...and they're off

There is just one subject at the moment. Let the games begin...

Millie Week 47, Mon 29 July - Sat 3 Aug 1991

This week's obligatory Darling Buds of May reference was on Tuesday, a dig at the enormous spreads the Larkin family always used to sit down to.

Sport for all

Anyone noticed how the more people say they love watching sport, the less likely they are to actually play it? Your average football fan would be hard pressed to get up from the sofa to change the channel back to Sky Sports after he's just sat on the remote with his voluminous arse. Tennis fans also have a tendency to sit in darkened rooms for the entirety of Wimbledon fortnight.

I should speak. I've been glued to the Tour de France for the past three weeks*, but I haven't been on my bike at all this year.

*I am of course, writing this two weeks before publication - so from my current perspective we're only half way through the race and two British riders from Team Sky are first and second respectively... I wonder if we've won yet...

Zapper

BBC2 vs Channel 4.

Snooker

The game is snooker, not billiards. It's a hugely popular televised sport* in the UK, and it fascinates cats. Cholmondeley used to be transfixed by the sight of balls rolling into pockets, but his favourite bits were the cues, which would waggle around enticingly on the screen. I've seen him have a crafty paw at the screen when he thinks no-one'slooking several times.

*Yes. It's televised as a 'sport' in England. As are lawn bowls and darts. Don't expect too much from our athletes at the Olympics this year.

Millie Week 46, Mon 22 - Sat 27 July 1991

"Perfick" was the word of the summer - another Darling Buds of may reference. It was Pa Larkin's favourite affirmation. The sun was 'perfick', the food was 'perfick', everything in the idealised kent countryside he lived in was 'perfick'. It's a word I've never ever heard without silent but easily discernable quotation marks being put around it, and I've lived in Kent for most of my life.

Kent always used to be known as the garden of England. It's now the high speed transport corridor of England, the orchards and hop fields have been replaced with motorways, high speed train lines and enormous logistics warehouses. This strip was written just as all that construction was happening.

The common market, which turned into the EEC, which then turned into the EC, which then turned into the EU, is soon to turn into the German Fourth Reich, due to the bankruptcy of the rest of the continent. It was a good idea at the time, but that time was 1955, and the idea was just to have a free trade region. By 1991, Europe had bloated into an organisation with a parliament whose only purpose was to rubber stamp the policies of unelected bureaucrats, and the European Common Agricultural Policy was paying farmers to leave fields fallow, in an attempt to stop overproduction. In the meantime, Africa starved, but it made slightly more sense than the previous policy of stockpiling the surplus in huge barns and leaving it to rot. It was quite the opposite of 'perfick'.

Big Screen

Curry's is the British equivalent of Best Buy, and masters at the selling of totally unnecessary product insurance.

For your security

More on the preparations for the Olympics, which are proving to delight and annoy in equal measures. I'd like to report that the British construction industry has done us proud - all the venues have been built on time and under budget, much to everyones surprise. Not to worry though, the people in charge of transport and security have ensured that the expected British standards of chaos will be adhered to, and have pushed the budget for the games to twice the originally quoted price.

Anti-aircraft missile launchers have been stationed on top of blocks of flats around East London, in order to protect the Olympic Park from the threat of rogue aircraft. No-one has explained exactly how shooting down an aircraft over one of the most heavily populated areas of the city can be in any way described as 'protection', but never mind. I'm sure that once the games actually begin it'll all be worth it.

I don't know why Cockneys say "Lord love a duck' - it's probably rhyming slang, in which case, no further questions, m'lud.

"I'm in a right two and eight" definitely is. Two and eight - bate. Two and eight, two shillings and eight old pennies, translates to 13p in decimal currency, roughly equivalent to the cost of the film of froth on your cup of Starbucks coffee.

I try to pop out for a quiet lunch and THIS happens...

There's an Olympic torch somewhere in the second photo. Can you find it?

Eternal Flame

The Olympic torch has been touring the UK for what seems like the last couple of billion years, and tomorrow it's Hastings' turn to have it.

In fact it's going to be chasing me around the South East of England. In the morning it will be passing through the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells, about thirty yards away from where I work.

I'll be ready for it this time - just before the Jubilee we had a Royal visit by the Count and Countess of Wessex (or, as they're known around here, Prince Edward and the barmaid from the pub in Brenchley) and I never noticed as they turned up on the print day for two magazines I work on.

Then, in the evening, it will reach Hastings, where it will be relayed along the seafront, and after a few speeches by local dignitaries and a concert by Rizzle Kicks (no, me neither) it will be kept overnight on The Stade, the ancient fishing beach. Odds on, someone will try to nick the eternal flame and sell it on eBay.

This has certainly been a barbeque summer. Barbeques attract rain clouds in England in the same way trailer parks attract tornadoes in the US, and it's been raining non-stop since Easter.

A few guest stars in today's cartoon. Can you spot Mike Pike and Alonzo P Thurgermeyer in the crowd? Millie and Gemma (in the test versions I drew as a pitch for the Daily Mirror) are also there - Millie's in the pink shirt, and Gemma's to her right.

Millie Week 45, Mon 15 - Sat 21 July 1991

It's summer, so it's time to send the kids to camp. Or it's very British equivalent, a geography field trip.

I had to engineer a way to include Richard on the trip when he was a couple of years above the girls at school. That done, I was up and running for another extended story that was to last for five weeks.

