The big day

So this is it. And its interesting to note that despite everyone wanting to wish the Royal couple all the very best, a note of melancholy has entered the comments. Recent history weighs heavily on this marriage.

Margaret and Anthony. Anne and Mark. Charles and Diana. Andrew and Fergie. We've been here before. The commemorative tea towels lasted longer than the marriages.

I don't want history to repeat itself. May this new generation have more sense than the preceding ones. And may the media give Kate more breathing space than they ever gave Diana.

Not very funny, but there you are. Normal slapstick resumes on Monday.

Middleton, Middleton, Middleton Pie

I checked GoComics this morning to make sure the strip had loaded into the system properly, and the following advert popped up underneath it...

Offcuts of Royal Couple served in a delicious puff pastry. Coming soon in the same range - Diana in a bun. Blee!

Indecision

I missed Charles and Diana's wedding. I was on the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland where the TV signal was spotty at best, doing a Geography field trip with other A Level students from my school. I remember hiring a bike, cycling halfway around the island, and then coming back to measure pebble sizes in the burn in Glen Catacol.

Charles and Camilla's wedding was spent in a car showroom in Tunbridge Wells, Linda and I bought our Honda Jazz as the ceremony was taking place on monitors all over the sales floor.

Edward and Sophie's wedding was spent cycling through the Medway valley, waiting for the peal of church bells that would sound the all clear telling me it was safe to go home again.

This time round I intend to watch the wedding in Halfords in Brighton, buying a bicycle to replace the one that got stolen last year. After all, it's tradition isn't it?

Bag

A brown paper grocery bag of the kind that we don't use in the UK - we tend to go for plastic bags over here but I can't draw one of them in this situation.

Desperate Wedding tie-ins

Are you a cringing royalist and deaf as well? Scared you won't be able to hear the royal couple say 'One does' to one another? Then this is just the thing for you.

Got too many rabbits at your rescue centre? Just name two of them Wills and Kate and let local journalists desperate for stories with a royal angle give you as much free publicity as you need.

(Also note the ad underneath for the Charlton Athletic football team, advertising a fixture that had taken place three weeks previously. That tells you everything you need to know about the intelligence of footballists.)

Roofscape

This is one of my continuous background cartoons. It's a bit of a cheat this time as no characters are walking from frame to frame, but as it's essentially Smith sitting on a roof looking out over the Hastings skyline, the division of frames still works as a timing device.

This was taken from a photographic reference. One of the handy things about Hastings is that it's very hilly. Roads tend to follow contour lines, and it's perfectly possible to stand on one street and look down over the roofs of houses one block away. The other handy thing about Hastings is that it's riddled with twittens, footpaths and stairways - short cuts from one level of houses to the next.

Here's the photo the drawing above was based on.

It was taken from halfway up this flight of stairs on the West Hill, looking NW over the Ore Valley towards St Helens Woods (of which more will be seen in the summer) and the High Weald of Sussex. Of course this is nowhere near the post-war bit of town Smith and Jones actually reside in, but I wanted this strip to be a bit more interesting in its architecture. Therefore we can see the Victorian houses in the foreground, graduating to the gingerbread Edwardians in the middle distance and then the red roofed 1930s semis in the distance.

The photo was actually taken in February, so I've had to improvise the foliage.

Scary masks

Remember those Kate and Wills masks I mentioned in yesterday's post? See below, a photo from Sunday's London Marathon, scanned from Monday's 'i' newspaper. Are they sinister or what?

Also worth noting is the fact that, according to the story, Superman put in a time of 2:42:46, while Fred Flintstone managed 2:46:59. That's what years of propelling a car with your feet can do.

Z

I've been keeping away from the hype, avoiding tabloid newspapers and not watching ITV, but now it's starting to become unavoidable. The creepiest Royal Wedding souvenir I've seen so far is the Will and Kate masks. It wont be long before the Royal couple are caught on CCTV doing their first armed bank robbery...

Bunting

OK, here we go. Time to tackle the Blessed Union of The Two Most Fragrant and Radiant People in the Universe. Not that I'm particularly interested, you understand. Or that I'm particularly against it. But when an event becomes so over hyped that it becomes compulsory I tend to react against it, and that tends to be reflected in Smith's attitude.

Just for the record, I wish them well. I just worry for Kate. She's marrying into a problem family. They have previous when it comes to this sort of thing and if past events can be used to predict future trends, things do not look good for her. I can't help thinking she might be better off marrying into the Krays.