CHARLIE MACKESY: "The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse"

I am so thrilled to share this podcast episode with you on this most thankful of weeks!

Charlie Mackesy, author and illustrator of the lovely, simple, but hugely inspiring book, "The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse" joins me today.

An amazingly talented, kind, and insightful man, who has spread an abundance of love and compassion through his pen and ink drawings, profound statements, and relatable characters, Charlie is as delightful to speak with as his book is to read. It's a moving conversation, welcome! ~ Delilah

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
By now, if you've been listening to my radio show,
or following me on social media, or listening to these podcasts,
you probably figured out I love books. Books clutter every
surface of my home. They are here in my studio.
I have shelves of books. I have a desk that's

(00:27):
piled up with books. They're all over my house, next
to the laundry. They're the thing you're most likely to
trip over because I have piles of books on the floor.
I kid you not. I'm somewhat of a hoarder and
I love books. You can't find a place to set
sometimes because I got books piled up, And please, please

(00:49):
don't try to ask me to narrow it down and
ask a foolish question like, well, what kind of books
do you like? Just pick those, because really I like them.
All you will find fiction. You will find nonfiction, saga's,
short stories, poetry books, lots of how to books. I

(01:09):
think I've got. There's like a popular mechanics series that
came out when I was a kid. I got all
of them. How to do everything, how I could. I
could build a house with my how to books. I can.
I can go to my how to books to learn
to do watercolor paintings. I have novels hardback, soft covers.

(01:31):
I got coloring books in the stacks. The list doesn't
even include my kids selection. My joy of reading. My
love of books is why I have a monthly book
club to share something that brings me so much joy
and to recommend the titles that I think you will enjoy.

(01:51):
Reading was a favorite pastime of my mother's. Wellmadine passed
her passion for the written word on to all four
of her chill written and I try to do the same. Although,
just like my mom, I've discovered that it takes with
some more than with others. When I stumble upon a
book I feel everyone will love, regardless of age, genre,

(02:14):
or any other number of variables, I get super excited.
That's what happened last December. I was choosing gifts for
my twelve stockings of Christmas giveaway and a beautiful picture book.
It's full of swirly calligraphy, amazing illustrations and the simplest, sweetest,

(02:37):
most profound messages. Came to me as a gift. My
friend Linda gave it to me as a gift and
I fell in love with it. Whether you're looking for
a little piece, a little comfort, a little insight, or wisdom,
or in my case, I have been I'll be honest,
I will admit it. It's hard to say, but I
have been paralyzed with fear the last two years, actually

(03:02):
the last four years, since losing my son's ach, I
have let fear dominate my decisions, and I found peace.
I found so much peace and so many things that
you might be looking for comfort wisdom between the pages
of this simple little book, The Boy, the Mole, the

(03:24):
Fox and the Horse. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox
and the Horse, by English author and illustrator Charlie Mackasie.
It was written, as Charlie notes in the foreword, for everyone,
whether you are eighty or eight, you've not heard of
this book, which I can barely believe, or you've not
prepared to take my word for it that I simply

(03:44):
won't believe. You've got to believe me when I tell
you this. Perhaps the fact that as of August the
book had been on the New York Times bestseller list
for eighty eight weeks and had sold over two million
copies in the US alone will speak to how beautiful
and relevant it is to our world. Right now. I

(04:05):
am so pleased that Charlie Mackasie is joining us on
Love Someone Today, hailing all the way from the UK.
We're going to catch up with him and his characters,
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Right
after we spend a little moment on one of the
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(05:09):
That's l A m O Lambo Footwear dot Com. Use
promo code Holiday off your order with me today. I
Love Someone with Delilah is Charlie Mackasie who's the author
of such a delightful book, The Boy, the Mold, the Fox,

(05:30):
and the Horse. So I have to tell you a
friend of mine, Lyndy. I don't know if you have
spoken with her, but she works with my company. Last
year she called me so excited, like she had found
the holy Grail, like you know, like we women get
when we find a pair of jeans that actually fit

