PRINTED IN PENRITH; BOUND IN LANCASHIRE

Date Posted: 9th May 2018

It’s here! - The reprint of THE MAN WHO COULDN’T STOP DRAWING which, in 182 pages tells the extraordinary story of Kelly’s life. Beautifully bound and full of enticing colour pictures, it looks back from his lonely end in Norfolk as Roberta Penelope in 1993 to his birth in industrial Workington in 1918 setting the pattern of a whole life spent in self-inflicted poverty.

There are a few updates since the last print because I keep discovering new things. It’s like watching a play. New walk-on characters appear and say something interesting about him leaving me with a snippet of new information which I then follow up with more detective work. One of the big surprises recently was discovering in a letter that the HRT he was taking was not prescribed for him but for his ex-wife Christine. I was misled when I found a calendar among his effects with HRT writ large in some places. The year was indeterminate because he recycled a calendar year upon year by over-writing days of the week to make it unintelligible to everyone including himself. No wonder he was constantly missing doctors’ appointments.  His prolific writing of letters is a wonderful bonus for a biographer but changing dates on paintings, completing some he began in the 50s and 60s later in life and ‘borrowing’ his wife’s HRT are a biographers nightmare.

So today is big post-out day for those who gave me an advance order for the book (and there are a lot). They will receive a little extra something for their patience. For those who haven’t ordered yet, it is still at the introductory price of £25 on the merchandise page of this web site (I see it is now available on Amazon at £28). It could be slightly more in shops though because printing costs have increased quite a lot since the first print run and, as ever, it has been printed and bound in the UK.

The fallout from the Countryfile programme continues. No two days are ever the same. Now, where do I put 800 copies of the book …? (200 have gone already)