MEETING HOUSE SQUARE EXCAVATIONS Week 1

Greetings, fellow brethren of the filth and all those who wallow in mire searching for the answer to the great mysteries of the past. Here they are, the drawings I did during lunchbreaks at the Temple Bar rootfest. It will take a while to get all these drawings online, I'm hoping a few will be in glorious technicolour, the ones left in black and white feel free to print out and colour yourself, or better yet colour them directly on your screen using crayons. The image at the top of this missive is based on a photo the delightful Bishop of Nobber, Monsignor Kevin Weldon sent me via the magical method of emailing. Thank you your holiness, your parishioners don't know how lucky they are.

This one was drawn over a month before the excavation began. The government had started a feasibility study into setting up a cheese mine somewhere south of the Liffey. I was present at the initial clearance of the site (so the cheese engineers could take a butchers at the layers of cheddar strata underneath the Meeting House Square area.) Lo and behold archaeology was found and we all advanced gripping our trowels between our teeth much akin to Errol Flynn in 'Captain Blood.'

This was on the very first day of the excavation proper. Someday I hope to write John 'Broken Nose' Barrett's biography but for the moment I will have to be content drawing occasional pictures of him. Needless to say he didn't approve of this one. He was also at odds with the excavation believing the miners should be let directly at the cheese and to hell with the archaeology. 'How else will we save our economy?'

Here he is, the Bishop of Nobber himself doing a spot of moonlighting and enjoying a tub of pot Noodle. I don't like to gossip, but he was often seen smuggling sackloads of Brie off the site to bring to his starving parishioners. This isn't a great likeness of his holiness, but the tub of pot noodle is spot on.

The garden gnome style figure at the bottom left of this one is none other than Herr Uberrooter Alan Hayden. More of him to come. I drew him small at this stage so I wouldn't be overcome by his radiance (think of that bit in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' when they open God's teachest - just like that but remove the swirling light and angels and replace it with body odour.

This is quite a good one. The two gentlemen on the balcony above are hanging about hoping to catch a glimpse of Limburger. Although I can't be certain I think one of them is Bono and the other is Angela Merkel.

This is a dreadful one. Her Uberrooter does not work well in profile. It is one of a handful of images I managed to get down of Niall 'Two Chord Ditty' Colfer. His diminutive size meant he preferred to eat lunch under the table, so he wasn't an easy subject to draw.