A scribblegraph self portrait

Self Portrait(s)

a hastily scribbled bio & portrait including a brief history of the sandwich fascination and other oddities.

I am writing a proper bio tonight which is just way not fun. I got as far as ‘Hey! I’m Ash’ …and then I started scribbling. This beanie came all the way from Nikki Cartlidge in London (thank you!) and has been worn on many heads. Here it is on mine!

See? Tangents. I’m great at them. Bio! Okay okay – all about me… in the third person, because apparently that’s classy now. It used to be a sign of mental instability, and I hate it when my 7yo does it. But I can talk about me in the third person, sure.

Ash was born in Dudinka in Russia on the shores of the frozen Yenisei River. His father was an itinerant scrap metal tradesman; his mother the first female airport traffic controller in the world. Sadly, both were eaten by narwhals before he reached his ninth birthday but amazingly, it was not one incident. It was two separate bastard narwhals on two separate crappy days. But that’s a whole other bio.

He spent the next four years in an orphanage and was put to work making sandwiches for all the other children. Mostly he enjoyed inventing sandwiches, but things don’t grow so well in good old Dudinka, because it’s just mind-shatteringly cold. So sandwiches were generally made out of seafood (with a heavy tendency towards narwhal steaks) which suited him just fine.

At the age of thirteen he began to crave a broader selection of fresh ingredients, and posing as a chef’s assistant second class in the Russian Navy, he boarded a yellow submarine and ended up in Australia. He did in fact pass an octopus’s garden, and you may often spot the creature in his scribblings.

He arrived in Perth in the great Western state, and opened up a little sandwich street-store where he quickly gained notoriety as one of the finest sandwich chefs in Australia (still with a tendency to favour garfish, herring and flounder. Narwhals are somewhat thin on the ground down under).

…oh, he is also known to write utter nonsense and sometimes he scribbles.