Dame Doodah began during one of the most challenging chapters of my family’s life.
My dad, George - a civil engineer from Bootle and a devoted lecturer - was diagnosed with Myeloma, a blood cancer that arrived with almost no warning. Overnight, his work as Head of Quality and Equality at Liverpool Community College came to an abrupt halt, and our world shifted.
At the time, I was nineteen and in my second year of undergraduate opera studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Being close to Liverpool meant we could stay connected through every stage of his treatment. As my training grew into professional performance work, my mum and dad travelled everywhere to hear me sing - even during the most difficult phases of his illness. We learned to adjust, live one day at a time, sometimes one hour at a time, finding small pockets of joy wherever we could.
Amid the hospital appointments, waiting rooms, and uncertainty, I turned to sketching. Scribbling gave us a distraction, a comfort, and a way to bring a little humour into heavy days. The quirkier and more colourful the drawings became, the more they made us smile.
One day, a character appeared in my sketchbook: Dame Doodah. Dad immediately imagined her world, and by that afternoon he had written her first story. From then on, he filled notebooks with comic biographies and character ideas - people, creatures, buildings, anything that sparked his imagination. Even as his mobility declined, he wrote with unwavering determination. Creativity became our shared refuge - and joy.
Creating these characters together gave us focus, laughter, and a way to transform difficult moments into something hopeful. He hadn’t written creatively since school, but once he began, the ideas poured out faster than I could draw them. Hospitals became places of imagination.
The handwriting above with 'The Dame's story' belongs to George.
We discovered that creativity - in any form - can be a source of solace, healing, and connection. It has been that for me, and it continues to be - and I hope you can share in that too and enjoy the doodles!
Katie
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