(05:51):
in her comfortable, you know, and we're calling our friends.
Oh my god, you're not gonna believe this, she called.
She's like, you're not gonna believe this book. I'm sending
you a present. Wait till you see this, Wait till
you read us. And she sent me your book, and
I thought, this is like a kid's book. And then
I sat down and Charlie, I read it in one night,
and I went, oh, my gosh, it's like thousands of

(06:13):
years of wisdom condensed into such a sweet story. Well
that's very it's beautiful. And your illustrations, oh my gosh.
I love to draw, I love to paint, and when
I you know, the first time I read the book
was just because Linda had recommended it, and then I

(06:35):
got several copies to give to my listeners as gifts
last Christmas in our twelve stockings of Christmas, and then
I sat down with it just for me, and I
have little pieces of paper, little torn pieces of paper
stuck in different pages that I just wanted to kind
of read again and reflect on and honestly try to

(06:58):
incorporate into my everyday life. So thank you for the beauty.
Thank you for the simplicity. It's very simple, isn't it. Yeah,
it's so simple. Are you like this sweet? Like? Is
your heart really this sweet? I think that's for others
to say. You know, it's very hard to describe yourself
least I find it very difficult. I would never say

(07:19):
I was that sweet. I'm sure I don't know because
I've written, I've written some stuff, but my my heart
is not nearly as sweet or as pure as yours
because you wrote this incredibly touching little book that I
honestly think if we made this mandatory reading for everybody

(07:40):
in government right now, like if we could pass a
lot and say everybody in every nation around the world
who is in leadership position before they go to bed
tonight must read The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and
the Horse. Don't you think would wake up tomorrow in
a better world. Oh that's a love of things. I
have to write that down. But yeah, I mean, obviously

(08:04):
they did. Imagine if all the leaders in the world
sat down and read this book before they went to
bed and thought, you know what I could apply. I
could apply just one principle of this book to my
life tomorrow, to my decision making tomorrow, and the world

(08:25):
would be a better place. I mean, what do you
think success is, asked the boy to love, said them, mhmm.
I think that idea of success is fairly low on
the list of many a leader probably. I mean, let's
just send it to every university, to every professor at
every university that teaches an economics class or teaches a

(08:46):
business class, and let's just put a little torn piece
of paper right there. What do you think successes, asked
the boy, And let's just make that into a poster. Yeah,
that'd be pretty moving. I mean, it's it. It's a
good idea. I mean, obviously I wouldn't promote it, so
you know, it would look at me telling people to
print out my drawing. But I mean if you suggested, well,
I I let me be your champion. So if anybody

(09:09):
is listening to this podcast, who, as a professor or
a teacher, or a leader or a mayor or whatever
in a position of authority, at least print up the
page about what success is and make a poster out
of it. Good idea, and the other one of the
other pages. Um most of the old moles, I know,

(09:36):
I wish they had listened less to their fears and
more to their dreams. Well fit kind of can destroy dreams,
kind of real fear can destroy everything. That's pretty loud
of them, especially now, the last couple of years. Especially.
So I got this book last fall when we were

(09:57):
in the thick of the shutdown and the insanity that
was going on. And when this book came and I
read that, I felt like it was a gift from God,
like like he was saying, stop and listen to your
dreams instead. And not that I don't want to be
mindful or aware of what's going on, but I can't

(10:21):
live in that place. No, it's exhausting, you know. So
should we make a poster out of this page too?
If we're redefining success, the true meaning of success as love,
there's so much wrapped up in that, because then you go, well,
you know, what do you mean love? Do you just
mean like being romantically in love? And it's no, no, no, no,

(10:45):
no no from it. Well, let's see posters. I'm not
done with you yet. I want to do a poster
of of when the boy and the mole are sitting
on the limb and the fox comes along, just because
that's such a pretty meaning. Yeah. So what is your medium?
I'm trying to figure out. Is it ink? Watercolor? How

(11:08):
do you get to think it's it's ink and water color? Yeah.
So it's an old fashioned dip pen. I mean I
spill ink everywhere. It's like every it's sea of ink
splattered pages, and it's on my feet and you know, yeah,
I saw use ink and then I let it dry,
and then when the drawings dry, then put water color
over the top, and sometimes not even any color some
of those drawings. I just think your artwork is very

