A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox. Ahahahahahahaha! - this paradox.*

February may be the shortest month of the year, but it always seems to be the longest. And adding an extra day on every four years just adds insult to injury. Mutter mutter mutter.

* From the Pirates of Penzance - poor Frederick's dilemma is that he was born on February 29, and although he bears the outward appearance of a young man of 21, he is actually a little boy of five (Ahahahahahahaha, then repeat an octave lower) and he is therefore not old enough to leave the pirate crew he is apprenticed to. It's OK, WS Gilbert couldn't take his plots seriously either.

Repeat as necessary

This is very much a remix of the one on the stairs from a few months back, but made more general. We've no doubt all seen this happen. Gizmo is the current master of the art of falling asleep and letting his head drop lower and lower until his nose touches the floor. And then he stays there, still fast asleep. I don't know how he does it.

Print this strip out. Then cut the strip out and make a loop, with the first frame continuing on from where the last frame ends. Rotate the strip and read. The cycle will never end. Repeat as necessary.

Millie Week 26, Mon 25 Feb - Sat 2 March 1991

This is the comics equivalent of one of those improvisation games where you are handed a prop and asked to come up with as many different uses for it as you can. Richard has a plaster cast and I'm going to play it for all it's worth.

The first three are definitely memories of my own broken leg at school. I ended up wearing a badge saying 'I slipped on some ice' to stop having to explain for the fiftieth time how I'd ended up with a plaster on my leg. It wasn't strictly true. Actually I'd been walking carefully over the icy quadrangle at school when I felt something in my right knee go 'ping'. And that was it. No dramatic falls, no blood, just the tiniest of sounds. And then, every thousand strides or so, I'd find my right leg would decide not to bear my own weight any more... But that wouldn't fit on a badge.

The 'Don't ask' strip is an example of a gag construction I use now and again in Smith - one where the slapstick happens at the beginning of the strip but it only becomes funny when the results are observed by a third party a while afterwards.

Flash! AaaaaaAaaaaah!

Wednesday's cartoon led in a natural progression to this one. I was considering the properties of cats eyes - and the other remarkable thing about them is the amount of light they are able to reflect. This, coupled with seeing Smudge sitting on my USB turntable (for converting my old vinyl to MP3s) as I coloured in the strip one day, led me to this.

The turntable Jones is sitting on is an old fashioned Dansette, a portable record player much loved by teenagers in the 60s. In fact, it's my sister's. It comes from an age when continuous play meant stacking ten singles onto the spindle and then letting them drop one at a time on the turntable, like a juke box.

Eye calisthenics

Ever played with a cat and watched its pupils dilate and contract? To quote an old Ukranian proverb I've just made up: "The pupils are largest before the pounce."

The magic box

This almost became a series of strips but I decided against it. I was considering a follow up strip where Jones jumps into the first box, is spat out of the upended second one into mid air, falls back under gravity and then rolls out of the first box again. And then another where Smith uses the boxes in an attempt to get onto Smudges wall, only to find Smudge has just knocked it off just as he is emerging from the second one. And one where he drags the first box into the airing cupboard, just in case. And one where Smith goes in the first one and a negative Smith called Schrodinger walks out of the second. But no - it's best kept as a one-off. If a box such as this stayed in the Smith Universe it could end up destabilising the domestic setting of the strip.

Millie Week 25, Mon 18 - Sat 23 February 1991

I wasn't one of those accident prone kids who spent their entire childhood with a different part of their anatomy in plaster every week. I think I broke my arm once in a freak climbing frame related accident at primary school. And the only other problem I had was a chipped patella when I was 12, which, once I'd finally persuaded everyone that I wasn't faking it by getting an X-ray done, meant my entire right leg ended up in plaster. I dredged up those childhood memories here.

Wednesday's strip brings to mind Spike Milligan's observation that any man left alone in a room with nothing but a tea cosy, who doesn't try it on as a hat when he thinks no-one is looking, has no soul.

Thursday's strip was suggested by the layout of my local hospital at the time, the Kent and Sussex hospital in Tunbridge wells. It was originally built in the early 30s, on a steeply sloping site, and got bits added onto it over the years. By the time we reached 1991 it was a labyrinth with corridors and wards going off at crazy angles on about eight different levels as it dribbled its way down the hill. It's just been replaced with a brand spanking new PFI hospital which has effectively bankrupted the local NHS trust. But that's by the by.

