Yeeeeeek!

...It's better than being moled by a goose.

Meet the mole. He's another occasional character who will join the cast of poetic cockroaches, cheeky daffodils and other visitors to the garden.

If he has an inspiration, it's this guy, a Czechoslovakian mole called Krtek (or 'The Mole' in Britain). His adventures used to appear on the BBC when I was a kid, and I'm amazed to find they're still being produced today, and they look exactly the same. Apologies to fans of grey gloomy eastern european cold war animation - you'll find nothing of that sort in The Mole, his main influence appears to be early Disney shorts.

Perch

For a more positive take on seagulls than I usually manage, why not take a look at Piers Baker's wonderful Ollie and Quentin.

Bod

If I ever start making children's books out of Smith and Jones' adventures, this will be the first story I choose to adapt. This is developing into a classically structured picture book story, the kind where one character has a problem and then meets every other character in turn asking their opinions. Then (spoiler alert) by the last page the problem has solved itself anyway.

The Bod books and cartoons are the archetypes of these sort of stories. Here's Bod and the Apple. Luxuriate in John Le Mesurier's silky voice, Derek Griffith's wonderful music (he came up with a sig tune for each character's entrance, and the Bod theme, once heard, is never forgotten), and simply animated characters with retractable legs.

Splot 2

A pattern is starting to emerge here...

Splot

This was originally going to be a snow joke until I realised that it work even better if I waited for the thaw. The original idea was that the cats would normally be able to walk over the top of a crust of snow, after the the top layer had thawed and frozen several times over the course of a few days, but if they concentrated their weight on just one paw, they'd fall through.

Mud

The thawing snow has left its usual mess behind. After last year's almost perpetual rainfall the ground is so sodden that there's nothing left for the snowmelt to soak into, so there are large areas of countryside which have essentially turned into bogs. Alexandra Park, down the hill from me, has a big events field which is now a thin membrane of grass stretched over a pool of liquid mud.

The inevitability of mud in the mind of the cartoonist

Maybe using getting covered in mud as a punchline three times in two months is a bit too frequent. Or maybe I could rebrand it as a running joke - this is the third and final time I'll use it. For a bit...