Millie Week 49, Mon 12 - Sat 17 Aug 1991

The plot thickens, and Richard finds himself landed with the job of being responsible for the fourth form of Crippen Comprehensive, miles from civilisation, and not being up to the job.

John Major was the Prime Minister at the time. It is said of him that he rose without trace. He was popularly depicted as a grey boring man, but secretly I quite liked him. After the madness of Margaret Thatcher's final years it was good to have a dull decent man in charge of the country. What he didn't have was any authority. He was soon to find himself desperately trying to keep his government going as his party plotted against him, while simultaneously self destructing in an orgy of sex scandals, incompetence. criminality and bribery. He was that teacher we've all had who couldn't keep order in the classroom.

Swimming

Of course, there are cats out there that love water. Turkish Vans and Bengals are famed for their swimming. And Gizmo loves to sit on the edge of the bath whenever  I'm having a shower and allows himself to get covered in the fine spray.

Kickboxing

However, in the semi finals, Scrumpy had to fight a kangaroo...

I got rhythm

What you can't see in the finished version of this strip is the little mound of Tippex where I kept on spelling Rhythmic incorrectly. I'm not sure I've got it right even now. However, if you're feeling brave, 'Rhythm' is a killer word to use when playing hangman.

Millie Week 48, Mon 5 - Sat 10 Aug 1991

...and the Darling Buds of May references continue. Mariette was the character played by Catherine Zeta Jones in the series. The pub name 'Perfick and Firkin' makes it one of the Firkin chain of real ale pubs that were very popular at the time. And Mr Evan is called that because he is a Geography teacher and therefore by law has to be Welsh. I don't know why, but all the Geog masters at my school were either Welsh or graduates from the University of Aberystwyth. (I'd also like to add that they were all uniformly excellent.)

Once I'd got that bit of plot out of the way I spent the rest of the week mucking about in boats, and indulging in a running joke.

The fourth strip was one of my attempts at taking an old joke and working a twist on it. As the script for the last panel says: "Well, you'd be really disappointed if she didn't wouldn't you?"

Note the partial change of handwriting in a couple of balloons in the last two strips - the result of a last minute editorial decision to change the words 'you lot' and 'they're' into 'you kids' and 'the kids' for the sake of clarity. It sounds pernickety, but if you're publishing these strips one at a time, it helps to give these reminders.

High Jump

Time for a catchup, I think. First of all, you've probably noticed that the format of the Smith Blog has changed somewhat. I'm now using Blogger's 'dynamic' system. It's taken a bit of getting used to, but I've decided I rather like it. It means that the posts themselves need to be set in a rather boring centralised layout to be intelligible, and I wish there was a way to turn off the type justification, as, being a typographer of the Swiss school, I much prefer ragged right setting. But the advantage is that the front page allows you to see all the posts in one go, and that the reader can change the settings on the front page so they can see what the blog looks like in a choice of different formats. Try the options in the menu bar underneath the title - it's currently set at 'Magazine' but some of the others are really neat. I especially like the mosaic - it's impractical for this blog but it looks rather neat.

The other good thing about this format is that my hit rate has rocketed, and most of them appear to be real people, rather than spambots from Russia.

I'm writing this on Tuesday 30th July. The Olympics have started, the opening ceremony was spectacular and Mitt Romney is on his one-man mission to insult the entire world one nation at a time. He's now one Polish joke away from causing an international incident.

And the cats continue to run their own version of the Games, brought to you by Wiskas Dentabits, Unigate Dairies and Tush & Pat's Original Fish Rolls

Long Jump

Memories of the long jump at my old school sports ground. Our sports ground were in a private bit of parkland a mile away from the school, and it tended to be used by dog walkers in the rather well heeled housing estate that had built up next to it. You didn't want to look to closely at what you might find in the sand pit on the long jump, but you definitely needed to give it a good rake before using it.