a small green acacia tree

I have waded, fully clothed, into the adventures of colouring the drawings and doing the page layouts for the Story of Bahamut book. It's fun, I enjoy the muddy bottom... and I get lost in the currents.

I'm getting to like Procreate, it's a generous app – and working with a tablet is growing on me... it's the pen! A pen in the hand is worth a gaggle of geese... no, a pen in hand is better than three blind mice in the bush? – herding cats with a pen in hand is better than with a mouse in your pocket?

Pens, mice, tablets, geese, cats – all good and welcome things.

the acacia

Growing up in Kenya, I was enchanted by trees – entities each one of them – jacarandas, baobabs, and of course the ubiquitous acacia tree. Along with the tall yellow grasslands, they were the symbols of The Savanna, standing like lone sculptures.

Spreading up and out with spindly and wandering branches that held aloft a mop of small green leaves. They tended to stand apart and give each other lots of room. They didn't like being crowded in – maybe they're not really forest types, or maybe this is simply a more spacious type of forest with a bigger horizon.

The branches are full of long beautiful white thorns. Those sharp needles were a good deterrent for animals that might think to graze on the tiny leaves, although giraffes are particularly adept at getting to the choice leaves from the tops of the trees with their agile and curly blue-green tongues. The thorns were hollow and served as perfect housing for colonies of stinging ants that lived in the trees – which worked as an added deterrent for any marauding grazers.

We knew these trees as Thorn Trees, which was also the name of a great cafe we used to go to in Nairobi – The Thorn Tree Cafe in the Stanley Hotel, all vestiges of a different version of colony. The story went that a thorn tree at the original hotel served as a message board for pinning notes for other travellers passing through.

Dr Livingstone, I presume? said Stanley... such folksy folklore of a history that needs to be rewritten – is there an AI for that?

Ok - I'll get back to the colouring with my bag of pens and a pocket full of mice.

As always, thanks for reading and indulging!
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