(11:31):
loose and flowing, and yet the little details, the little
nuances are so precious. Oh thank you. And I'm making
a little film at the moment. That's quite intense. I've
never done one before. You're making a film with your book, Yeah, yeah,
doing a little tiny animation animated film, and are you

(11:54):
drying each picture? Are you doing like old fashioned animation? Yeah,
you know I'm doing I'm doing quite a lot of them.
I have a lovely little team and we'll share the
share the load. But I must, I mean, the last
nine months, I must have drawn. I hate to think
how many drawings I've done, terrifying, so many. It's twenty
five frames a second. It's a lot of drawings in

(12:16):
frames a second. So let's just say this. This little
movie is a minute long, sixty seconds exactly. I mean,
I'm not gonna mats. You do the maths, but I know,
I mean it's half in the film's half. Now, Oh
my gosh, you you've got to do just for a
little five minute movie, over seven thousand drawings, and each

(12:36):
one has to be the same except for the little movement.
Well a tiny difference, Yeah, a tiny difference. So is
there a way to like leave the stick or the
branch they're sitting on out and just like move the hand.
So yeah, of course you don't have to re draw
the whole. Yeah, you have layers, you know, so sometimes
they'll be background and landscapes aretty much. Still, so you

(13:01):
don't have to reach Charlie. That's a lot of ink
me really aware. I don't want to think about it anymore.
But I love that you're doing it the old fashioned way.
I love that you did the book the old fashioned way.
People think my crazy doing it this way. I mean
everyone thinks on that. Yeah, we need to start a

(13:22):
movement to get Charlie Mackasey in the hands of every
You know, we can start with kids, because it would
be really good for children to learn this before they
get all messed up by our education system that teaches
them the exact opposite of what the Boy the More
the Fox and the Horse teaches. Yeah, don't you think
like the media and the education system and everything right

(13:45):
now kind of teaches kids the opposite. The irony of
all that is, you know that. I think sometimes if
you apply these principles, you'll do better. Anyway, I had
a band accompt to me a couple of years ago,
and I probably shouldn't say this, um anyway is a
name involved. But he came to my house and he'd
been following me on Instagram at gee, and he decided

(14:06):
to want to talk to you. He left his driver outside.
He was a very cool guy, you know, And he
sat with me and he said, you know, I kind
of feel that we need to run the bank on
these principles. But it's so against the flow, it's so
counter culture. So he said, he said, you know, if
if we're all honest, we we discover what our weaknesses are,

(14:29):
and then if we knew what they were, we could
cover each other. Okay, so if you're telling me that
this is what your struggles are, then that's great. There's
at least we know, whereas everyone's pretending to be strong,
everyone's pretending to be good at things when not, so
we don't really know. So he he applied the principles
to his bank, and he came senior a year later said, yeah,
this seems to be working. By being kinder and more honest.

(14:51):
I were sharing pain. No one's covering up anymore, you know,
all this stuff, and I was, you know, I cried
with him, and we had a cup of tea and
I cried as well, you know, I'm really throngthy you know.
He said, we have a community now, whereas but beforehand
we had a team, a team, and a team. We
are a winning team. And he said, now we have

(15:13):
something else you know, it's it's a it's a kind
of it and empathetic group of people who know each
other pretty deeply now and I'm not afraid to say
who they are, what they struggled with, or what they
fear or and because of that we worked better together,
you know. So I was I was fun, very moving.
I mean, I don't think I said like to make
a book that we help banks. Far from it. But

(15:35):
it was interesting at least. I don't know when you
decided to write this and publish it. If you had,
you could not have known how many hearts it would touch. No,
I mean, really I wrote a lot of those drawings
I wrote, I had made for um people that I
know and love, you know, who have been honest and

(15:56):
brave enough to tell me what they struggle with and
what I struggle with. I'm not like exempt from these struggles.
So who who do you? Who do you, Charlie? I mean,
obviously there's there's a little view and all the characters,
but is there one in particular that you feel as
you represent you the most? You know, it's interesting that
there's bit to me in all of them, and from

(16:18):
day to day I think sometimes I'm definitely like the fox.
I definitely take a while to trust people, so I'd
like go around in big circles, and then my circle
decreases and eventually I'll sit next to someone. Sometimes other
times I leaped straight in and I'm gun ho and
very happy and hugging and everything. But I do see
the fox in me. Um, I think I am like

