Drawing chubby mermaids is fun; you can see lots more that other people have drawn here. I tried to make it look sort of like an old-time saucy seaside postcard. Stuart was most pleased that I'd included Colin the crab. Stuart's a big Colin fan; I didn't have him on one page of There's a Shark in the Bath and Stuart protested, so I put him in. (This is not Colin, below, this is just some random lovestruck fish.)
Speaking of seaside postcards, my greatest contact with the British seaside has been Bexhill-on-sea, where Stuart's dad lived until he died recently. Stuart was there on the weekend, and he and his brother stopped into the Sovereign Light cafe, across the street from his dad's place. There was a little notice in the menu about it being featured in a Keane music video, so this morning, Stuart looked it up on YouTube. We were quite staggered to see that it could practically be a documentary of where Stuart's dad used to live. The video starts out with a shot of his block of flats, goes up and down the promenade where he walked every day, and ends back at the cafe, in front of his flat again. We watched it, and watched it again, and Stuart got quite teary. He's had a hard year and it felt a bit like a tribute to the place he's visited so often, and, in a way, to his dad. You can watch it here:
Direct YouTube link