Paste

Having introduced the dandelions last week, how could I resist this? Some gags just assemble themselves.

Clang Clang Clang Clang

Is this just a British thing? My wife Linda, brought up in Japan and the US, had never heard of the theory that you could tell the time by blowing on a dandelion - the number of puffs it takes you to denude the stem of fluff supposedly tells you what o'clock it is.

Achoo!

Sometimes a drawing is just right. Jones's pose in the last frame is one of those drawings in my opinion.

Dandelions.

One of the problems with writing a cartoon strip so far in advance, as I tend to do, is that sometimes I see something that is definitely specific to a certain time of the year, which spurs a cartoon idea. I then have to hold onto it until that time of year comes around again and then use it. This weeks' strips were inspired by seeing a cloud of dandelion fluff float gracefully into the car park at work in April last year.

Mind you. I don't think dandelions are particularly fussy about when they seed. I remember rehearsing a show with the West Kent Youth Theatre in the open air one summer. It was a beautiful day, so we were using a quadrangle next to West Kent College's science block, which was downwind of a field of dandelions which had just come into seed. The wind got up and we were suddenly breathing dandelions...