(16:40):
the mole. I think I default the cake very quickly
if things go wrong. Um, I default a cake very
quickly when things go right, when I think. One of
my favorite pages was when the mall said I brought
you a cake and the boys like, where is it?
I hate it? And then I brought you another and
at the same things seems to have happened. Yeah, you

(17:03):
know that. I did that the other day with my sister.
I brought her, I got a beautiful take for her,
and I knew she was getting back like you know
that tea time, and I just every time I walked past,
and I thought, just a little, there's like a million
little universal truths here, just so sweetly put be curious
as they look up at the moon. How sweet is that?

(17:26):
How sweet is that? So I've read it to my children. Um,
the seventeen year olds didn't appreciate me setting them down
and making me read it. They're like, no, I bet
they couldn't. Ye for them that they could. They could,
they cope with it. Do they like it? They did
like it, but they're like, just give me the book.
Just give me the book mark. Let me read the book,

(17:46):
because I'm kind of animated and I like to, you know,
act out the characters. And it works. It works well
for my five year old, but not so much for
the seventeen year old. Yeah. I mean I get I
get a lot of emails and mails from from eighty
year olds and eight year olds, I really do, and
school kids, and but not many adolescents, not many teenagers.

(18:11):
I bet if we turned it into a crazy phone app,
I don't know. I don't get why kids like have
to be like this, glued to a device when there's
books you can touch and hold. Well, that's the thing.
I mean. It's interesting you say that because I kind
of remember when I decided to do the book. There's

(18:32):
a lovely irishmanchall column and you helped me so that
pages together on some terrible with digital stuff and he
I remember saying to him right at the beginning, I
think we should try and make a little treasure that
you can hold and it exists and it's it's a
solid and so I wanted it to be quite heavy.
I wanted it to really exist physically. And I get

(18:54):
these letters now from a lot of mothers who say
that their children hold it or have it physically into
their arms in bed, arms, the pillow, or they take
it with them to school. And I find that so moving,
that because because the screen is as you say, as
screen is a screen, and it's a different thing altogether.
But I love I wanted to have heavy paper and
I don't know it substance, physical substance. Yeah. And even

(19:20):
even though the drawings are very whimsical and very ethereal,
they're ethereal. They're light, like a spirit. Nice. But I
hope they I hope they also fairly grounded. I didn't
want to make something That's what I was going to say.
The colors and the composition, even though they're ethereal, the

(19:44):
colors and the composition, they're very grounded. They have something
and they leave an impression, like when you look at
one of your paintings, one of the drawings, especially one
that you've like the horse swimming, you fell, but I've
got you. After I looked at that and I studied it,
I went to sleep. The image was still in my mind,

(20:06):
was still I could still see. Yeah. I love that. Wow,
you're very talented young man. Well you're very kind, Cake
said the more cake. Cake. Yeah, but he discovers, he
discovers something better than Kate to see because I, you know,
there's the site, there's a part of the mole that

(20:27):
he's definitely the audit. He is deaf. That's why the
mole and I are simpatico. Especially when he wanted to
bless his friend. He wanted to, you know, to surprise him,
but his addictions just like, ah, dang it, I had
right right then he discovers that love is better than
better than cake. How many times in my life have

(20:50):
I been disappointed at myself or somebody I dearly love
because addictions kick up and it gets in the way
of love. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I
don't know who said this. I think it's a brilliant
was a discovery that was made that the opposite of addiction,
it's not sobriety, The opposite of addiction is connection. And
I think a lot of addictions arise from a desire

(21:13):
for some kind of connection, or there is a disconnection.
We want to to somehow phil yeah, or medicate if
we feel disconnected or you know, it's all it's all
that stuff, isn't it. Okay, So we've got your books
in the hands of every leader, every mayor, every elected official,
every self, and every economics professor and business teacher. Now

(21:38):
let's just, you know, spread it to every recovery center.
What do you think, Well, that's a it's a good aim.
But again, it would be very arrogant to me to
suggest these things. You can. I will do it for you.
I will be the champion of the boy. The more
the fox Lynda is truly we need to appoint her
your champion. Linda Thurman, Oh, Charlie, she is in love

