Ping

It was inevitable that the 'mountain out of a molehill' line was going to be used as some point. The question was how to ring the changes on a really obvious joke. The answer was to make it the set-up rather than the punchline.

Mad cat! Mad cat!

Billy's been having a bit of a mad night tonight. In fact he's still having one now - I can hear him tearing from room to room like someone's stuck a chili pepper up his bottom. Here are some of the photos I've managed to take of him where he hasn't come out as a big black black and white blur.

This is the first warning that it's going to be a lo-o-o-o-ong night...

Boooiiing!

Oh oh... Billy has just spotted the central light pendant hanging from the ceiling. Bella tries to persuade him against trying to jump for it...

Taking a breather

The naming of moles

Of course the mole is called Adrian. What else could he be called?

Millie Week 77: Mon 24 - Sat 29 Fab 1992

Mopping up the last week of the Winter Olympics.

180°

A bit of a variation on the usual 'pull back and reveal' technique of producing punchlines. Instead this shows Smudge's wall on both sides. Alert readers may have realised we're looking at the other side of Smudge's wall in the first two frames when Smudge runs on from the left instead of her usual right.

Dig dig dig

These molehills are structurally quite impressive as well. I reckon the mole must be using some sort of rebar as reinforcement.

Mounds

The problem with having a mole in the strip is that he's going to do what moles do. And here he goes. I've never seen mole hills this large - the only ones I've seen tend to be on Tunbridge Wells Common, and that has a very sandy soil so the hills tend to be low and flat. These are more like termite mounds.

Billy and Annabelle and the Sunday papers

Granted, Julie Burchill does write total bollocks in the papers sometimes, but this is not the way to deal with it.

Millie week 76: Mon 17 - Sat 22 Feb 1992

Responding to the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, back in the days when it was automatically assumed that anyone British would be no good at sports.

'The wrong sort of snow' line is one that has plagued British railways ever since 1991, when it tried to make an excuse for its usual inability to predict the onset of winter with the excuse that its trains couldn't move because the snow that has fallen was of the wrong type. To be honest, just for once, they were correct - it was a very rare type of powder snow that Britain's damp climate usually ensures we never receive - but by this time no-one was willing to believe them. 'The wrong type of snow' has since become a byword for lame excuses. We're all waiting for George Osborne to blame his triple dip recession on 'the wrong sort of economy'.

The last strip succinctly explains why I always wear slip-ons.

Yeeeeeek!

...It's better than being moled by a goose.

Meet the mole. He's another occasional character who will join the cast of poetic cockroaches, cheeky daffodils and other visitors to the garden.

If he has an inspiration, it's this guy, a Czechoslovakian mole called Krtek (or 'The Mole' in Britain). His adventures used to appear on the BBC when I was a kid, and I'm amazed to find they're still being produced today, and they look exactly the same. Apologies to fans of grey gloomy eastern european cold war animation - you'll find nothing of that sort in The Mole, his main influence appears to be early Disney shorts.

Perch

For a more positive take on seagulls than I usually manage, why not take a look at Piers Baker's wonderful Ollie and Quentin.

Bod

If I ever start making children's books out of Smith and Jones' adventures, this will be the first story I choose to adapt. This is developing into a classically structured picture book story, the kind where one character has a problem and then meets every other character in turn asking their opinions. Then (spoiler alert) by the last page the problem has solved itself anyway.

The Bod books and cartoons are the archetypes of these sort of stories. Here's Bod and the Apple. Luxuriate in John Le Mesurier's silky voice, Derek Griffith's wonderful music (he came up with a sig tune for each character's entrance, and the Bod theme, once heard, is never forgotten), and simply animated characters with retractable legs.

The Big Billy and Annabelle post

Billy and Annabelle have been with us for a week now, and it's great to see how they're settling down to sharing a house with people. The cats natural curiosity and playfulness has brought them out of hiding and they'll now spend a good proportion of their day thundering around the house chasing each other from room to room, or playing with me when I bring out a favorite toy like the pole with a bit of fluff at the end or the blue mouse.

The house is, of course, a mess now, as the cats redecorate to get the space more to their own liking. Toys are strewn all over the floor, neat piles of papers are knocked over and books pulled out of bookshelves.

When it all gets too much for them they have a retreat in Linda's wardrobe. Here's Billy relaxing in his nest, producing the biggest purr you have ever heard.

The two of them still don't like being touched. Actually, that's not quite true. They like being touched but they haven't convinced themsleves of it yet. Occasionally they'll forget to shy away from a hand when they're distracted by a toy or a treat. They'll allow themselves to be stroked, start purring, push back with their back and raise their tail in the air, and then they'll suddenly think: 'Hang on a second, what am I doing?' and then run away again. It looks like Billy will be the first one to give in completely - I've seen him consider jumping up onto my lap a couple of times before thinking better of it, but that time will come.

A major moment of triumph was last night, when they started following me from room to room for the first time. Call me strange, but I was very happy to be reading my loo-book on the toilet last light, and look up to see two cats watching me intently.

