Hello everyone, happy hibernation to you!

Christmas was a dark dwelling in the caverns of my mind while being in the extended womb of my mother's front room. Perhaps it’s because I’m in the relative new comfort of middle age that I didn’t resist. Instead, as my eyes rested on the flickering telly acting as fire, I followed these inward recesses lined with emblems of fear, anxieties, and the general willy nilly of the now and the unknowable. Glad I did because I met with some welcome insights, hidden clearings filled with the building blocks of my patterned thinking. ‘Ahh’ I said in my mind’s voice.

When I got back to London, I cat-sat for a friend and spent 3 days inhaling 3 week’s worth of an online course about the brain. I really enjoyed creating my own Glossary of Terms, and paraphrasing descriptions to make them feel at home in my medial temporal lobe.

Although, that said, my brain really had no idea it was considering itself, I don’t think. It was too busy learning. And when it wasn’t doing that, it was too busy taking breaks and building a symbolic place of itself as chasms over Christmas.

ONLINE SHOP with HEADWAY DONATION

I could go on and on with this meta-fun, but really I should tell you about two other things. First of all, I now have an online shop. It is a mixture of things really, prints of paintings, previous comics, homemade toothpaste, drawings of twigs, etc.

For the whole of January, rather than doing sales, I will give 10% of proceeds from all ‘Like an Orange’ supporters to Headway East London. Visit www.etsy.com/uk/shop/WallisEates and message me (from the shop platform, it will give you the option) with the code ORANGE for any purchases you might like to make.

WINGS

As you can tell, ‘Like an Orange’ is very much a long-haul project, but in the shorter term I am illustrating a book called ‘Wings’ which is a collaboration between myself and Dr Victoria Anderson about our time together working in HMP Wandsworth. It is a beautifully written account by Victoria about the hive-like panopticon prison building and the men we met there who swarmed in the wings, made drawings and shared stories with us.

For more on this project, please visit www.wings.cellmemory.org It IS another crowdfunding project, I’ll heads you up on that now! (You can keep it in your neurocytoplasm ready for some synapse action if you so fancy it.)

That’s it for now! Thank you for making it this far, and for your support orangenaral.

Toodle pip,

Wallis x

ps. the subject header refers to The Circle of Willis, the collection of arteries at the base of the brain that supplies the blood. I couldn't help but give it a narcissistic tweak.