Perspective Fest

I'm quite proud of this sequence of the milk float going over the brow of the hill and descending into town. I find perspective really hard so I reserve it for special occasions.

Float

OK, I'll stop slaughtering pheasants now - Smith and Jones have finally found their way back home. They're very lucky as these milk floats are rapidly vanishing from our streets. When I lived in Tunbridge Wells I'd always be able to tell when it was 4am in the morning, as I could always hear the whine of the float's electric motor and the merry jangling of the milk bottles as I lay awake in bed. Alas, the rise of plastic bottles from supermarkets has meant hardly anyone gets their milk delivered anymore.

Sparrers

Introducing some new visitors to the garden, the Cockney Sparrers (or sparrows, if you insist). Cheery chirpy Cockney sparrows, mate, that's what they are, lawd elp us. They're not one of the species that learned to do the trick with the foil bottle tops - this is a bit of artistic licence - but they have developed an few better tricks.

In France, I've seen them inside hypermarkets, where they perch in the rafters and then fly down to the shop floor to see what they can tear open on the shelves. They're very big on nuts, of course, but they also have a taste for refined sugar. One day they will find the breakfast cereal aisle, discover the Honey Nut Loops and it will all be over.

Meanwhile, in the Oxford Services off the M40 (imagine a truck stop on the interstate, make the architecture a bit nicer and the food a lot worse) I was joined at my table by a fearless sparrow who had a taste for Burger King fries. He flew onto the table top and then edged slowly towards the half eaten packet of fries, watching me to see what my reaction would be, then backing off a few inches whenever I dipped my hand into the packet to get another fry out. Eventually I let him have last few. And that's when he called his mates…

The Tetrapack offensive

The next month's worth of cartoons show what happens when a thought goes spiralling off in all directions. They may not seem to be related, but they all spun off from the cartoon on 6th January, the one with the coffee jar which sparked off a lot of discussion about the behaviour of blue tits.

The carton Smith is struggling with is called a TetraPak. The man responsible for this package lives in a huge estate near Wadhurst, East Sussex, that I drive past every day on the way to work and is estimated to be the the 83rd richest man on the planet. One day I shall drive up his driveway with a carton of milk, ring his doorbell and challenge him to open one of his own packages, just to see if he can figure out how to do it. But I'm sure he employs a little man in livery specially to open his milk for him.

If this month's batch of strips look a bit different to how they normally appear, that's because I've changed my art materials. I'm now using Fountain Pentels as they give a more varied line. The lettering's done using an italic version of the same pen -it'll take a few strips to get settled again. These strips were also done on the floor in the living room of a house in New Mexico where the only adequate lighting came from the Christmas Tree.