Pick pick pick

I used to live in a flat which had woodchip wallpaper - every dodgy builder's favorite decorating option as it tends to hide any defects in the wall with random nobblyness. All went well until two kittens called Smudge and Cholmondeley moved in and discovered quite how delightful the stuff was to use as a claw sharpener. In a few short weeks my walls went from nobbly to shaggy.

They grew out of it after a year, and it was surprisingly easy to train them to use a scratching post. But it still meant I had to redecorate two rooms.

Pedants will notice that the skirting board only appears in the first frame.

Wallpaper

...well, it always happens to me.

More DIY

It's the last bank holiday of the year - or rather, the last one until Christmas, when we make up for the dearth of state holidays by staying away from work for a week and a half.

Thus, it's the last chance to do any extended DIY before Easter. And it's my chance to bring out all the DIY gags that I wrote for last Easter but which had to be postponed to make way for everything that happened over the summer.

Millie Week 51 - Mon 26 - Sat 31 Aug 1991

There was a traveling fairground that visited Tunbridge Wells very August bank holiday, and I know there's one that visits Blackheath in South London at Easter. The two got conflated for this series of cartoons.

My favourite fairground ride is the Waltzer - the one that Gemma comes a cropper on in the third strip. I remember when I was a kid sharing one with my friend Mark, who could at times be a bit of a geek. It was one where the spinning circular booth span around on the floor, but the floor undulated as you travelled around, causing the booth to speed up, slow down and change direction seemingly at random. When we staggered off the ride after five minutes of furious g forces, Mark looked at me and said, 'I didn't understand the physics of that...'

My wife and I have come to a pact about fairground rides after a Waltzer at Blackpool Pleasure Beach churned her up so much she was sick. I don't do heights. Linda doesn't do circumferences.

Several South London landmarks are pointed out from the top of the ferris wheel. Canary Wharf was being built at the time, on the Isle of Dogs, a peninsula of land formed by a loop in the Thames that juts into south London like the lug of a jigsaw piece. One Canada Square was brand new, and had just become the tallest building in the UK (a title now taken by The Shard at London Bridge). The Daily Mirror was to move there a few years later.

Braids

One for all you Scrumpy fans out there. He seems to have become my breakout character. Everyone loves a depressed rabbit.

Got that? Tomarto.

When I was a kid, my mum used to grow tomatoes (that's tomartoes) in a greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. They were big messy plants, with a tendril-to-fruit ratio of about 99:1 - nothing like the nice tidy tomatoes on the vine that you find shrink-wrapped in punnets at the supermarket nowadays. The greenhouse was also one of the real Jones's favourite places in the winter, as she could go in there on a cold but sunny day and pretend it was still summer.

It's pronounced tomarto

I say tomarto. My wife says tomayto. We both say potayto. Who on earth says potarto?

Millie Week 50, Mon 19 - Sat 24 Aug 1991

Back to Catford, and this week's them is ice cream and lollies.

Strip four was based on an ice cream I tried to eat on the Queen Mary in Long Beach during a very hot summer. It was about 100 degrees in the shade, and I found myself in a a race to eat as much of the ice cream as I could before it melted away. I ended up holding it over the side of the deck and watching the melted ice cream trickle swiftly down my arm and then into the water below.

Lolly sticks always used to have riddles printed on them. The question would be on the exposed part of the stick, and the answer would be revealed once you had consumed the ice cream. The riddles were be of the 'What's yellow and dangerous' variety.

Strip six is dedicated to whatever madman at Walls came up with the name 'Lolly Gobble Chock Bomb'. It lasted just one summer, probably because no-one could bring themselves to ask for it.

* Shark infested custard, of course.

Twitter

I suppose I'd better get a twitter feed at some point, but I refuse to own a cellphone, and there's never any wi-fi coverage around whenever I need it so using in only iPod is out as well. And a tweet from a home PC is essentially a crippled email, isn't it? I think I'll stick to a blog.

Charley says...

This is based on the real Cholmondeley, and his habit of talking to himself when he thought there was no-one around to listen to him. I think he must have been bullied by Smudge, she had opinions and she'd always tell you them at the top of her voice. Cholmondeley would instead stalk out into an unoccupied room and start making noises like Charley the cat from the old public information films. Then when you walked in on him he'd suddenly stop and look really embarrassed. 

