Fortunately, daddy tries to make things up

This is me being rescued by space mice.

A couple of months ago, I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s book Fortunately, the Milk on impulse. My children loved it, especially my five year old son. The premise for the book is that the narrator's father steps out to buy a pint of milk and then has to account to his children for the long time he is absent at this task. He spins them a tale of having been kidnapped by aliens and captured by pirates before being rescued by a time-travelling dinosaur called Professor Steg, who whisks him off on further adventures in his time-machine before dropping him back at the house. Fortunately, the milk survives all these adventures (and even aids in a couple of time-paradox scrapes) and the father produces it as material proof that he has been telling the truth.

I've borrowed Chris Riddell's picture of the Galactic Dinosaur Police from Philip Ardagh's review of the book for the Guardian: here. If it infringes copyright, or any interested parties want me to take it down, just let me know via @keatsandchapman

It’s a nice piece of whimsy with some Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett riffs on the fantastic characters encountered by the narrator (a one-eyed God named Splod, inter-galactic dinosaur police etc.). All this is accompanied by some fine illustrations by Chris Riddell in the UK edition and Skottie Young in the American edition. 

I haven’t seen the American edition, so don’t know how Skottie Young’s artwork compares with Chris Riddell. I’m intrigued by this decision: it’s not unusual for employ different illustrators on different sides of the Atlantic, sometimes because the same book will be published by different publishers or outlets of the same firm. But in the UK edition of the book, at least, text and illustration overlap and there are, for example, separate portraits of characters from the story in the endpapers. So the different editions must be very different books, even if only in minor details.

As noted, my son loved the book, but this had consequences I hadn’t foreseen. Shortly after we finished reading the book as a bedtime story, I was walking him to school after dropping his sister at nursery and he started asking me in a very pointed way what I had been doing whilst I was away from him. At his prompting, I started making up a convoluted story of my own - like the narrator’s father in Fortunately the Milk it turned out that I had been waylaid by aliens (Cat Aliens) and rescued by Space Mice whilst the Cat Aliens fought it out with some Dogs from Outer Space. And I ended up doing the same for next few days, spinning out our walk to school with free-falling, circular stories, that all ended up the same way: Professor Steg would pick me up in her time-machine and get me back home in time for our walk to school.

This is one of the Cat Aliens who kidnapped me.

I learned two things from this experience: firstly, I love making up stories for my son, largely because of the obvious pleasure he derives from having stories told to him ; secondly, I lack invention - only two days in, I was ripping off H.G. Wells' The Time Traveller for plot lines and baddies.* My admiration for writers like Gaiman, who make up new stuff all the time grew with each day I struggled to come up with something. 

This is the arch-enemy of the Space Cats, a Dog from Outer Space

The pictures I've posted here were all I managed in my attempt to keep up with Jake Parker's 'Inktober' exercise. My day job doesn't leave as much time as I'd like for drawing, especially since October is the middle of term, sigh.

* Don't ask me why, Dr Freud, but I always seemed to end up in an underground cave ...