Adieu

My favourite teacher, when I was at school, was my art teacher.

I don’t know if she would remember me, so many years later, but I haven’t forgotten her.

She only taught me for two years, when I was one of her ‘leetle leetle Std 6s’ and then one of her ‘leetle’ bigger Std 7s (in Grades 8 and 9), but the interest she took in me and my work made all the difference, especially at a time when my own interest in my school work was flagging.

She seemed to delight in each of us, her artists, in our mischief as much as our imaginations. And I think we, at a rather rigid and old-fashioned girls’ school, appreciated her impishness and wonder as much as her artistic and teaching abilities...

This was her farewell to us...

As a teacher now myself, I’ve since found out how hard it can be to say goodbye to students – but also how much easier it is to stay in touch.

We may have gone our separate ways, but I like to think that we may still meet up again, my past students and I, somewhere in the world – in the UAE perhaps, or Bahrain, Turkey, Pakistan, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan... That our farewell was more an au revoir than an adieu...

So...

Till we meet again...

Later...

Class of 2011

These are some sketches I’ve done for my kind-of-comic – they’re some of the girls from the class of 2011. I taught them for three years when I lived in the Middle East. Full of fun and mischief, they made me laugh – and they made me blush! – and they made me cry – and they made me go a little bananas at times! I watched them grow, and they let me grow as a teacher and make mistakes when I also had a lot to learn. I love them to bits, beautiful girls.

Paper kisses

Isabel Greenberg won the Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica graphic short story prize this year for her story “Love in a Very Cold Climate”. It’s about a man from the North Pole who falls in love with a woman from the South Pole but they can never touch because they’re surrounded by a magnetic force field. It’s a gentle and lovely story, and it’s beautifully written and drawn. I just loved it.

I think this is one of my favourite panels... They marry anyway – two feet apart - but of course they can’t kiss. So they kiss scraps of paper and blow them to each other – the snowy skies are filled with hundreds and hundreds of paper kisses, swept away on the winds...

You can read the full story here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/71465831/LIAVCC

A haiku about... falling poems?

I wrote this about ten years ago when I was living in London.

I was at work and from my window I could see a man and a woman reading on the grass below. It was a blustery day and she was leaning against him – but quite absorbed in what she was reading. It seemed like the perfect kind of solitude.

Chapter 1

I found the beginning of a story at my bus stop last week.

I still don’t know who wrote it but I’ve been going up to campus and down again, imagining the two of them... She must get on at my stop but does he? Did he see her read it? Did she blush, laugh or smack him with an armful of books?! Perhaps she was quite cool and gave nothing away. Would he have been bruised or a little bit smug? Maybe he was knocked off his feet!

I sat on the bus smiling and wondering what their next chapter would be. And what title they would give their story. And how many chapters it would have...

I wonder where he wanted to take her.

And, of course, I wonder if she relented and went with him?