Plart!

I like my sound effects. Note the 'poit' in frame three as well as the big juicy 'plart' in frame five.

Ping pong ball

Can you still get those blow pipes with baskets on the end, that come with light plastic balls you can levitate whenever you blow into the pipe? They always used to be stocking fillers when I was a kid. Nowadays I'm sure there's an app that does that instead.

Sprinkle

I'd like to thank BBC Radio 4's PM programme for inspiring this week's strips. I have no idea why - Eddie Mair may have just said the word 'sprinkler' in a totally different context in the middle of a report about the Greek debt crisis or something - all I know is that I was driving home from Tunbridge Wells in my car one evening and by the time I had reached Lamberhurst this week's strips had aready been written in my head. Either that or I was having problems with my screen wash.

Sprinkers are definitely in at Sherpa at the moment. Take a look at Friday's Snow Sez...

While we're at it, allow me to point you at Wil Panangiban's Frank and Steinway for last week. Can you spot the Smith plush toy that he's put in the background at San Diego's Comic Con? Thanks Wil! While you're at it, can you spot all the other Sherpa characters making cameos in his strip this week?

Groyne!

Thanks to longshore drift, the south coast of Great Britain is gradually working its way eastward one pebble at a time. Coastal defences have been put in place in Hastings in a vain attempt to keep our beach from drifting off in the direction of Dungeness, but that still doesn't stop the council from having to bring huge earth movers in every now and again to dig the beach up and put it back where they found it.

Another method of keeping the beach in position is the groyne. A groyne is a sort of fence running perpendicular to the coastline that attempts to keep the pebbles in position by limiting the amount of space that the pebbles have to move in. It usually means that pebbles get removed from the west side of the groyned off stretch of beach and end up piled against the east side, which means the beach levels on either side of a groyne can be wildly different. As today's dog has just found out.

Time and tide...

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' 

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

(Or for the manic post-punk version by Jean Jaques Burnel of the Stranglers, see here... )

I'm the queen of the sandcastle!

...Once you've introduced a good theme to the strip it seems a pity to waste it. So here's Smudge on her sandmesa of power.

Millie DVD extra 2

Written at roughly the same time as the first big scare about Mad Cow Disease. At the time the papers were trying to persuade us that we were all going to die from Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis. It hasn't happened of course. We all died from bird flu instead. Apparently.

Rowr!

My definition of what happiness looks like is a dog on a beach. It's a pity Jones is in too grumpy a mood to appreciate it.

I think the ball was thrown by a French tourist, judging by the sound effect it makes when landing. 'Paf' is very Asterix. However, the dog must be English, as it's nor running off going 'Woooaaah! Woooaah!'

Aquarium

Hastings Blue Reef aquarium. A museum of fish or a very exotic larder, depending on your point of view. Maybe Jones would have had better luck if she'd headed to the flatfish fondling pool instead.

A flock of seagulls

No, not the band that were 60% hair lacquer and 40% wheezy synth music. This is the real thing.

Yesterday I decided to get some sausages and chips from the chip shop (the Blue Dolphin in the Old Town - one of Hastings' many fabulous chippies) and eat them on the beach. On the way over there I dropped a sausage, so I put it to one side - I'd throw it away as soon as I came across a waste bin.

Then the seagulls saw me. Maybe it was the white newsprint the chips were wrapped in that attracted them. It started off with one hovering beside me. Then another, and another. By the time I'd reached the waves there were about 20 malevolent white birds following me, riding the breezee and waiting for their moment.

I sat on the beach and ate. The birds settled in a flock in front of me and watched. Finally there was just the dropped sausage left. I decided to break one of the big rules of seaside living - the one that goes DO NOT FEED THE GULLS.

I tore off a bit of sausage and threw it into the air. All the gulls were suddenly aloft and one of them caught the sausage in mid air. On the second bit of sausage I made a discovery. It is possible to chuck a bit of sausage into the melée, bounce it off one gull's head, and still have another catch it and eat it. I discovered I was able to set up a chain reaction - by the time I ran out of sausage I managed set a record of getting the sausage to ricochet off three separate gulls before the fourth caught it and ate it.

Most amazing of all. As soon as I ran out of sausage, the gulls settled down onto the beach and ignored me. I was allowed off the beach without being mobbed.

Maybe it was my attitude towards the gulls that saved me. They knew I wasn't afraid of them, and I gave them their tribute in the end. I've seen gulls mob terrified tourists for their chips - I won't be doing it again.

