This year I'm selling Christmas cards. The following two designs are available in my online shop, right here. You won't be surprised to learn that my designs shy away from the baby Jesus and other overt religious symbolism. Instead, my seasonal offerings feature natural world magic, especially poignant in this Darwin anniversary year.

Here's Christmas tree of life (with thanks to Klimt and Darwin). You’ll notice a few little Christmassy references among the swirly branches of the tree. It's available in packs of 10 cards with envelopes for £3.50.

These are already selling fast!

Count Raggi's bird of paradise is the national bird of Papua New Guinea, and a more joyful, dazzling and triumphant symbol of the natural world I can't imagine. If you saw the BBC’s recent Lost Land of the Volcano, you will have seen BBC cameramen Gordon Buchanan tracking and filming these astonishing birds in New Guinea. Packs of 6 cards with envelopes are usually £5, but as a special Christmas offer, I'm selling them for just £2.50.

This year you can also buy charity cards with my designs on through eBay, available in packs of 10 cards with envelopes for £3.50. All proceeds go to YWCA.

Here's Christmas dove, click here to buy.

And here’s The First Day of Christmas, click here to buy.

Yesterday we went fishing on the Thames near the beautiful, polite riverside village of Pangbourne. Our friend Martin recently bought himself a little boat and asked if we would like to join him for a spot of pike fishing in a weirpool just by Whitchurch toll bridge (the other privately owned Oxfordshire toll bridge which legally rips off the travelling public - for 40p a time, would you believe).

Three lovely men in a boat: Martin, Moth and Rupe
I joined them after having visited Martin's lovely wife Nat. The river was alive with birds; herons, grey wagtails, kingfishers and even a pair of Egyptian geese.
But it was the fish we were after, and when I joined them after they'd been fishing two hours, they hadn't even had a bite. As the afternoon sun sank lower signs of life in the water became visible; a few bubbles here and there, ripples from little fish scared up to the surface by predators. There were fish down there all right.

Finally, Rupe was 'in' and judging by the bend on the line, it was big! He played the fish for a few minutes and finally got it close to the boat.

As its head surfaced, I thought it looked more like a crocodile than a fish – the diameter across its head was six inches, and we could see it was three maybe even four feet long! That must weigh 15lbs, we reckoned! Martin reached for the landing net, got the net underneath the monster (which was going to have bend a bit to fit in it…) but at the very last moment, disaster! It came off the hook and disappeared back into the dark water. Luckily, Moth's photo shows I’m not exaggerating:
We were left with only the memory of the one that got away.

"Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" said Charles Darwin in the final sentence of his 1858 world-changing book 'On the origin of species.'

Last year I created a short limited edition of drypoints tinted with watercolour inspired by this sentence.

Such has been the demand for this picture that I have made a second edition of five more drypoints.

The picture is 400mm x 500mm and is just £100 unframed. Remember that each one is an original, handmade work of art painstakingly (and I mean painstakingly) tinted with watercolour. It’s the perfect gift for anyone who loves the natural world.

A glimpse of Sir David Attenborough

He’s shown us all the natural world
And brought such viewing pleasure
For 50 years we’ve watched him now
He’s a national treasure

He’s told us all about the lives
Of creatures great and small
Of how they rise, and grow and breed
And eventually fall

He's shared some great moments of his life
With us on the telly
Like when he met gorilla friends
And turned us all to jelly

For three hours I queued with hundreds more
For him to sign my book
We waited patiently in line
Just to get a look

An old man with a pen in hand
Sitting at a table
As I meet him I’m overwhelmed
To speak I'm hardly able

Not on a screen this time, oh no
He's there in front of me!
He signs his name and then looks up
It’s my face he wants to see

The things that his old eyes have seen!
Beast, bird, bear and bat
And for this brief moment of his life
It's me he’s looking at!

