, but it is obviously intended only for very occasional users. The help page:

Unfortunately, Facebook cannot provide any specifics on the rate limits that we enforce. Please know, however, that the speed at which you are acting and the sheer number of actions you have made are both taken into account.

It is true that when I was updating this blog daily my notes were at the rate of about one a day. Perhaps I am being disciplined retrospectively.

As punishment for the sheer number of my sins my Facebook notemaking powers have been removed and the red ‘you’ve been naughty’ sign above pops up to remind me of my guilt whenever I try to look as notes that anyone else has written. As an additional reprimand notes from others do not show up in my feed at all.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to everyone for the misery that my excessive notemaking has obviously caused. I will, in order to spare everyone further unhappiness, refrain from posting any more notes from this day onwards. Assuming i can work out how to turn them off of course.

Posted by Dave at 5:23 pm on October 9, 2008 and filed under Technical, Blogging.

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I’m aware that there are currently some problems on the cartoon pages of CartoonChurch.com and on the category pages of this blog.

I’m looking into them, but at the moment I am slightly mystified. I’m being told “Got error -1 from storage engine”, whatever that means.

At the time of writing the cartoons can still be accessed via this page. Otherwise there are a few cartoons here on my backup site if you need one urgently for a parish magazine.

Sorry for any inconvenience or complication that this may cause you.

Posted by Dave at 5:51 pm on October 7, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Technical.

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