ALLY'S FAMOUS CHRISTMAS CARDS

NOT THAT FAMOUS

They're not really that famous, except among a few, select people. But they're quite interesting. I may make a post showing as many of my hand made cards as I can find, although some of the early ones are a bit elusive.  Anyway, here's the story behind them, and the story behind this year's – 2025 that is – Christmas card.

ABOVE: 2012 CARD (it was wet that year)

EARLY HISTORY

I've been making my own Christmas cards since I was about 16 years old. The first ones involved sticking coloured film on to hand drawn images, and took a long time to make. I probably only made a dozen or so, for my close friends.

DARKROOM DAYS

In the following few years I made some cards in my father's darkroom, by laying things on pieces of photographic paper, exposing them to light from the enlarger, and then developing them with the usual chemicals. This was probably even more time-consuming than drawing each one by hand, but at least I could be sure they were all the same! I'd colour them in with magic markers. The mostly involved variations on Santa Claus with humorous text. (Well, at least I thought they were humorous at the time.) 

PHOTOCOPIERS! THE 20th CENTURY'S GREATEST INVENTION!

Gradually, things got more technical. I had a job in a drawing office, with access to that most wondrous of modern technology – a photocopier!  Back then, photocopiers were in their early days, and couldn't cope with large areas of black, so images had to be outlines, with no filling in. And of course, there still wasn't any colour unless I used a pen to fill it in. Still, it was much faster than the darkroom!

ABOVE: 2008 CARD (complete with recorder players and dogs)

COMPUTERS AND PRINTERS AND SOFTWARE!

Fast forward to more modern times, and I had a computer with graphics software and a printer, so things could get really fast and fun, especially when I got my hands on an OKI LED printer with a straight paper path, so that you can send quite heavy card through the machine, and print the exact colours you want.  If there was anything wrong wrong with those cards, it was my fault, not the printers'. 

Some of my longtime friends (you know who you are!) have managed to collect a copy of just about every card I've ever produced, and may even have some that I've lost myself! 

ABOVE: 2016 CARD (one of my favourites featuring Ghyll, Kiri, Aineko and Oscar)

NAUGHTY OKI

Sadly, the OKI started misbehaving, and refusing to print colour properly. They're expensive things, as well as being uncommon, so that buying a new one is something I kept putting off, and finding a technician who knew how to service them has been a nightmare. I spent a couple of Christmases printing in black and white, and either colouring them in myself or making a bit of a joke of the lack of colour.

THE COMPROMISE PRINTER

Last Christmas, 2025, I gave in and bought an interim inkjet – a perfectly decent Epson – which is fine, but I still miss the sad old OKI lurking moodily under my desk.

INSPIRATION STRIKES!

I needed inspiration for a card, and one day when I was sitting in my car in a queue of vehicles stuck at one of the interminable sets of temporary traffic lights, in order to alleviate boredom I started making up phrases based on the initial letters of nearby number plates. The one directly in  front of me was LWM. Oh, that's easy. LAST WISE MAN. I started wondering who the last wise man was, what happened to the other two to leave this poor magus as the final one alive, and so on. By the time I got home, there was a story in my head, as well as an idea for a Christmas card.

ABOVE: 2025 CARD

This time I did some mixed media messing around, using aquarelle pencils, watercolours, black pens, and a lot of scanning and tinting with both vector and raster graphics software. It's not quite how I wanted it, but I could keep refining it for ages, and Christmas was looming, so it is what it is.

I love the way you can sketch something on paper, (or even trace bits of other people's photos if you're crap at drawing a freehand camel for instance) scan it, refine it with vector software, print it out, colour it in, rescan it, adjust the colours with Lightroom or something, then write the text with a black pen on paper, scan that, and drop it on top of the image on the computer.  It's great fun! 

THE STORY BEHIND THE CARD

Oh, you want the story, do you? OK. In order to try to avoid my stuff being hoovered up by AI bots, I've turned the text into jpg images rather than text, just to make things a little more difficult for them. You can print them out if you like. They were designed to be printed with 2 columns to an A4 page, but I had to separate the columns to make them legible on this blog.

If you'd like a large text version, please let me know. 

AULD SCOTS RHYMES

This just popped into my head, and I thought as it might interest some people I should stick it up here in case it gets lost, as it's quite old. It's a children's rhyme which I think originated with my ancestors who lived in the Blairgowrie area in the 19th century and beyond. My mum and her mum would recite it to me. It certainly goes back to the days when it was common to see horses everywhere!

William Smith, my fellow fine,

Can ye shoe this horse of mine?

Yes sir! And that I can,

Jist as weel as ony man.