(22:01):
with you. She is like when she called me, I
thought she had just discovered like some anti aging cream
or something. I don't know. She was so excited. She's like, no,
d this sweet little book has impacted me in such
a profound way. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know,
I'm kind of skeptical. Yeah, I'm not going to be
self help books. It was never intended to be one there, No,

(22:23):
But you can't know where somebody is coming from when
they're talking about your book The Boy, the Mold, The
Fox in the Horse unless you actually read it. Four
very complicated characters with very different personalities. Yeah, I didn't
know that the four characters were bits of me at

(22:44):
the time. You know. It wasn't till after to wait
a minute, give me another piece of cake. Right, So
I have these questions and then, you know, I think
a lot of a lot of life. We don't fel
like what we're doing, so we look back. I think, oh,
now I see what I was. Okay, I think for me,
I have been all four characters at different phases of

(23:08):
my life. Who are you right now? Well, I'm always
mostly the mole. I mean, I'm always mostly you know,
the one that wants to eat the cake. I'm an addict,
and I I you know, I get addicted to projects,
I get addicted to artwork, and I am all consumed.
I am like and I've got this whole other life,

(23:31):
you know, like kids and grandkids and and work that
I'm like, but I just want to finish my floor.
I did this, I did this mural. I started a
mural with wood browns. I cut thousands of pieces of
wood from twigs and sticks, then I sanded them, then
I verithan them, and then I stayed them different colors,

(23:52):
and I used the wood rounds like you would use
a paintbrush to do a mural on my floor. But
then it kind of grew up the sides of the walls,
and before I knew it, it had like taken on
a life of its own. And so I would get
off the air Charlie at midnight and then I would
go work on this floor. But you have to use

(24:12):
pretty heavy chemicals, you know, it's very thing. And even
though I had the right mask and the respirator, by
two o'clock in the morning, I don't even know. It's
two o'clock in the morning. I don't even know where
I am, but I'm lost in the heralds. So mostly
I would say them all. But since I've lost my boys,
fear just dominates, you know, and I have to constantly

(24:38):
battle it. D I'm sorry, Yeah, but your book helps, really,
really truly does. And I think your your journey too.
I mean the fact that you're able to talk openly
about it. Is such a great thing, you know, means
grave to say. A lot of people can wouldn't have

(24:59):
the to say that. I trust me. I don't say
it very often. I don't talk about it because I
ended crying and then I'm a blubbering mass and and
you know, deep breath, yea deep breath. Yeah. I mean
I find myself crying a lot of these days. I
don't even know why. Sometimes I was on my bicycle
the other day, listen to your song, and I just

(25:21):
had an email from a nurse who I get a
lot of emails from people already struggled last year and
iven and I just read it. I just read an
email and then I was a song and I had
tears point in my face. And then before I knew
where I was, I had to stop the bike and
I was just really kind and it was just so
so much of the last two years was just coming up,
and I wasn't expected it came from sort of nowhere.

(25:43):
I talked to my kids all the time about having
tools in their tool build. I said, if you go
out to build a house and all you have is
a hammer and a saw, you're not going to be
very successful. And if you go out the doors of
this house whenever you choose to spread your wings and fly.
And the only tools you have in your tool else
are you know, the things they teach you in school
or whatever. Right, you're not going to be very successful.

(26:06):
So I refer to things that help us as tools
in our tool belt with my kids. And the more
tools you have in your tool belt or your tool chest,
the better equipped you are. I think, really especially for boys,
because I know for me, being English and you know,
educated in a certain way, emotions were difficult or almost

(26:31):
you know, there are only some. There were some legitimate
emotions like anger. That was fine, but you know, I'm
really good at that one. I'm so at that. But
when it comes to real vulnerability or sharing weakness or
you know that if that had been encourages, the strength,
the connection came through vulnerability rather than impressing people with
how well you did at rugby or whatever it was,

(26:52):
you know, I think we would have set off in
a very different It's taken me so long to learn
all these things, you know, yes, so I think having
an armory that involves all those things will set you up.
So your book, I think, is a good tool for anybody.
I mean, not just somebody who's going through loss, not
just somebody who's paralyzed with fear with our current economic