This entire run of strips was based on a pair of seagulls I saw on Rock-a-Nore, the road that runs in the strip between the cliffs and the fishing beach, fighting over a fish head and totally oblivious to the traffic that was backed up on either side of them trying to get past without flattening them.

Millie DVD extra 1

Unpublished (though a shortened version appeared in the daily version a few weeks later).

First thing to note : Isn't Roger's artwork superb when it's free of the crude colouring that the Mirror used in those days? I always used to think Roger's unadorned artwork was excellent, but it got ruined when it was published in colour. These were the early days of colour newspapers in Britain - Eddie Shah's Today newspaper had only launched four years earlier and all the other newspapers were playing catch-up. Not even Rupert Murdoch's Sun had colour at that time - the Mirror Group were able to get in early as it had had at least ten year's previous experience with its Scottish papers, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail. Photoshop was but a dream in those days - Roger had to send his art boards in to the Mirror by courier and they were then effectively photocopied and coloured in with felt pens before they were split mechanically into the four process colours ready for printing. It was another world.

The backstory to this was the National Curriculum, which had just been introduced by the Tories. An efficient method of precscribing a set amount of knowledge that everyone should have before leaving school, or a cyncical attempt to wrest control of what should be taught away from teachers and put it in the hands of politicians? You decide.

Note there are two different stories going on at the same time here. There's an 'A' story - the one in the speech balloons, and there's the 'B' story: the three girls join the queue for school dinners, have gruel deposited in their plates, ignore Richard's attempt to get them to sit with him and scrape the food into the pig bin without ever actually sitting down and eating it. I know of what I write here - school dinners at Skinners were frequently inedible and I ended up bringing in a packed lunch after my first term there. Look at the kids sat at the table in frame five.

Miss Thrimmage and Mr Twenk. I think I was having a Dickensian name attack at that point.

That's a FISH?

Fish are, of course, really cylindrical and their natural habitat is crab flavoured jelly , as all domestic cats know. The hard pellety stuff you get in dry cat food is fish in their larval stage.

Fish heads

I was contemplating whether to colour in the fish guts a bright red or not, but decided against it.

Fishing beach

Here we are at Hastings fishing beach. Hastings has the largest beach-harboured fishing fleet in Europe, we keep on being told. What that actually means is that the original harbour got washed away in a big storm in the 13th century and we still haven't got around to replacing it yet. Though to be fair, the same storm did strand the ports of Winchelsea and Rye directly to the east of Hastings a couple of miles inland.

The tall black weatherboarded structures that you see in the photo (and which you see the bottom of in the cartoon) are net huts. They're kind of like multi-storey garden sheds, a result of the lack of space between the cliffs and the shore for buildings to be put up on. Some of the fisherman store their nets and tackle in them. They don't actually hang their nets up to dry in them - that's just a story we like to tell tourists.

There are also a few wholesale fishmongers on the beach. As Jones has just discovered...

Millie 23

Daily Mirror, Saturday September 1st 1990

And that was it for Millie's incarnation as a weekly strip. The new daily schedule coincided with the start of the school year, which was useful. The strip was based on my usual state at the end of the summer holidays - I'd have to do a book report on something really tedious and would invariably leave it until around 5pm on the day before the start of the new term. I remember doing an overview of Graham Greene's 'The Power and the Glory' in that time.

(Incidentally - is Greene still considered part of the pantheon of Lit Gods any more? When I was at school, just before he died, he was huge. His star seems to have fallen a bit since then, and I'm glad to see his 'entertainments' are now regarded in higher esteem than his Catholic guilt saturated 'serious' stuff. He's worthy but he's no longer Important.)

I have a couple of DVD extras of weeklies that were drawn but never got published due to the rapidity of the format change. After those Millie will take a rest for a month and begin again in September, so the strips sync up with their publication 21 years ago.

Return of the skateboard

Like I said, it's downhill all the way to the seafront. If it was uphill Hastings would be underwater. The cars are amalgams of assorted 1990s and 2000s models, and the street scene behind is based on Queens Road in Hastings, a street of charity stores and Eastern European corner shops which is much less impressive than the name would suggest. (Though I highly recommend the food you can get at those corner shops - Romanian cuisine is not that far distant from that of New Mexico - though it involves a higher proportion of root vegetables.)