After queuing for three hours at Waterstones bookshop in Oxford on Tuesday I had the privilege of once again meeting David Attenborough. He signed two books for me: one his latest book called ‘Life stories’, and the other, my copy of Alfred Russel Wallace's book 'The Malay Archipelago' which Sir Dave read as a child and excited his interest in birds of paradise.

Yeah, I know! What a hero. What a privilege.

This year has been a bit of a Paul Gauguin year for me really. Here he is. Not only did I finally get my hands on a copy of a brilliantly funny and informative DVD by Waldemar Januszczak called ‘Gauguin: The Full Story’ but we also visited Gauguin’s grave in French Polynesia. So when we got the chance to go to Brittany for two weeks (we got back on Friday) it was obvious that I must check out some of the places in Brittany where the mad bastard lived and worked.

Gauguin’s life seems to have been one of restless travel, always searching for something, always on the move. Whenever he returned to France, his preferred ‘home’ seems to have been Brittany, which in the 19th century must have felt like a long, long way from anywhere, a remote and wild peninsula of rugged beauty, sparsely populated, where they even spoke a different language. They still do. Just right for Gauguin. He went to Pont-Aven, on the south coast.

Pont-Aven is a delightful small town nestling in a deep river valley near the coast. It's still delightful today so inevitably full of tourists. In Gauguin's day it was quieter. People made their living fishing and farming. In 1886 he lived at the Pension Gloanec right in the centre of the village.

Together, with Gauguin as their leader, they founded the Pont-Aven 'school' which used strong flat colours and symbolism to create a new visual 'language' which later would have a profound influence on some of the giants of 20th century art who came after them, including Picasso.

The Pension Gloanec is now a newsagent selling books, postcards, maps and of course, art materials. There's a statue of arguably Pont-Aven's most famous son in the middle of the town square:

There's a lovely small museum in the village which has original paintings by some of the artists who worked here, including Gauguin. In 1890 as Pont-Aven became busier, he went to live and work for a few months in Le Pouldu, about 10 miles from Pont-Aven. Here, he lived in the Buvette de la Plage, which is now a museum, 'La Maison du Marie Henry' named after the woman who ran the place.

There's now a plaque on the wall of the Pension which lists all the artists who lived there with him.

The interior has been reconstructed to how it was in Gauguin's day. Gauguin and his artist friend the Dutchman Meijer de Haan who also lived in here spent the winter months redecorating the dining room. They portrayed themselves on the doors on either side of the back wall of the dining room:

Here’s the side wall:

The original paintings, glass and panels have been removed, but faithful reproductions are very effective. Here's what they did on the glass in the window:

Cheerful, eh?

During our stay in Brittany these past two weeks, I did a couple of long rides, through the absurdly pretty hamlets with granite stone farms and along the lofty cliff tops near Plouha. I rode along gorsey tracks with the wind in my face and down steep damp stoney woodland paths towards perhaps my favourite beach in Europe: La Plage du Palus. I first rode on this beach eleven years ago and the memory of cantering over the smooth wet sand has never left me. You just feel completely freeeeeee!

In the summer this beach is busy with holidaymakers, but for 10 months of the year all you get are a few local dogwalkers, the odd surfer, a few musselpickers, the occasional fisherman… oh, and, at low tide, horses from the nearby stables.

I’m not used to spending two hours at a time in the saddle, so consequently after each ride, my knees and thigh muscles ached like buggery!

On my last ride on Thursday, as we cantered through the surf, a cloud of black-headed gulls followed us along the length of the beach, diving for tiny creatures displaced in the sand by the hoof-fall. Fabulous.

Photos: Moth Clark

A new film about the life of Charles Darwin is released on Friday. I rarely go to the cinema because it’s too expensive and there’s nowhere to park in Oxford but I might make an exception for this. Check out the film's website: the home page is beautiful!

For me going shopping is a chore, not a leisure activity. So it's unusual for me to be blogging about my favourite shop. It's not Harrods, or Harvey Nicks, it's not, Broad Canvas the art material shop in Oxford, although that comes a close second to my very favourite shop in the world: Evenlode DIY in Eynsham, Oxfordshire.