(27:12):
situation and world situation. But anybody of any age that
reads your little book I think will be blessed. I
think their heart will be enlarged. I can't believe our
good fortune in being able to spend all this time
with Charlie Mackasey about the Boy and his motley crew
of unlikely companions. Will continue this delightful conversation as soon

(27:36):
as I share a little more of my good luck.
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(28:24):
buy that extra lipstick. It'll look great on you. You're
in America, right. I have two farms. I have a
small farm that's fifty five acres outside of Sea Ice. Well,
you have to go across water to get to me.
So even though we're only like technically eight miles from Seattle,

(28:44):
it takes an hour to get here because you have
to go on a ferry. I always wanted to go.
And then, um, I have a farm six and a
half hour south in Oregon. Um that's five acres. So
I love dirt to be in because I say that
because you do remind me of when I was in

(29:04):
my twenties. I heard a show in New York and
and then they asked me if i'd do a big
mural in a house in Connecticut. That's my Manhattan, you
know now on the trainer and I went and I,
you know, I did the mural or whatever. And it
was nice and there's some very lovely people there and
it was fun. And a lady came at the end
of the day. It was like the press officer, and
she said, looked at me, and she said, well, who

(29:25):
are you? And I said, Charliet, just where are you staying?
And I said, oh, in in a little sort of
boarding house in Manhattan, so you see every day you
come out and do this and go out. And said
you want to come stay with me? And I said,
I'd be lovely, should write I'll pick you up five
And she came and she had this big old station wagon.
When I got to the the house, she had foster children.

(29:45):
She had parrots and dogs and cats, and it was
this whole menagerie of life. And she was called Pam.
And she showed me a whole other way of thinking
and living. She showed me what it meant to really
extend family to people. She had lost the son, she

(30:05):
lost the husband. Her husband had been alcoholic, he died.
You know, she had really suffered, like really, and that's
suffering had opened her heart rather than shut it down.
She had opened up. And her household was something I
will never forget as long as I live. It was
beautiful thing between my husband and I. We have twenty

(30:28):
children and twenty three grandchildren. Yeah, well you remind me
of that. The reason I said, it's because you do
remind me something about you that that is really so
open and more, it's really rare so you're great. I
don't understand. I will never understand when there are so
many children who need love, right, Why I I don't

(30:52):
understand why there is a single child stuck in foster care. Yeah,
it's a strange thing, right, Why? Why? Why are children
in foster care? If we claim to be people that
have faith, you know, we use our religion or our
faith as an excuse to to say this or do that,
But we have no love. If every church or synagogue

(31:17):
or mosque in America just took just took an adopted
one child out of foster care, do you know there
would be no kids in foster care. Yeah, that's amazing.
Why aren't we stepping up to the plate and saying,
come live, come to my you know, like the lady
like Pam who said Charlie, come and stay at my house.
So you have twenty You have twenty children? I mean
how many? How many of those? Only four are still

(31:38):
at home? Wow? Then my husband has five children, all
but one were grown when we got together when we met, right,
and our children aged from forty two down to five. Whoa,
that's so. I saw a picture the other day of
my oldest natural born on who I took to kindergarten,

(32:04):
like thirty two years ago was his first day of kindergarten.
And last week was my baby's first day of kindergarten.
This is my last first day of kindergarten. This is
the last time I will be taking a child of
mine to kindergarten. And that was very I came home
and I bawled like a baby. Everybody's like, oh, you

(32:25):
must be so excited, You're gonna have some free time.
I'm like, I'm not excited, my baby, I'm pretty pathetic. No,
you're in touch with that great and he loves your book.
He does. Yes, his name is Paul Adam. He loves
your book and I've read it to him. I cannot

(32:48):
even tell you how many times I need to. I
need to send you some books with my name in them.
I can write my name. I would love that. I
would love. And I'm going to start this campaign to
get the Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
into the hands of every politician, of every teacher, of
every leader. I'm gonna I'm you know what I'm gonna do, Charlie.

(33:10):
I'm gonna go buy some and I'm going to take
it to the principal at our local high school and say,
you know, if you just, if you would just please
make these into posters and put them in all the classes,
especially for the seniors who are about to launch into
the world. I would appreciate it. Like, can they do that?
Can they make a photo copy of the page? Yeah?

