Stories of Mr Wolf, 1966

Last week, Mary and I went to see the movie of Scott Freiman’s lecture Tomorrow Never Knows: Deconstructing the Beatles (Revolver).

The Beatles created their famous album “Revolver” during the summer of 1966. I’m afraid that my artistic creations during that summer were less sophisticated, probably because I’d just turned six at the time. Above is an illustration from my 1966 book “Stories of Mr Wolf”. According to a date on the page, the drawing was created on Sunday, July 3rd of that year.

The stories turned out to be rather short, and much less psychedelic than the Beatles’ music! Mind you, they did involve talking wolves who visited Scarborough, so they could have been described as being “far out”…

I scanned the surviving contents of my 1966 book recently. As you can see, the paper is becoming extremely yellow, and it’s very fragile. Fifty more years from now, the whole thing will probably have turned to dust, but then so will I!

When I penned that drawing, back in July 1966, my father was the same age that I am now. Did I imagine then that, fifty years later, I’d be scanning my drawing into a digital image, then posting it on a publicly-networked page for all the world to see? Of course not! I wouldn’t even have known what those concepts were. That wasn’t just because I was only six years old at the time, since I’m sure that my parents would not have understood those concepts either. There were contemporary TV shows that attempted to predict what life would be like in the twenty-first century, such as Thunderbirds, but all of those shows completely missed the emergence of the internet. It really was a case of “Tomorrow Never Knows”…