Millie Week 18; Mon 31 Dec 1990 - Wed 2 Jan 1991

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Nowadays, of course, we have phones to do the annoying bleepy thing for us. I don't wear a watch - my iPod Touch fulfils that function - it's a sort of musical fob watch I pull out of my pocket now and again.

I tend not to do new year's resolutions. However, I can say that for the first time in my life, I actually managed to keep to one. The fact that this blog post is here today proves it. Hurrah!

A happy new year to all my readers.

Have a fantastic New Years Eve. I'll be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic flying back home so I 'll have no idea when the new year will be... it's an eight hour flight so who knows, I may get to ring the new year in eight separate times...

Post Christmas comedown

Was that it????

Boxing Day

Today is the Feast of Stephen so 'Good King Wenceslas' is actually a Boxing Day carol.

It always annoys me that the USA starts to dismantle Christmas and goes back to work as soon as the day itself is over. You've got it all wrong. There are twelve days to Christmas and this is just day two. Christmas isn't over till the twelfth drummer drums. Britain won't go back to work until Wednesday - as Christmas fell over the weekend we reckon it doesn't really count as a holidays and tack another day onto the end.

Why is it called Boxing Day? Allow me to go all Wikipedia on you:

"In the UK, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663; This custom is linked to an older English tradition: in exchange for ensuring that wealthy landowners' Christmases ran smoothly, their servants were allowed to take the 26th off to visit their families. The employers gave each servant a box containing gifts and bonuses (and sometimes leftover food)."

All perfectly true. It still goes on today. Though the killjoys at the Post Office today (I wrote this on December 4th) instructed their postmen not to accept Christmas Boxes of over £30 as 'they could be construed as bribes'. First they take away their pensions, then they take away their bonuses, and now this.

I'm not expecting any post this Christmas.

Millie Week 17; Thu 27 - Sat 29 Dec 1990

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Happy Christmas!!! Oooo. New tablet? Schmancy!

My wife has been knitting the same sweater for me for the last four years! It'll never be finished because it'll never reach the high standards she sets herself, so she keeps on pulling it apart and starting it again.

How on earth did I get the word 'frottage' past the Mirror? They would always call me up on imagined problems - I once referenced the famous dance DJ Joey Negro in a strip and got called up on it until I explained that it was a real name. But somehow, frottage never got spotted.

Millie Week 17; Mon 24 & Wed 26 Dec 1990

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British papers don't publish on Christmas Day, so there are only two cartoons here today.

Ah, dear old Cheesy Wotsit. Whatever happened to her? Well, it turns out she's been doing a lot of British TV in soaps I never watch, like Emmerdale and Holby City. And then she's been a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing. I never watch that either. Sorry, Patsy, you've been very busy but you've disappeared completely below my radar.

Note the Christmas sweater Millie is wearing in the Boxing Day strip.

A Merry Christmas to you all. May you all have a truly magical day...

Christmas viewing

Forget the turkey, if BBC America isn't showing the Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas night there's going to be an international incident...

•They are, at 9/8c, whatever that means. What is that in mountain time?

The shortest day

Britain is further north than you would expect - we're roughly at the same latitude as Labrador in Canada. So today here on the south coast the sun rises at around eight in the morning, and sets again at a quarter to four. The rest of the country sees even less daylight...

Merry Xmas Everybody

The perennial stompalong party hit by Slade, as much a part of a British Christmas as plum duff and Charles Dickens. If you don't know the song, and Noddy Holder's famous holler over the fade out, here it is, from and old Top of the Pops. Jones is doing the bit at 3.30. And, yes, they are miming to the record.

In the clip the odd looking man in the Santa suit is Jimmy Saville, DJ and national treasure, who died a month ago.

Millie Week 15; Thu 20 - Sat 22 Dec 1990

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I never got that scalextric set.

If you don't know the carol, here it is...

Millie Week 16; Mon 17 - Wed 19 Dec 1990

I collect daft aftershave names. All of the ones the girls find in the strip are genuine, apart from Butch, which I borrowed from one of The Goodies fake adverts (though researching it now, it turned out to be for tobacco rather than aftershave).

If you do click on the link, remember this is from 1972. Standards have changed for the better since then. Incidentally, it's a clip from the intermission for their 'Kitten Kong' show.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Christina Rosetti's haunting Christmas carol is much loved. But I've always thought that she lost her way in the 'snow on snow' bit. OK, we get it, it's snowed a lot.

If you don't know 'In the Bleak Midwinter' - here it is...

Hi, 'T'.

Cosy fire

I've noticed Smudge and Gizmo warming themselves in front of an unlit fire several times before, fighting for the best spot. They just associate that part of the room with warmth. The fact that the central heating may be in and the warmth is coming from a radiator in another part of the room doesn't matter, it seems.