I went in there yesterday (it's just round the corner from my house) to get a key cut for £3 (they charge £8 at the key cutter in Oxford) and it occurred to me that this must be the best shop in the world. It's an Aladdin's cave which sells lots of exceptionally useful and wonderful things, displayed – if that’s the word- in a gloriously ramshackle and utilitarian way. Balls of string hang from the ceiling, jostling for position with hand tools, washing up brushes, electrical bits and bobs, bird seed, scissors and kitchen utensils. Colourful bedding plants greet you as you walk in, tempting you towards the garden supplies, pet food, bits to fix your bike, dog leads and strange solvents and chemical compositions to fix whatever it is you need to mend. Paint brushes festoon the walls next to boxes of screws, hinges and lengths of wire. They sell Christmas trees in December, they'll sharpen your shears, mix any colour of paint you want and cut timber and glass to size for you. They'll sell you one nail if that’s what you want. And if you want a 3" copper phlanged thingummybob for your oohjammaflip, they’ll probably have one in a dusty box somewhere hiding in a corner. And if they haven’t got it, they'll get it in for you.

Opened 35 years ago by Eynsham resident Robin Saunders, he still runs Evenlode DIY cheerily and helpfully, whistling while he works. And everything here is way, way cheaper than those hideous, unhelpful, faceless out-of-town DIY superstores.

It will be a very sad day indeed when Evenlode DIY, and other independent local mercantiles just like it are finally squeezed out by the likes of B&Q and Homebase.

Last night we went to the recently renovated Assembly Rooms in Leamington Spa to see Scottish funksters the Average White Band.

They were funktastic!

For me, Onnie McIntyre’s bright, insistent and jangling rhythm guitar give AWB its unique sound. And combined with bouncing, energetic bass riffs, crisp and groovy drums, I find it irresistible.

Some people might find the catchy tunes on the sax more distinctive, but for me it's that funky, 'high key' guitar.

The sound quality in this venue was superb – really clear and bright – and did justice to AWB’s joyful, upbeat songs. We stood at the front and shook our average white arses until our legs ached (that could just be our age, of course).

I felt slightly cheated that they didn’t play two of my favourites, 'Queen of my Soul' and 'Let’s go Round Again' but hey, they funked me to the core, so who am I to complain?

Photos: Moth Clark

On Friday the postman brought me my copy of Richard Dawkins' new book The Greatest Show on Earth.

I was not going to start it until we go on holiday later this month, but I couldn’t resist.

Today, in the early 21st century, 150 years after Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’ it seems daft that an eminent scientist such as Dawkins should have to waste precious time on writing a book to present the evidence for evolution, which is a scientific fact. But staggeringly, 40% of Americans don't ‘believe’ in evolution. Such is the virulence of creationists, religious dogma and what Dawkins calls ‘history deniers’ – people who despite incontrovertible evidence still deny that certain things happened, the Holocaust for example, or evolution – this book is so very necessary.

I’m less that a quarter of the way through, but already he has clarified the misunderstanding of people who deliberately say evolution is 'only a theory'. The word theory can mean a number of things including an idea or hypothesis, or in the sense Darwin meant it: a series of ideas and general principles which seek to explain some aspect of the world.

I've read many thousands of pages about the natural world and biogeography, I've seen a lot of natural history and documentaries and I always learn something new and astonishing about life on earth, as I have in this book. He tells us about dog breeding, 'missing links', predators and prey, the evolutionary 'arms race', symbiosis, plate tectonics and how it has affected the distribution of living things. It’s fascinating stuff. Dawkins addresses this book at those who find evolution difficult, but sadly they are not likely to read it.

I love Dawkins' sexy scientific brain, his wisdom and wit, his logic and reason, his use of crystal clear English, and his wonder at the biodiversity of the world. If you love the natural world and want to understand more about why it is the way it is, you’ll love this joyful book: 'The Greatest Show on Earth'.

There's a nice review of it here.