Feed the birds

The weather girl is Kaddy Lee Preston, BBC South East's local weather presenter. The robin isn't. I was searching for a photo of a robin on a postbox in the snow, a Christmas card staple, but found this chirpy little bird on a post instead.

Note Jones' prehensile tail.

Carrot Thief

OK, I do know how to spell weird really. Jones, however, is a cat, and therefore doesn't. Always remember, I before E except after W.

Millie Week 73: Mon 27 Jan - Sat Feb 1st

I'm fifty, and my study is still a tip, just like Millie's bedroom. Every now and then the clutter in the study reaches critical mass and I have to tidy it up before it either congeals into a super-dense black hole or self combusts.

It's a bit tidier than usual at the moment - I had to clear the floor so I could spread out all the pieces of an IKEA desk I was assembling.Yes, I'm going to start drawing at a desk, I can't be doing with this lying on the floor drawing business any more.

Bros were a boy band from the late 80s, comprising of two brothers, Matt and Luke Goss, and someone else, usually referred to as The Other One. They had a rabid fan base of teenage girls calling themselves the Brosettes. Millie would have been around 11 at the time they were at their height. They were huge in the UK, with a string of No 2 and one No 1 records, but never broke America. This was their big one...

Snowcatsh

Is it a snow cat, or does it look more like some sort of devilish pagan snow creature? Whatever, it's Jones's answer to the Snowdog that we were introduced to this Christmas as the Snowman's sidekick.

Pinnnnngggg-Blip!

I have no idea where this one came from - I just liked the idea of Smith using his tail as a periscope.

Whump

As I mentioned in a Millie post a week ago, if snow is going to fall in Britain at any time, it's usually round about now, just after Christmas when it's no longer seasonal and just gets in the way. I'm writing this on Sunday night, a week ago, and the long range weather forecast says we're expecting some snow over the next week or so. If we're extremely unlucky an inch of snow will fall, officially closing the entire country down, as we can't cope with snow. People will forget how to drive - trains will be paralyzed as the points freeze up in that totally unpredictable way they do every single bloody winter - supermarkets will emptied by panic buyers. If we're lucky, less will fall, but the country will still close down anyway. 21 miles away, in France, life will continue as normal under a three foot blanket of ice.

Millie Week 72: Mon 20 - Sat 25 Jan 1992

The scary thing about this set of school-set strips is that I requested Roger to draw a generic French teacher, and he came up up with a character who was the spitting image of Mr Plant, the teacher who put up with my stumbling attempts at French in my first two years at grammar school. (I eventually scraped a Grade 2 CSE in French - this in a school where anything less than a fully fledged 'O'-Level was frowned upon.)

Off the wall

If in doubt about ending a sequence, I usually bring in Smudge and her wall. And just for once she gets bested.

Incidentally, this is proof that The Cat Who Stares At Stuff isn't a stuffed toy, as some readers have speculated.

Contest

Not quite up to the quality of this staring contest from the BBC's Big Train sketch show, but good enough...

The incredible elastic ears of Scrumpy the rabbit

Yes, Scrumpy's ears are getting longer and longer every time I draw them. Maybe it's because he uses them so much, they're stretching with overuse.

In sadder news, Gizmo died on Tuesday last week, his renal failure having finally caught up with him. It's been a tough month, losing Smudge and Gizmo within a month of one another, but not a surprise. It's hit us both hard, though - today's been the first day I've had the strength to write about it. Linda and I would like to thank everyone at the Chase Vets Practice in London Road for helping us to make their last few months so comfortable.

Smudge and Gizmo, 2010

A house that is suddenly without cats feels so empty. The water fountain no longer burbles merrily away in the corner of the living room. There are no food bowls to trip over in the kitchen. Gizmo no longer perches on the far edge of the bath whenever I take a shower. Smudge no longer gives running commentaries while trying to talk to Linda's parents on the phone. There is no furry body blocking the view of my Mac as I type. Every now and then I catch a moving shadow in the corner of my eye and have to remind myself there's no longer a cat there to cause it.

Over to Linda, who wrote this obit on Facebook on Tuesday.