The Starlight Barking*

This was based on taking my wife's dog, Sandy, on walks around the streets of Clovis just as the sun was setting. Sandy would trot blithely on down the street, tail sashaying in the breeze, completely unbothered about the way she was sending every single dog in Eastern New Mexico into a frenzy. 

* If you haven't read Dodie Smith's peculiarly mystical sequel to 101 Dalmatians, then I suggest you do. You'll believe a dog a can fly.

Millie Week 49, Mon 12 - Sat 17 Aug 1991

The plot thickens, and Richard finds himself landed with the job of being responsible for the fourth form of Crippen Comprehensive, miles from civilisation, and not being up to the job.

John Major was the Prime Minister at the time. It is said of him that he rose without trace. He was popularly depicted as a grey boring man, but secretly I quite liked him. After the madness of Margaret Thatcher's final years it was good to have a dull decent man in charge of the country. What he didn't have was any authority. He was soon to find himself desperately trying to keep his government going as his party plotted against him, while simultaneously self destructing in an orgy of sex scandals, incompetence. criminality and bribery. He was that teacher we've all had who couldn't keep order in the classroom.

Swimming

Of course, there are cats out there that love water. Turkish Vans and Bengals are famed for their swimming. And Gizmo loves to sit on the edge of the bath whenever  I'm having a shower and allows himself to get covered in the fine spray.

Kickboxing

However, in the semi finals, Scrumpy had to fight a kangaroo...

I got rhythm

What you can't see in the finished version of this strip is the little mound of Tippex where I kept on spelling Rhythmic incorrectly. I'm not sure I've got it right even now. However, if you're feeling brave, 'Rhythm' is a killer word to use when playing hangman.

Millie Week 48, Mon 5 - Sat 10 Aug 1991

...and the Darling Buds of May references continue. Mariette was the character played by Catherine Zeta Jones in the series. The pub name 'Perfick and Firkin' makes it one of the Firkin chain of real ale pubs that were very popular at the time. And Mr Evan is called that because he is a Geography teacher and therefore by law has to be Welsh. I don't know why, but all the Geog masters at my school were either Welsh or graduates from the University of Aberystwyth. (I'd also like to add that they were all uniformly excellent.)

Once I'd got that bit of plot out of the way I spent the rest of the week mucking about in boats, and indulging in a running joke.

The fourth strip was one of my attempts at taking an old joke and working a twist on it. As the script for the last panel says: "Well, you'd be really disappointed if she didn't wouldn't you?"

Note the partial change of handwriting in a couple of balloons in the last two strips - the result of a last minute editorial decision to change the words 'you lot' and 'they're' into 'you kids' and 'the kids' for the sake of clarity. It sounds pernickety, but if you're publishing these strips one at a time, it helps to give these reminders.

High Jump

Time for a catchup, I think. First of all, you've probably noticed that the format of the Smith Blog has changed somewhat. I'm now using Blogger's 'dynamic' system. It's taken a bit of getting used to, but I've decided I rather like it. It means that the posts themselves need to be set in a rather boring centralised layout to be intelligible, and I wish there was a way to turn off the type justification, as, being a typographer of the Swiss school, I much prefer ragged right setting. But the advantage is that the front page allows you to see all the posts in one go, and that the reader can change the settings on the front page so they can see what the blog looks like in a choice of different formats. Try the options in the menu bar underneath the title - it's currently set at 'Magazine' but some of the others are really neat. I especially like the mosaic - it's impractical for this blog but it looks rather neat.

The other good thing about this format is that my hit rate has rocketed, and most of them appear to be real people, rather than spambots from Russia.

I'm writing this on Tuesday 30th July. The Olympics have started, the opening ceremony was spectacular and Mitt Romney is on his one-man mission to insult the entire world one nation at a time. He's now one Polish joke away from causing an international incident.

And the cats continue to run their own version of the Games, brought to you by Wiskas Dentabits, Unigate Dairies and Tush & Pat's Original Fish Rolls

Long Jump

Memories of the long jump at my old school sports ground. Our sports ground were in a private bit of parkland a mile away from the school, and it tended to be used by dog walkers in the rather well heeled housing estate that had built up next to it. You didn't want to look to closely at what you might find in the sand pit on the long jump, but you definitely needed to give it a good rake before using it.