This year's Christmas tree strip

Partially inspired by the weeping angels in Doctor Who... all the action takes place in the dark.

Millie Week 15; Thu 13 - Sat 15 Dec 1990

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Millie Week 15; Mon 10 - Wed 12 Dec 1990

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Look, the promotion in The Mirror's over and the strip's its normal height again.

Multiplexes were something new in Britain at the time, along with the concessions stand. Before the multiplex, you were lucky to get a bag of Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles and a carton of Kia Ora (a sickly still orange drink) at the snack bar of the cinema. Now we were presented with industrial quantities of popcorn and cardboard vats of fizzy drinks. I now smuggle my own Fruit Pastilles into the cinema...

It's a Cannon cinema! That takes me back. Cannon was an Israeli owned chain, the main conduit for Golan/Globus's movies that no-one else would touch. Nowadays we have the straight-to-DVD movie - back then in Tunbridge Wells we had whatever was Cannon screen 3, in a converted bar where the screen was wider than the depth of the seating.

As you can see in Wednesday's strip, Teenage Mutant Hero/Ninja Turtle fever was at its height at the time...

The secret life of Scrumpy Jack

I won't tell if you don't...

Health and Safety

A necessary evil. I'm all for safety at work, and I applaud the safety advances in places like the construction industry, but the H&S industry tends to expand into places where it's not needed. For me the limit was reached when I was working as a graphic designer at a printing company, and I had to waste a day on a course on 'how to pick up heavy objects'. At the end of the day I was given a card, which told me I was certified to pick up heavy objects for two years and gave an expiry date!  I can now use that card to get out of any heavy lifting as I haven't topped up my lugging things about knowledge.

If you have to go on a course just remember, it can be boiled down to these three things:

1) Bend your knees when picking things up off the floor.
2) Secure your ladder before going up it.
3) Cones can be a trip hazard.

Where's the snow?

It doesn't normally snow here in England in December. In fact it doesn't normally snow here at all. Until two years ago we've had a series of warm wet winters, with snow tending to appear for five minutes in February, and then disappearing again.

The last two winters have been terrible - with depths of snow up to an unprecedented COUPLE OF INCHES! Snowmageddon! The country closed down for a month, and Hastings was cut off from civilisation.

The weather is back normal this year - in fact I haven't had to switch the heating on at all yet this winter. So much for trying to anticipate the weather when I drew this...

Incidentally, the next month's worth of blog posts will have actually been written and posted in early December. We're off to New Mexico to visit Linda's parents this Christmas. So I've drawn two month's worth of strips and will be preparing a month's worth of blog posts before I go. If I can find WiFi in Clovis (there used to be a church on Prince St with really good WiFi) I'll post supplementary comments on GoComics and the Blog while I'm there...

Millie Week 14; Thu 6 - Sat 8 Dec 1990

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The Little Mermaid is a great film, of course - widely recognised to be the first movie in Disney's 1990s return to form after the two decades in the doldrums ushered in the The Aristocats. (Look at the Aristocats nowadays and it looks half finished, and it's suspiciously similar to Chuck Jones' 'Gay Purree' movie from eight years earlier.) Of course, parents of budding Disney princesses who have had to watch the DVD of the film on an endless loop for the past three years may have other opinions.

If you don't know what Clearasil is you've never been a teenager. It's an acne treatment, and girls can smell it at 100 paces.

Gemma's house - in a posher part of Catford. Note the middle class signifiers, the carriage lamp outside the door, the Tudorbethan architecture of the houses in the background, the string of pearls around Gemma's mum's neck.

Millie Week 14; Mon 3 - Wed 5 Dec 1990

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Note the new shallower format. This was for one week only - I think the Mirror had some sort of Christmas promotion going in the space below the cartoons and we had to shove up a bit to make room on the page.

..and this is the story I set up last week - Gemma's reluctant date with Richard.

GoComics is undergoing maintenance

Please have patience with GoComics today - they've been doing some behind the scenes fiddling in order to improve the performance of the site, which has been pretty slow lately. They're still putting all the pieces back together, so todays strip hasn't loaded yet.

However, the old Sherpa site at http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csmdx is working OK. And you can still see today's strip in the post below.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Advent calendars

Can you still get old fashioned advent calendars any more? The paper ones, I mean, with a different picture behind each door leading up to a big double door on Christmas Eve with a nativity scene behind it. Nowadays the only calendars I can find have uniformly grotty lumps of a brown substance which is not quite but almost completely unlike chocolate* squatting behind their doors. However, whichever kind you have, the doors are impossible to open without doing some severe damage to the rest of the calendar...
*© Douglas Adams 1978