Ian Strathcarron – författare

If there is a typical example of Annabel Fairfax’s oil painting, it is a bowl full of abstracted flowers and foliage, her bright bold brushstrokes and markings setting them apart from the mundane. Her watercolours of animal life and picturesque locations capture the moment and are painted with energy and freshness. In ‘Delightful, Enchanting’ Annabel Fairfax shows us the imaginative humour of her oil and watercolour paintings – from her travels around the world to the peaceful haven of her studio on the Isle of Wight. Her paintings are harmonious and decorative, the very opposite of photographic; she paints with her eyes, the subject matter becoming an idyllic version of reality. She exhibits regularly, is in private collections around the world and her work is frequently used for cards, prints and giftware.

Ian Strathcarron follows Mark Twain and his caravanserai as it sways across the Holy Land and the two writers' contrasting adventures and observations are told in Innocence and War. Twain's pilgrims landed in Beirut and went on to Baalbec and Damascus. They then headed south through the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Nazareth then finally on to Jerusalem, Jericho, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem and Jaffa. Strathcarron follows their exact route though the countries are now Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the West Bank-with diplomatic diversions by sea on the writer's yacht Vasco da Gama, where needed. Together they meet the tribes and tribulations of the Holy Land, where the religious is political and the political is religious, where natural beauty meets man-made squalor, where hope and despair hang from the same tree and where trouble is always close at hand. Travel was troublesome then and it is troublesome now. Troublemakers and troubleshooters vie for supremacy. Both protagonists suffer for their troubles-and only sometimes laugh it off.

Nigel Molesworth, ‘the curse of St. Custard's’, was a much-loved post-war fictional schoolboy character who featured in a series of books by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle. The books also featured the headmaster Grimes, Nigel’s annoying younger brother Molesworth 2, his best friend Peason, the head boy Grabber and the school wet Fotherington-Thomas. Nigel’s main characteristic was his cynicism and in Nigel Molesworth’s Cynical Tendency he has, through the success of his YouTube channel The Cynical Tendency, started a Cynical Tendency political party and his school friends have all become heads of the main political parties. The play starts with a Prologue for those unfamiliar with the characters, and the action is then set just after a general election in the near future, the result of which was chaotic and all the players could possibly become Prime Minister but only with Nigel’s support. Nigel on the other hand…

Pepper the dachshund therapy dog sets off across the African Plains to cheer up the unhappy elephant Poncho. Along the way she meets a giraffe living with camels, survives a wildebeest stampede, makes friends with an aardvark, walks with a leopard through a valley of warthogs, befriends a vegan crocodile, swims with an inflatable hippopotamus, steals a picnic, avoids hungry lions, sprints with an ostrich and is charged by a bull elephant. And she hasn’t even met Poncho yet.

When in July 2024 the incoming Labour Government announced as one of its priorities to stop hereditary peers sitting and voting in the House of Lords, Unicorn's Chairman and backbench hereditary peer Lord Strathcarron decided to write about the political machinations involved in the Government trying to abolish him on the one hand, and the Opposition trying to foil abolition on the other. The result is an insider's guide to the workings of the Parliamentary process, with direct access to the movers and shakers involved, and a not always entirely complimentary commentary on the key players involved.