No wall required

OK, hands up everyone that thought this sequence would end with Smudge knocking Smith and Jones apart as they attempted to get onto her wall.

Rolling rolling rolling...

I've actually seen animals in the wild do this trick, and they didn't need a mat between them to do it. There's a linear park at the bottom of the hill from my house, a thin strip of parkland that is about three miles long and three or four hundred yards wide. The southern end, near the town centre, is your standard English town park, with bowling greens, boating lakes and ponds, playgrounds and meadows for running around in. Follow the brook that runs its length upstream and the park gradually gets wilder and wilder until, past the miniature railway and the chalybeate spring, you reach a reservoir with a steeply banked dam leading up to it.

I was walking below this bank on afternoon when something caught my eye. Something grey and furry was rolling down the slope towards the brook. Before it reached the water, the furry ball suddenly split in who and became two squirrels. They chittered for a bit and then raced up to the top of the bank again, where in one carefully choreographed movement they jumped in the air, grasped one another's paws in the configuration you see Smith and Jones in, and then rolled down the slope again. They did it once more - then they noticed me watching and scarpered.

This amazed me. Normally when I see animals playing it usually involves play fighting or chasing - it's competitive play. This was the first time I ever saw two animals co-operate to make a game that would be impossible to play by themselves.

Just wait till the squirrels discover Zorbing...

This strip was originally intended to have Scrumpy playing Smudge's role, but I changed it for space reasons - I needed the extra level of Smudge's wall to be able to fit everything into the frame.

Bum 2

Pdoyynng

Another childhood toy inspired this one. Remember push puppets - those plastic figures held together with string that collapsed when you pressed on the base? Smith stuck on his mat reminded me of a Pluto toy I used to have...

Just flick to kick

I suppose the more obvious punchline here would be: "Have you ever considered a career as a rocking horse?" but I chose Subbuteo because of its local connection.

Subbuteo, if you're not aware of it, is a tabletop soccer game, played by very small men and a very big football. Each man stands on a semi-circular weighted base and is flicked towards the ball in the hope of hitting the ball and kicking it towards the goal without the ball hitting one of the opposing team's men, in which case posession of the ball goes to the other team. It's one of those touchstone kids toys, like Scalextric or Top Trumps, that will make any man of a certain age go all misty eyed.

The local connection? It was invented in Langton Green, a village that is now part of the Tunbridge Wells metroplex, in 1947. At the time it consisted of a 22 weighted bases, two sheets of cardboard players you could press out and put in slots on the bases, and a stick of chalk so you could mark out a pitch on an army blanket (in 1947, two years after the war, every family had several). As the years went by, Subbuteo grew in sophistication over the years to the point where you could buy painted figures for every team in the football league, plus a whole host of accessories. If you wanted to take it to its extreme you could build a stadium so big and realistic that it was no longer possible to play the game any more. When my parents owned a driving school, they had an office that backed onto the Subbuteo warehouse in Warwick Park (both buildings are now part of the Brew House Hotel).

My favourite Subbuteo accessories? From the 70's, this streaker set of one male and one female streaker, plus two pursuing policemen.

Subbuteo was killed off a few years ago by computer games such as FIFA [insert year here], but was relaunched last year by Hasbro.

Dignity

The return of The Cat Who Stares at Stuff. I'm determined to get a photo of his real-life counterpart staring at laundry at some point but this winter's been so bad I haven't seen much of him since I introduced him to the strip. He'll take his position beneath the laundry as soon as there is enough sun for it to be worth anyone putting their laundry out for him to stare at.

Smith the cat tree

Rrrrip.

This never quite happened to Gizmo when he was having one of his mat pummelling sessions, but he did have a tendency to forget to retract his claws when walking on carpet, with similar results.

The cat sat on the mat

Plot! Plus, watch me cycle through a variety of different background colours in the next few strips before the action moves outdoors.

Pummel

A tribute to Gizmo, who inspired this entire storyline. He fell in live with the doormat outside the front door of the flat next door. Every night used to get back from work and put the key in my front door, and no sooner had I opened the door when this beige blur would rush out into the corridor and make a beeline for the doormat opposite. He would then pummel at the mat with all his might, purring loudly, pulling the mat around the floor. Eventually the man next door bought a new mat and gave the old mat to Gizmo so he could play with it whenever he wanted.

Doormat

 This rather unprepossessing strip is the start of a major month-long storyline. Who knows where this will go...