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.

Splish splash

First of all, we're past the Spring Equinoxe, so the strip has moved to it's summer plumage. The grass and the sky will remain this colour until the end of September. This was inspired by watching some birds washing in a puddle one lunch break. Not much else to say, apart from noting that in the last panel I tried to catch that moment when a cat gets distracted, forgets to put its tongue back in its mouth, and then walks about with it sticking out for the next few minutes until you laugh at it.

I've got a luvverley bunch of coconuts

There is a long tradition of cockney music. I won't try to explain, Bill Bailey has done a far better job of it already. You can see it here. And here.

Rhyming Slang.

No-one is quite sure how rhyming slang first got started in the East End. Some say it was used by the criminal underclasses to confuse the police, others think it was joke that got out of hand. Whatever, it's still going strong, still evolving, and still proving to be as confusing to insiders as it is to those its supposed to confuse.

For the uninitiated, this is how rhyming slang works:

First choose the word you want to encode in to slang, eg 'stairs'.
Find a rhyme. make sure it has two parts. eg. 'apples and pears'.
Now only use the bit that doesn't rhyme. eg 'I'm going up the apples'.

A few examples:

Trouble - Trouble and strife - wife
Currant - currant bun - sun
Butchers - butcher's hook - look
Loaf - loaf of bread - head
Chalfonts - Chalfont St Giles (town in the Chilterns) - piles
Tonys - Tony Blair - Flares (the trousers)
Lionels - Lionel Blair (dancer) - Flares (archaic usage)
Britneys - Britney Spears - beers

My personal favourite comes from academia. When you graduate you get awarded a grade - a first, an upper second (or a 2.1) or a lower second (a 2.2), also known as a Desmond.

I though I'd made up all my rhymes for cat, but two of them already appear in the online Cockney Rhyming Slang Dictionary.

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…