Flipping Kevin Parrott, Lowry, uncle Bob, and fag packets...

It seems to me that it’s been nothing but drawings for the last few days.

It isn't intentional. It's just the way things have fallen I guess.

Maybe it's because I haven't been to Wales for a few weeks, caught up in new things and nonsense and my expensive hobby at the Trader's club.

Less of that though.

You know it never fails to amaze me how our minds work.

Let me explain.

It isn’t always easy understanding the connections, the inter-relationships between events and thoughts, thoughts and actions, actions and results. It can be hard but if you can understand them, and work with them, then you have something special going on.

I call it mind surfing and I guess we all do it. Perhaps we are all logged into our own internal internet all the time. Maybe it’s not about the number of active brain cells we have or our ability to absorb complex information - perhaps it’s far simpler than that.

Yes, let’s call it mind surfing.

Here’s what I mean.

I was on Facebook the other evening and I saw a post from an old friend that I used to work with. Let’s call him Kevin Parrott because that’s his name and not Brian of Brian and Michael fame because it isn’t. Now you may remember that Brian and Michael had a chart-topping hit record with "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs", a tribute to the artist L. S. Lowry, in the seventies. It stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks Pop Pickers and I think everyone in the county can probably hum or sing it even today.

It got me thinking and from here my mind flipped to my old geography teacher Mr Moore who had an original Lowry sketch that he bought for a hundred quid when he was in Manchester as a young man. I saw it once when I went round to play with his son Jonathan. It was a small pencil sketch of three men, all sticky arms and legs with round heads standing on a street corner under a tall lamp smoking cigarettes.

Flip – and I wondered what it’s worth now and where it hangs these days. Certainly not in Jonathan’s living room on Park Street above Mr. Moore’s (or Ronnie (Ronald) as we nicknamed him for no apparent reason – there were no MacDonald’s back then) homework marking desk.

Flip - and I remembered a story about a small boy who was given a pencil sketch by Lowry when he was on holiday in Berwick. I also seem to remember that it sold for twenty thousand pounds a few years ago.

Flip – and I remembered being given a drawing by a stranger at a wedding when I was a very young child. It was a drawing of a man in top hat and tails drawn on the back of a fag packet and I kept it for years. It was probably that drawing that got me started scribbling my scribbles.

Flip – and I remembered how my Uncle Bob use to cut holes in his flip top cigarette packet, poke his fingers through for eyes and a nose and use his little finger to make the flip top mouth work whilst singing Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs.

Flip – and I was back to Ronnie Ronald Moore’s picture and the smoking men.

Flip – and then I lost my connection. Something wrong with the router I guess or maybe my service provider simply pulled the plug.

I wonder where I would have Flipped to next?