The week I turned 46, ordered too many aubergines and forgot what a chicken looks like.
📮🎥 Includes a bonus video of me drawing live
Hello Powells,
It was my birthday at the weekend: I am now 46 years old. As my trip to Italy hadn’t gone ahead I decided last minute to have a ‘small’ Italian get together at our house. Naturally, I wasn’t prepared to host a casual dinner for 15 friends. A quick audit revealed I possessed only: 6 chairs, 4 plates, 7 knives, 8 forks, 9 glasses of various unsuitable sizes, an empty fridge, no cooler to keep the Italian wine cool and one medium sized lasagne dish. So on Wednesday I did a large online food shop where I overestimated the amount of aubergines I would need to make a parmigiana - you need 2, not 9. On Thursday I panic bought 4 bags of ice and took delivery of a 14 yard industrial sized skip (not in any way related to the birthday). On Friday, I wasted most of the day stood in the street on the phone to the Argos delivery man, who desperately wanted to give me the two lasagne dishes that I desperately wanted to have but who couldn’t find my house. The final hours of my 46th year on planet Earth were spent assembling layers of pasta and trying to find a suitable place to keep 7 spare aubergines.
On Saturday friends arrived with chairs, cutlery, plates, cooler… basically everything except aubergine as I had that covered. The sun was shining and for a moment it felt like summer. We were all happy and gay… until the sun went behind a tree and we realised it wasn't summer; it was April, in England and it was freezing. Luckily, one friend had not only bought a bin bag filled with home-grown salad leaves he’d also brought a fire pit and so we were able to retain the feeling in our extremities as we ate fresh rocket, saved by the warmth of flames. All the food was eaten except for one of my two parmigiana’s and that’s only because I forgot to take out of the oven and put it on the table. A great time was had by all, as seen in these photos taken by my photographically talented friends:
In other exciting news, I have bought some all weather pegs for the washing line and thrown half of my garden in the skip, gnomes and all. I’ve been drawing everyday and recently discovered the joy of Substack Live. I went live 4 times last week, drawing on a new theme called ‘Let’s Have a Little Sit Down’, whilst answering your questions. You can see the first one here and below is a longer live, where I create two drawings and forget what a chicken looks like.
I’ll go live again this week, keep your eyes peeled for me 👀.
Yours, aged 46 and 2 days,
Powell x
Happiest of birthdays, funster bunster xxx