Friday's strip was inspired by once getting lost in that hospital and accidentally coming across the private dental wing. You could tell it was the private wing. There were shades on the lightbulbs, there was carpet on the floor, there were pictures on the walls, the furniture still had stuffing. Everything matched. I've got nothing against people who decide to go private - if they can afford it that's fine by me. But please, use your own buildings rather than NHS ones I've paid for with my taxes.

Jigsaw

Our problem isn't cats and jigsaw puzzles - it's cats and board games. It's incredible how well a cat can disrupt a game of Scrabble by walking across the board, or even worse, flopping down in the middle of the board and demanding to be adored.

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.

The naughty step

Introducing a new location: Jones' naughty step. This is the front door to the house, and it's where Jones gets banished to whenever she's done something wrong. Of course, if she wanted to get back in again all she has to do is walk around to the blue back door where the cat flap is. But she's too busy brooding on the injustice of it all to remember it's there.

We don't have flowers in our house for this exact reason. Flowers tend to get put in a vase outside our front door, where Smudge can't get at them.

Millie Week 24 Monday 11 - Saturday 16 February 1991

Here begins another long storyline, which begins with the stock situation of Valentine's Day, and then, via Saturday's shock twist, wanders all over the place. I'm quite proud of the forthcoming month's Millie strips.

Once again I'm writing from experience. Yes, I was the one who never got any Valentines cards but was forever hopeful. And yes, one year I got three. And it turned out they all came from my Mum.

I never discarded my specs though. That idea came from a friend at school who once lent me a book about the Bates Method of eye exercise: "Better Eyesight without Glasses", the work of a pre-war opthalmological quack repackaged as a self help book. It was all plainly bollocks, but the book still has its adherents, and the sheer lunacy of of its premise (basically, take of your glasses, blink lots, and stare at the sun) stayed with me until it came out here...

Kenny

...Except the parka in this case is a snot green colour unique to Britain. Minus points will be awarded to the first person to put up the inevitable 'Oh my god, you killed Smith, you bastard!' comment on GoComics this morning.

The difference between climate and weather.

This is weather. Because it never knows weather it's going to rain or not. And it only ever rains when you're away from shelter.

There's nothing worse than an oily cat.

The car is based on an Alfa Romeo, or, as I suppose we'd better start calling them now, a Chrysler. When they inevitably make their crossover vehicle, I imagine it will look as misshapen as this. And, being an Alfa under the skin, it will break down five minutes after leaving the showroom.

Millie Week 23

I’m going to just post a week’s worth on Saturdays from now on. And on Sundays I shall rest. And it will be good.

This week’s set is one of those that proves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is 1991, and John Major’s government is trying to find something to distinguish itself from the overpowering previous administration of Margaret Thatcher. It was a bit like George Bush following Ronald Reagan - how do you follow an act like that, especially when you’re a grey little man with no distinguishing features apart from a massive philtrum (look it up).

Their main idea was to privatise everything that Thatcher had left standing. She’d privatised everything that was suitable for privatisation - the Major government extended the program to everything that wasn’t. But one of their other, more sensible ideas, was to give more power to parent’s boards of Governors in schools, in an attempt to get parents more involved with the schooling of their children. I conflated the two issues, with a governors board of spivs (look it up) looking to make a profit out of their kids education.

The line about Jumbo Jockstraps (look it up) on Monday wasn’t mine. My original punchline just stopped at 'But first a word from our sponsors'.

The names of the companies on Tuesday were also imposed on me. My original script had business studies sponsored by Polly Peck, an Enron-like company that had just gone bust. It also has 'Englosh Linguage' sponsored by the Guardian, a paper which at that time was famed for its misprints. A rewrite has Geography sponsored by the Flat Earth Society.

Nowadays, of course, everything is sponsored, from the TVs next to the beds of NHS patients where you have to pay to switch off the constant drip feed of adverts, to exercise books in the local school.

This message has been brought to you by Google, Apple and the Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet.

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…