I'd been invited to a wonderful birthday by a very brilliant couple who live on the top of a hill in Wiltshire with their 4 children. It's hard to know what to get someone on such an occasion and a nice bottle of whisky didn't seem like enough, knowing the effort and energy that these guys expend to create a party. I felt very lucky when my hostess - the lady in the tye-dye dungarees - agreed to give me the inside scoop so that I could create a drawing to commemorate the party - before it happened. There's something rather thrilling, not to mention nerve-wracking, about creating a picture to give to someone on the day of a party and this one was a full blown evening-to-night festival on the side of a hill in Wiltshire. Photos of the cast-list were sent, heights adjusted as well as relative sizes of pets and teddy bears. A flurry of texts followed about top secret fancy dress - headdresses that started with a cardboard circle and over the course of 24 hours had a great deal of feathers added to them by us both - in real life and on paper concurrently. Existing aspects of a wonderful countryside life were woven in: elderflowers, yellow rattle, wild carrot and orchids. A Graylag goose, deer, a long-nosed dog, cinnebar moths, rabbits, swallows and chickens arrived. As we chatted further a totem pole crept in; an orange Le Creuset, Wispa chocolate, a dinner bell, best dungarees, favourite dresses, a game bag and tent, kareoke, a Land Rover, bikes, Sensations crisps and taramasalata...in no particular order. It's wonderful to have a little window onto someone's life and I felt like I learnt a great deal about the subject - a modern gentleman who is passionate about the countryside and its conservation, a well-read family man and adored husband and father (also, a great advocate of a Schoeffel/Crocs combo). I very much hope that it becomes a zeitgeist of that fabulous evening; the young and old roaming the fields - may the skies above this wonderful family always be cloudless and sunny...with a socking great disco ball hanging in the middle.