Hi, Everyone. Andrew and I are saddened to tell you all that our little big scrawny ol'Snaggedypuss boy Gizmo went to sleep this afternoon at the vet's office, with me holding him as he went. He might have been about eight or nine years old. He came to us about two years ago, when a friend had to give him up to keep him safe. He was a great source of fun for us, and I've never seen a cat who was better able to imitate Stevie Wonder or someone who should have been spread on the top of a grand piano, singing torch songs.

His hind legs were weak when he was a kitten and never got any better, so among other things, when he would crawl up into your lap for a cuddle or a Stevie Wonder pummeling session, he would sit, not on his haunches like other cats, but flat on his butt. He only had one tooth, which made him all the more lovable because his tooth was on the lower jaw in the front, so he had a snaggle tooth. He was bright eyed and earnest, and had a peep that sounded like a dog's squeaky toy. I think, though, before she died, Smudge must have told him he needed to learn how to meow, because for a little while, he was able to MEEEAAAAOOOOOUUUUWWWW in a very deliberate fashion.

I am at a loss...I have had an animal in my life constantly since 1995, and for the first time in nearly 20 years, I am alone with my human companions, which is fine, but there is some life missing. As I always ask, please donate to your favorite animal charity in Ol' Momo's name.

Millie Week 71: Mon 13 - Sat 18 January 1992

If there's going to be any snow in Britain, it's going to fall in January. It will leave a covering about half an inch deep and will cause the entire country to grind to a halt. I was writing the strip six weeks in advance of publication at the time, so I had to learn how to become a long range weather forecaster if I wanted to do anything like this in the hope that it would turn out to be topical.

You may recognise the third strip - I recycled it for a Smith cartoon a couple of years ago...

Spider sense

Cats can tell when they're being watched while they're asleep. And The Cat Who Stares At Stuff must send out stronger beams of whatever it is that cats can sense than anyone else.

Laundry

As previously mentioned, laundry holds a particular fascination for The Cat Who Stares At Stuff. And sometimes he can gather a whole group of other cats around him, all staring up at the same thing.

The Cat Who Stares At Stuff

Say hello to a new character, The Cat Who Stares At Stuff. He (or she - no-one is sure) is just that, a cat who stares at stuff. That's all he does.

Like most of the characters in this strip, The Cat Who Stares At Stuff has a real life counterpart. He (or she - no-one is quite sure) is a black and white cat, called The Cat Who Stares At Stuff. He may have a real name, but as he doesn't wear a collar, and I don't know who he belongs to, he's just The Cat Who Stares At Stuff to me. He can usually be seen in the communal garden to my block of flats, absolutely motionless, staring up with glazed eyes at something in one of the balconies. He can spend an entire afternoon just watching laundry flap about in the breeze. I've seen him stare transfixed at a dustbin lid for an hour. I've even opened my bedroom curtains first thing in the morning to see these intense green eyes staring up at me. It can be most unnerving.

Millie Week 70; Mon 6 - Sat 11 Jan 1992

Continuing with my antidote to those new year's resolutions that no-one will ever keep.

Flare

They say the true art of humour is in timing. And you'll see it used to its utmost in two different professions, standup and comic strips.

Normally, comics artists play with timing by adding and taking away frames, adding beat panels, or doing pull-out-and-reveals. Read about the many techniques that can be used in Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics.

Here's a new one. There are two different sets of timing at work here. I don't want people to realise that the last two panels are degrading until the reader gets to them. Hence the big wodges of text in the first two frames, setting up the gag and slowing the reader down. By the time the reader reaches frame three, the picture and text in frame four should be unreadable, and frame three should be just legible. Then the wait, until frame four becomes clear again. I spent a lot of time adjusting the timing on this one. I hope I've got it right...

Vanilla

Last year was one of those years where so much was going on that it was really easy to write. All I had to do was look at a calendar and write the jokes to fit the event that was happening that month. I wrote most of them in a coffee shop in New Mexico last Christmas. This year has less going on. It's a bit of a blah year. I'm going to have to come up with jokes out of thin air this year, which is probably a good thing. As last year's Myopic Topic strand proved, the best ideas come out of the tightest constraints.

Let's see what this year brings. This is a vanilla year, we need to cover it in sprinkles.