Pit a bit upon the tae,

to mak the pownie clim the brae.

Pit a bit upon the heel,

to mak the pownie pace weel.

Pace weel, pownie

Pace weel, pownie,

Pace weel, pace weel, pace weel pownie!

And here's another one. This was my grandfather's pretend grace before meals when he was the municipal engineer in Darjeeling in the early 20th century. It was a bit of a joke with the local servants, who assumed it was some sort of strange, foreign pooja. (I know, we wouldn't do such things now or laugh at the staff, but these are different times, and this is a wee bit of history.)

Bake a puddin' bake a pie,

Send it up to John Mackay.

John Mackay is no in!
Send it up to the Man in the Min.

The Man in the Min is makin' shin:

Tuppence a pair, an' they're a' din!

(Do I need to supply translations? Is auld Scots a bit tricky if you're not from these parts? Let me know!)

 

Christmas greetings to all my friends!

 

EVERYDAY LIFE WITH A BROKEN ARM – PART 2

I've given up trying to make food look presentable. It tastes just as nice when it's a mess. (Well, you try slicing an avocado neatly with one hand!)

Bending over can be difficult and painful. If something falls on the floor, it ceases to exist.

These lids are hard enough to remove with two working hands. With only one, it's impossible.

 

TYPING WITH ONE HAND

Welcome to the exciting, new, non-typed section of my rather irregular blog. Why is it not typed? Well, read on, and all will become clear.

SUGIE pronounced shoogie

Browsing through the poetry of Thomas Morgan McGurk, my late father, I found this one, about his sister-in-law Struan's pure white cat, called Sugie (pronounced "shoogie" because she was as white as sugar.)

You'll notice that this contains proof, if such were needed, that my parents used to take a dictionary to bed and find exciting new words. Here's an opportunity to expand your vocabulary!

Anyway, it's the internet, and you know, cats ...


SUGIE
Albescent puss, proliferous and proud,
Cohabitant of luxury and ease,
What dream obtrude upon they gremial sleep?
What heart-seducing, feline Odysseys?


Distract thee from thy couch, when day has gone,
And night has wrapped its mantle round thy heart,
Calling thee forth, where wanton Tom-cats sing
Their love-songs with an unmelodious art?

Immantled in thy coat of hirsute snow,
Quivered with barbs of loveliness and grace;
The moonlit yard, beneath a starlit sky,
Is surely not for thee the safest place!

While shades of ancestors behind thee stand,
Adjuring thee to spurn thy false delights,
Biology has destined thee to write
An Iliad of polyandrous nights.

Go forth, and taste the sweet, connubial air,
The door's ajar, and Hymen holds his court,
Fair nymphomaniac, now take the field,
Horripilant and fierce before the sport!

Methinks it is a fate of worst degree,
A jest of feline gods in bacchic mood,
First to be born a cat, and then to act
The masquerade of humans, preaching good.

And yet, meseems, for thee the loving hands
Of gentle humans toil with tireless jest.
The lap of luxury, the cup of joy
Is shared with thee. Was ever cat so blest?

For thee the night is dark with felon's stealth,
When comely maidens, armed with spade and pail,
Delve the rich loam of dewy pleasances
And sift it then of worm, and slug, and snail.

What wonders of the deft, chromatic brush,
What meadows lush, and opalescent meads
Are to the world denied, through hours ill-spent
In min'stering to thy sanitary needs?

Oh, then the gay glissade, the lepid leap!
The vanished languor and the routed sloth !
Art is well lost for rapture such as this
And kings would lose their crowns for less, in troth.

Sugie! Thy name should blaze in solar glow,
Lighting a canvas in thy mistress' flat,
Amid thy progeny, esconsed in luxury,
The feline matriarch, the model cat.

T.M.M 5th January 1947

Her Last Encore

Tidying out some boxes of papers, I come across this poem. I must have written it about 10 years ago, at a guess, though I don't remember much about it. Thought it might raise the odd titter.

HER LAST ENCORE

She did not cry or scream or shout
that day she cut her finger;
she pulled the glassy fragments out
and sang - for she's a singer.

The bloody puddles stained her score;
the notes could not be read.
Yet still she sang her last encore,
ad-libbing words instead.

Alas! She could not stem the flow.
Red gore poured all around.
She faltered, weakened by the blow,
and slumped towards the ground.

The crowd, in horror, rose as one,
to see the diva dying,
"I fear that nothing can be done!"
the tenor whispered, crying.

So still the prima donna lies,
right there, where she did drop.
the crowd files out, with sorry sighs,
and the cleaner brings her mop.

ally McGurk