Cartoonist's moan, summer 2013:  I'm writing this well over year after I drew the last Ol and Sal strip, and a year and a half into the most frustrating experience of my life. With unpleasant irony, the morning after publishing the cartoon titled Self Harm in October 2011 I found my right forearm ached when I gripped anything (pens and pencils incuded). The pain didn't go away so over the following weeks and months I started cartooning less regularly, doing stretching exercises and having physiotherapy. Graduallly the pain faded from my forearm, but then began to get worse in my elbow! Since last autumn I've had more physio and begun daily Pilates exercises (great fun if weird to look at). More recently, an MRI scan established that my elbow is inflamed but with no nerve or serious muscle damage, which was some consolation. Annoyingly though, I'm still not able to write, draw, type or click a computer mouse for longer than a few minutes without my elbow aching, a result I guess of many years of cartooning and desk jobbing. Some hair-raising websites suggest that repetitive strain injuries like this can hang around for a lifetime, but I'm determined to find a way round this one. I feel like I've only just scratched the surface of what I can do with Ol and Sal - it will return, although I might have to learn to foot-cartoon first....

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