(33:30):
I've always said that to people. I mean schools and
hospitals done that, and I love what they do. So
they blow them right up right there. What do you
think successes, asked the boy to love, said them all,
that's the one. I think that everybody should have a
poster of that. You know, you could frame it, You
could put a nice like black frame around it, or

(33:51):
you could just make a poster. What do you think? So, okay,
I'll work on this campaign. You go work on your
seventy five seven? Thou do you have to do for
a five minute movie? Like? I used to volunteer in
a place that every Wednesday afternoon, I used to teach
people in an old people's home how to draw. And

(34:13):
one of the things they were scared of was not
being very good, you know, disappointing themselves. Or they're always
told when they were little they shouldn't draw whatever, and
I said, okay, so here's the thing drawn out. But
two things. One pretend that you're four years old and
that you can You're allowed to make a mess. The
whole aim here is to make a mess. And the
second thing is that when you've done your drawing, throw

(34:33):
it away. No one's going to look at it. Oh
I couldn't do that, okay, so so wait, so they
started doing it, and I said, there's no pressure at
all on to make anything good. This is not about
just having fun. And you know what, They began really slowly,
and then three weeks later they were unstoppable. They just
drawing a mess everywhere, a bit by bit. When they

(34:55):
realized that it was okay to not do very well,
their drawings got better and better, and they went through
full small after full s wood into the Eventually, you know,
they're making these beautiful things. I mean, half of the
guys I saw a dead now, sadly, but they they
did some beautiful things while they were here. Right in
the last last year or two, they made they had fun.

(35:17):
You know, if you if you give me away to
text you or send you, I'll send you a picture
of my floor that took over my life for six months. Okay,
I started it in February and I just have one
coat of era thing to go and then I'm done.
But it literally crawled up the walls of the its

(35:37):
two rooms. And it was just going to be an
image of a tree on the floor, and it crawled
up the walls and and over. Yeah, it even went
up to the ceiling. Yeah. So but yeah, I will
get the dip pin out. I've got them someplace, and
I'll start drawing again just because you inspired me. I

(35:58):
really think you said be hard in yourself. Well, like,
I'm too much of a I'm too fussy. I'm way
too fussy. I can be loose in life with other things,
you know, and and free flowing, but I'm way too
fussy with with something. So my goal is to be
more like Charlie. Now. My goal is to be more

(36:20):
like the horse, because be the horse. If you've got
to be anyone, be the horse. Yeah, I think that's right.
I'll send you some pictures of my horses. Okay, I'd
love to see them, all right, Jolly, I know you've
got work to do, so I'll let you go. Thank
you for spending time with us. You are I really
loved it. Thanks for having me stay in touch. Okay,

(36:42):
I'm going to organize your talent to get you some books. Wonderful.
I'll talk to you stop by. I know it's getting
late in the day in London. Charlie, thank you for
sharing so much of your time and reintroducing the Boy
and his friends to us. I say reintroduce is saying
because I feel like we've all met the Boy before.

(37:03):
He's inside each of us. He represents our life struggles,
big and small. It's been wonderful getting reacquainted with him
and remembering the things that either once worried him or
maybe he still does, and he managed to figure it out,
as well as putting me in touch with all those
inner voices that have guided me along my life's path.

(37:26):
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse is
truly a special gift. If you haven't yet thumbed your
way through a copy, do yourself a favor and get
a hold of one as quickly as you can. As
Charlie recommends in his forewords, start anywhere you like, start
in the middle, start at the end, or if you
must start at the beginning, it's up to you. Just
like so many other choices we have in life. Perhaps

(37:48):
the most important one is the choice to be kind
the boy the more. The Fox and the Horse can
be found wherever books are sold, and they make great gifts,
Great gifts for everyone on your list, from grandparents to
grandchildren to world leaders. Charlie continues to share the journey
on his social media platforms at Charlie Mackasseie on both

(38:13):
Instagram and Facebook. You want to keep up with him
there and share his beautiful, insightful post with all your
own followers. Thank you for joining us. I cannot wait
to spend time with you again, my friend,