Obviously the extra financial strain from paying maintenance and extra on the mortgage at a time when my business had barely got off the ground didn't do me any good and by the end of 1988 I was struggling financially, so I was glad when my ex-partner from Rustcraft, Simon Osbourn, who was now in charge of one of the studios at British Greeting Cards offered me a job working with him! ...well, I still had to get through an interview with his boss Andrew Gentles (who was the bosses son or something like that!) and impress him as to my abilities. I was immediately unhappy when Simon told me what Mr. Gentles had said after I'd left the interview room, his comment of, "Yes I think we'll take him on, he seems desperate enough!!!" tended to rankle with me. However I needed the money and took the job and started to look for another, I enjoyed working with Simon again and one night just two months after starting there I arrived home from work to find a message on my answering machine from a chap in Leeds called Nigel Widdowson who ran a small design company that I'd contacted about a year before about the possibility of freelance work. He'd never replied until now, he said that one of his illustrators was leaving and would I like to come along for an interview? I did go along and he offered me a job then and there, with a couple of thousand more than I was getting at B.C.C.C.! So it was with an extremely smug face that I got to hand in my notice to Mr. Andrew Gentles the next day, I walked up to him in the middle of the office, handed him the envelope with a curt, "I think you know what this is!" and walked off again! It felt good! ...every dog has his day, and my tail was fairly wagging on that occasion!

So in January 1989 I started work at Nigel Widdowson Graphic Design. I must admit this was one of, if not the best jobs I've ever had so far. The illustration work was varied and interesting, we did stuff for Wimpey Homes, Foxes Biscuits, Michael Benn publishing and other illustration jobs from various ad agencies in the area who didn't have their own illustrators. Nigel had a reputation for quality and could be a hard taskmaster sometimes but I do look back on that job with some fondness! I won't bore you with the machiavellian details of how the business came to fold but suffice it to say that in November 1990, by now married to Audrey and with a baby daughter Mary Anne I was made redundant just a few weeks before Christmas! ...bloody wonderful!