Bella's favourite toy is my old Hot Wheels set. I put it up to see if she'd be interested in it - she seemed to be the one who responded the most to quick moving objects. And boy she loves it. She'll sit astride the track, jumping out of the way just in time, catch the cars and then propel them forwards with her paw again. She's even tried to persuade Billy to join in but he's less interested.

Bella's also started leaping up and down on top of us wheile we're in bed at night. I don't think she's worked out that the moving shapes under the bedclothes are actually Linda and I trying to make room for her to settle down in. But it's another encouraging sign that her shyness is going away.

Let's finish off with a few more photos. More reports soon...

Millie Week 75: Mon 10 - Sat 15 Feb 1992

 

Chewing nuts - my favourite sweet. They're small lumps of almost solid toffee covered in something that is almost but not quite chocolate. The US equivalent would be one of those flat rectangular packs of Milk Duds you can get at cinemas.

Splot 2

A pattern is starting to emerge here...

Splot

This was originally going to be a snow joke until I realised that it work even better if I waited for the thaw. The original idea was that the cats would normally be able to walk over the top of a crust of snow, after the the top layer had thawed and frozen several times over the course of a few days, but if they concentrated their weight on just one paw, they'd fall through.

Mud

The thawing snow has left its usual mess behind. After last year's almost perpetual rainfall the ground is so sodden that there's nothing left for the snowmelt to soak into, so there are large areas of countryside which have essentially turned into bogs. Alexandra Park, down the hill from me, has a big events field which is now a thin membrane of grass stretched over a pool of liquid mud.

Billy and Annabel - day two

As I write this, Billy and Annabelle are scampering around the house, taking turns to chase one another up and down the hallway.

We've had several major achievements since I last wrote. First and foremost - they both found the litter tray and used it while we were asleep last night. This is a great load off my mind - we were worried they might adopt a corner of the living room and use that, but no, all is well. They've also worked out that their food tray is in the kitchen, and that there is a lot more room under the sofa than there is under the shelf unit. They have of course ignored the bed and the blanket we prepared specially for them.

Annabelle is proving to be the more forward of the two. She's become quite taken with a blue mouse which she's been beating seven bells out of.

Billy emerges from his lair

Annabelle and her mouse

Two cats, one mouse. Who shall be the victor? There's only one way to find out...

Annabelle, safe behind her curtain.

Millie Week 74: Mon 3 - Sat 8 February 1992

Millie's paper satchel is, of course, advertising the Daily Mirror, the paper the strip originally appeared in.

I'm not sure where the iconography of the heart being pierced by an arrow came from, but it certainly wasn't me, and I doubt it was Roger the cartoonist either. That strikes me as an addition made by a sub editor to underline a plot point that was perfectly obvious anyway.

Putting the milkbottles out on the doorstep - that dates the strip even more than the fact that no-one has a mobile phone or uses the internet. I'm sure there are still milkmen doing their rounds today, but I haven't heard the reassuring whine of a milk float and cheerful chink of bottles in the early hours of the morning since I moved to Hastings. Milk now comes from supermarkets.

Billy and Annabelle, day one

Here they are. They're very nervous at the moment - they'll take a while to adjust to their new surroundings and to learn to trust us - but for the moment they've taken up residence in the space underneath the shelves behind the TV set. Occasionally, when they think no-one is looking, they'll have an explore, but as soon as they hear anyone move, they're back underneath the sheving unit again. Above, you see Annabel, considering a trip to the unknown land beyond the DVD player.

And below, is Billy, in the same place, doing an excellent impression of The Cat Who Stares At Stuff.

Finally, here's Billy. He's working on the assumption that he can't be seen because his head is hidden.
More tomorrow, after the Millie posting.

Patiently...

I'm using the time honoured third-person interior monologue device here, as used by Snoopy in Peanuts and Garfield in, um, Garfield. As ever the war between cat and seagull contunues, and as ever the seagull wins.

Away from the strip, today's the day Linda and I will be welcoming Billy and Annabelle, two new rescue kittens, into our home. I'll have photos up as soon as they get here. In the meantime here's their back story...

Billy and Annabelle are brother and sister, they're five months old and they're black with white flashes on their nose, chest and socks. They come to us courtesy of the Blue Cross rehoming centre in Northiam. They were born to a feral mother who found a big converted oast house in the countryside, walked in through the cat flap and made her nest in an unused room. Believe it or not, it was five weeks before the mother and her kittens were discovered! This makes me ask two questions - did the owners of the house not have noses, and who lives in a house so large they don't notice a strange cat wandering about feeding her kittens?

The kittens have been at the Blue Cross since they were discovered (mum vanished as soon as people turned up) and the good people there have been gradually acclimatising Billy and Annabel to human contact ever since. On Friday, they come to live with us. They're still rather nervous around people, but they're gradually learning to trust us. Billy's the more outgoing of the two, he's not sure he likes being stroked yet, but scratch him on the head in just the right way and you will be rewarded with the loudest purr ever. Given the choice, Annabel will just be a shape underneath a blanket, we'll be sure to make sure she has one when she gets here, so she can emerge in her own time.