Millie Week 46, Mon 22 - Sat 27 July 1991

"Perfick" was the word of the summer - another Darling Buds of may reference. It was Pa Larkin's favourite affirmation. The sun was 'perfick', the food was 'perfick', everything in the idealised kent countryside he lived in was 'perfick'. It's a word I've never ever heard without silent but easily discernable quotation marks being put around it, and I've lived in Kent for most of my life.

Kent always used to be known as the garden of England. It's now the high speed transport corridor of England, the orchards and hop fields have been replaced with motorways, high speed train lines and enormous logistics warehouses. This strip was written just as all that construction was happening.

The common market, which turned into the EEC, which then turned into the EC, which then turned into the EU, is soon to turn into the German Fourth Reich, due to the bankruptcy of the rest of the continent. It was a good idea at the time, but that time was 1955, and the idea was just to have a free trade region. By 1991, Europe had bloated into an organisation with a parliament whose only purpose was to rubber stamp the policies of unelected bureaucrats, and the European Common Agricultural Policy was paying farmers to leave fields fallow, in an attempt to stop overproduction. In the meantime, Africa starved, but it made slightly more sense than the previous policy of stockpiling the surplus in huge barns and leaving it to rot. It was quite the opposite of 'perfick'.