The TV series 'The Darling Buds of May' had just come out. Based on the novels of H E Bates, and set deep in the Kent countryside sometime in the 1950s, it proved to be a huge hit. It also introduced a rather comely young starlet to the world - Catherine Zeta Jones as Mariette Larkin. The tabloids were obsessed with the show, and I was writing for a tabloid, so I joined in. The fact that I lived in Kent and rather liked the series myself helped too.

Drought

It's been raining solidly for what seems like three months now. Strangely, Hastings is no longer under drought orders, but Tunbridge Wells, twenty miles away, still is. It all depends on which company is supplying your water. Go to Yalding in Kent and you will still see the tide marks half way up the walls of the high street, where the drought of ten years ago reached its high water mark.

Timotei

For anyone that doesn't remember the original Timotei ads, it looked something akin to this. I've been searching for the original ads but all I can find is a lot of people who have been to the same waterfall in Australia where the advert was filmed, and then staged their own re-enactment.

Highflying li-lo

Millie Week 44, Mon 8 - Sat 13 July 1991

School exams always used to take place just before Christmas and three weeks before the end of the summer term. And GCSEs and A levels (the All Important Exams your Entire Career will Rely on ) always occur just as the sun finally comes out and the summer proper begins. Even worse, they tend to coincide with major Soccer tournaments, so a significant percentage of the exam candidates tend to be rather distracted.

Yes, that is a Garfield on Gemma's desk. That's his second guest appearance in a month on this blog. Two less famous cartoon characters can be seen to the extreme right and left of the strip, from Roger's old strip 'Sammy the Caterpillar', which used to appear daily in the Scottish Daily Record.

Ding dang dong

Gizmo is fascinated by our own wind chimes. Especially early in the morning. But that's not quite as annoying as this...  (thanks to Russell Howard's Good News on BBC3 for alerting me to it).

What day is it?

A day of droll recognition of the celebrations happening over the other side of the pond, playing with a few American icons and their local resonances.

Cholmondeley, the real cat our Chumley is based on, was identical in appearance to Happy Cat, the cat that started off the entire LOLcats franchise. And of course, the cheeseburger is an American icon, so it made sense to include it here.

Frame two is a tribute to The America Ground, a bit of Hastings town centre that was for a short while the self-proclaimed 24th state of the union.

Here's the official story, taken from www.americaground.co.uk

The roots of the America Ground lay in the weather. Back in 1287 a series of terrible storms wreaked havoc on Kent and Sussex, submerging forests, shifting the course of rivers and dramatically reshaping their coastlines.

Hastings was badly affected. Once the south’s best natural port, the storms blocked the town’s harbour with silt and pebbles, forming a huge shingle bank.
This new piece of land, which comprises the area now bounded by Robertson Street, Trinity Triangle, Carlisle Parade and Harold Place, fell just outside the boundaries of Hastings Borough - effectively making it a no-man’s land.
The locals soon realised that they could live on this land free from taxes and rents. Consequently, many moved in, building a thriving but ramshackle community of shops, houses and workplaces.
By 1822, an estimated 1,000 people lived on the bank, forcing Hastings Borough into action. Taking inspiration from the recent American Revolution, the residents reacted defiantly, declaring themselves independent from Hastings as the ‘twenty-fourth’ US state and hoisting the Stars and Stripes flag. The famous America Ground was born.
Before being declared the America Ground, Hastings’ shingle bank was a hive of activity. In her 1919 book ‘Tamarisk Town’, novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith described it as having been “free to any beggars, gypsies or other undesirables ... a mock city of shacks, huts and tents.”
 
The main thoroughfare was a level stretch called ‘Rope Walk’, which largely corresponded with Robertson Street. Due to its flatness it attracted rope-makers who erected upturned boat hulls along it as makeshift shelters.
 
While Hastings Borough decried it as a lawless den of iniquity, the facts suggest a fairly well organised community. Research reveals that much land was occupied by lodging houses, pig-keepers, carpenters, limekilns, warehouses, tallow factories and small farm holdings. There was also a school and gin palace, but no church.
 
By the 1820s, the dark clouds that triggered the declaration of the America Ground were gathering. Squabbles arose between the Hastings Corporation and the Earl of Chichester over who officially owned the land. In addition, Hastings was turning into a fashionable resort, attracting new construction and affluent middle classes fascinated by the town’s ‘quaint’ poor communities. The spirit that fuelled the America Ground was about to be lit, but also quickly extinguished.
The storm clouds that forced the establishment of the America Ground also destroyed it. In the early 1820s, Hastings Borough made several attempts to impose control on the area, prompting the declaration of independence. However, the problems for the residents grew when it was found that no title deeds existed for property on the land.
 
The matter was referred to the Crown Authorities, who called for a Crown Commissioner’s Inquisition. Two other claimants of ownership also came forward - Lord Cornwallis, holder of the Priory Estate, and Battle Abbey Estates.
 The death knell came on 6th December 1827, when five Commissioners and 12 jurymen met at the George Hotel in Battle. Without consulting with or referring to the land’s residents, they ruled that the Ground should be seized on behalf of King George IV.
 
By 1834, the Ground was cleared, with many residents having already moved to St. Leonards. In 1849, a new chapter opened when the developer Patrick Robertson leased the Ground area from the Crown.
 
The America Ground may have gone but the spirit behind it is still celebrated in Hastings today, nearly 200 years on.

Hence the fireworks in frame three.

Have a great day, everyone.

Back up

I always find the best way to gently persuade a cat that has fallen asleep on top of you to move is to stroke it on the back until it's tail and bottom is so far up in the air that it has no choice but to stand up.