I'm the queen of the sandcastle!

...Once you've introduced a good theme to the strip it seems a pity to waste it. So here's Smudge on her sandmesa of power.

Millie DVD extra 2

Written at roughly the same time as the first big scare about Mad Cow Disease. At the time the papers were trying to persuade us that we were all going to die from Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis. It hasn't happened of course. We all died from bird flu instead. Apparently.

Rowr!

My definition of what happiness looks like is a dog on a beach. It's a pity Jones is in too grumpy a mood to appreciate it.

I think the ball was thrown by a French tourist, judging by the sound effect it makes when landing. 'Paf' is very Asterix. However, the dog must be English, as it's nor running off going 'Woooaaah! Woooaah!'

Aquarium

Hastings Blue Reef aquarium. A museum of fish or a very exotic larder, depending on your point of view. Maybe Jones would have had better luck if she'd headed to the flatfish fondling pool instead.

A flock of seagulls

No, not the band that were 60% hair lacquer and 40% wheezy synth music. This is the real thing.

Yesterday I decided to get some sausages and chips from the chip shop (the Blue Dolphin in the Old Town - one of Hastings' many fabulous chippies) and eat them on the beach. On the way over there I dropped a sausage, so I put it to one side - I'd throw it away as soon as I came across a waste bin.

Then the seagulls saw me. Maybe it was the white newsprint the chips were wrapped in that attracted them. It started off with one hovering beside me. Then another, and another. By the time I'd reached the waves there were about 20 malevolent white birds following me, riding the breezee and waiting for their moment.

I sat on the beach and ate. The birds settled in a flock in front of me and watched. Finally there was just the dropped sausage left. I decided to break one of the big rules of seaside living - the one that goes DO NOT FEED THE GULLS.

I tore off a bit of sausage and threw it into the air. All the gulls were suddenly aloft and one of them caught the sausage in mid air. On the second bit of sausage I made a discovery. It is possible to chuck a bit of sausage into the melée, bounce it off one gull's head, and still have another catch it and eat it. I discovered I was able to set up a chain reaction - by the time I ran out of sausage I managed set a record of getting the sausage to ricochet off three separate gulls before the fourth caught it and ate it.

Most amazing of all. As soon as I ran out of sausage, the gulls settled down onto the beach and ignored me. I was allowed off the beach without being mobbed.

Maybe it was my attitude towards the gulls that saved me. They knew I wasn't afraid of them, and I gave them their tribute in the end. I've seen gulls mob terrified tourists for their chips - I won't be doing it again.

This entire run of strips was based on a pair of seagulls I saw on Rock-a-Nore, the road that runs in the strip between the cliffs and the fishing beach, fighting over a fish head and totally oblivious to the traffic that was backed up on either side of them trying to get past without flattening them.

Millie DVD extra 1

Unpublished (though a shortened version appeared in the daily version a few weeks later).

First thing to note : Isn't Roger's artwork superb when it's free of the crude colouring that the Mirror used in those days? I always used to think Roger's unadorned artwork was excellent, but it got ruined when it was published in colour. These were the early days of colour newspapers in Britain - Eddie Shah's Today newspaper had only launched four years earlier and all the other newspapers were playing catch-up. Not even Rupert Murdoch's Sun had colour at that time - the Mirror Group were able to get in early as it had had at least ten year's previous experience with its Scottish papers, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail. Photoshop was but a dream in those days - Roger had to send his art boards in to the Mirror by courier and they were then effectively photocopied and coloured in with felt pens before they were split mechanically into the four process colours ready for printing. It was another world.

The backstory to this was the National Curriculum, which had just been introduced by the Tories. An efficient method of precscribing a set amount of knowledge that everyone should have before leaving school, or a cyncical attempt to wrest control of what should be taught away from teachers and put it in the hands of politicians? You decide.

Note there are two different stories going on at the same time here. There's an 'A' story - the one in the speech balloons, and there's the 'B' story: the three girls join the queue for school dinners, have gruel deposited in their plates, ignore Richard's attempt to get them to sit with him and scrape the food into the pig bin without ever actually sitting down and eating it. I know of what I write here - school dinners at Skinners were frequently inedible and I ended up bringing in a packed lunch after my first term there. Look at the kids sat at the table in frame five.

Miss Thrimmage and Mr Twenk. I think I was having a Dickensian name attack at that point.

That's a FISH?

Fish are, of course, really cylindrical and their natural habitat is crab flavoured jelly , as all domestic cats know. The hard pellety stuff you get in dry cat food is fish in their larval stage.