Every year I buy one of those pocket diaries in the hope that it'll keep me organised. Every year I give up after the first month and scribble things on scraps of paper instead.

At the end of 2006 I bought a diary with the same ridiculous hope as usual, and one day before Christmas I was hanging around in the kitchen of the vet's surgery where Caz worked, with nothing to do. I only had a pen and the diary in my pocket, so I drew Jude, who was lying on the floor.

Later I thought it'd be a nice idea to post the diary as a blog, showing my appointments alongside scribbles of what I'd actually done that day, as if anyone would be interested.

This was when I was still using the diary as a little doodle book, and still concerned that every day's space should show something that happened that day. But I quite like it because it's the first time I thought of giving the week a theme. I decided that every day I would draw whoever I saw on the bench outside my boat, trying to tell a story with each one. Shame I ruined it with Sunday's picture.

This is one of Caz's favourites. Part of our London-to-Singapore-by-train journey.

We took two long train trips in China. The sleeper from Beijing to Guilin was great: comfortable, with friendly fellow passengers laughing at our attempts at Mandarin, and sometimes talking on more serious matters as on Monday's picture. The other, Guilin to Nanning, was the worst of the whole journey, on hard wooden seats right next to the streaming toilet with chain smokers, hackers and gobbers everywhere.

In Hanoi I sat on the kerb trying to capture the traffic chaos while Caz was in the theatre watching the water puppet show. A couple of days later we hired motorbikes and went to see live snakes being cut open so their fresh bile could be drunk by businessmen who were as self-important there as they are everywhere.

As with all entries from that trip, this was photographed somewhere in the sun and emailed to my brother, who uploaded it. Hence the fuzziness.

This actually happened. I don't think I need to say more.

God this was a depressing experience, but I had such fun doing the picture as I drowned my sorrows in the pub.

This man had asked me to look at his website, which was (and still is at time of writing) an utter train wreck. I'd spent hours trawling through his statistics and found out some interesting information about where people were coming from and going to, where it was all going wrong, and what to do about it.

But all he was interested in was pushing his latest marketing scheme. Fine, I thought, and tried to work through where he could put that stuff to get people's interest. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say that he's one of those people who believes you have to have everything there, all with equal importance (apart from what's bright red), preferably badly written and with links that lead nowhere.

(I've given up web design.)

Poor old Glenn was a really nice bloke who was my benchpal in the hot summer when I painted the boat from very early in the morning, before work. He was an ex-professional footballer who had a kid somewhere in Spain whom he never saw. He drank from a bottle which he swore contained just water, and I believed him, and still do. I think he just had a lapse, and he was refused an operation after destroying his last chance. It was painful to see Red Fleece Man going the same way.

He came over to the boat on the pretext of asking us about the pole stuck in the river. He expected us to be unfriendly and when we weren't, he ranted anyway. Every time we responded he picked another thing to get angry about. His idea (and he's not alone) seemed to be that because we were living within our means, in a little discomfort and with few luxuries, we were somehow taking something from others. He wanted our living costs artificially raised to match those of people who've burdened themselves with big mortgages and large energy bills.

It's hard to condense a long argument into a small space. Anyway, it left us pretty upset and determined to find out who he was. I never did, although I saw him around a few times and stared at him in a manner I'm sure he found utterly terrifying.

Yes, she spent almost all day sitting with me, fiddling with the kerning between letters in headings.

It's a very difficult balancing act. On the one hand the client is paying (although in this case not by the hour, sadly) and therefore has final say; on the other hand what's the point in employing a designer, only to use them as a monkey? If I were a plumber I would not expect my customer to stand over my shoulder telling me which joint to tighten and which pipes to use. Very frustrating.

I'd seen the John Martz quote some time before on Twitter. I emailed him to ask if I could use his words, not knowing that he is 'Johnny' who contributes to the Drawn! illustration blog. The next thing I knew, I was listed there. Hurrah!

A few months later I went back to the same company, had a similar experience and posted Brain Hari-Kiri II.

Someone looked at this and said it summed me up. I'm fond of it, even if it is a poor imitation of Lewis Trondheim.

We spent two weeks moving the boat out of Cambridge, where there is a genuine community of boaters. There we were near the Watford Gap in nice enough countryside, but it suddenly dawned on me that we'd lost all that. It was raining, it was grim under the trees and I was on my own. I rang a friend on some pretence just to have a person to talk to.

You can't beat a real community, and there are few of them about, even on the canals. Cambridge is lucky, and if they get rid of their liveaboard boaters they will lose a lot more than just a few boats.

On a positive note, for once I was happy with the colours in this picture.

Another goodbye.

I think it's safe to say that Uncle Mark wasn't the most well-liked character in my wider family. But for some reason his death affected me badly, and I can't put it any better than I did in the picture.

Better drawn than usual, with a more imaginative layout. I didn't document further the back pain, but six months later I was still going to the osteopath.

I thought only a single panel could do justice to the scene, and I wanted to get across the incomprehensibility of the language through the design somehow. (Most religions are incomprehensible to me, hence the same treatment given to the Christian ceremony on 080609.)

But it was a fascinating business, and not as boring as the Hindu ceremony I attended about ten years ago, which was much longer. But my back has got worse in the meantime (see above!), and after an hour I was about to scream.

Also I kept wanting to pull out my sketchbook but thought it would be rude, even though I doubt anyone would have minded. I should have sat at the back.

I like this one because of the final panel, which neatly summed up my state of mind, and because the drawings of the dogs weren't as dodgy as I sometimes make them.