...and they're off

There is just one subject at the moment. Let the games begin...

Millie Week 47, Mon 29 July - Sat 3 Aug 1991

This week's obligatory Darling Buds of May reference was on Tuesday, a dig at the enormous spreads the Larkin family always used to sit down to.

Sport for all

Anyone noticed how the more people say they love watching sport, the less likely they are to actually play it? Your average football fan would be hard pressed to get up from the sofa to change the channel back to Sky Sports after he's just sat on the remote with his voluminous arse. Tennis fans also have a tendency to sit in darkened rooms for the entirety of Wimbledon fortnight.

I should speak. I've been glued to the Tour de France for the past three weeks*, but I haven't been on my bike at all this year.

*I am of course, writing this two weeks before publication - so from my current perspective we're only half way through the race and two British riders from Team Sky are first and second respectively... I wonder if we've won yet...

Zapper

BBC2 vs Channel 4.

Snooker

The game is snooker, not billiards. It's a hugely popular televised sport* in the UK, and it fascinates cats. Cholmondeley used to be transfixed by the sight of balls rolling into pockets, but his favourite bits were the cues, which would waggle around enticingly on the screen. I've seen him have a crafty paw at the screen when he thinks no-one'slooking several times.

*Yes. It's televised as a 'sport' in England. As are lawn bowls and darts. Don't expect too much from our athletes at the Olympics this year.

Millie Week 46, Mon 22 - Sat 27 July 1991

"Perfick" was the word of the summer - another Darling Buds of may reference. It was Pa Larkin's favourite affirmation. The sun was 'perfick', the food was 'perfick', everything in the idealised kent countryside he lived in was 'perfick'. It's a word I've never ever heard without silent but easily discernable quotation marks being put around it, and I've lived in Kent for most of my life.

Kent always used to be known as the garden of England. It's now the high speed transport corridor of England, the orchards and hop fields have been replaced with motorways, high speed train lines and enormous logistics warehouses. This strip was written just as all that construction was happening.

The common market, which turned into the EEC, which then turned into the EC, which then turned into the EU, is soon to turn into the German Fourth Reich, due to the bankruptcy of the rest of the continent. It was a good idea at the time, but that time was 1955, and the idea was just to have a free trade region. By 1991, Europe had bloated into an organisation with a parliament whose only purpose was to rubber stamp the policies of unelected bureaucrats, and the European Common Agricultural Policy was paying farmers to leave fields fallow, in an attempt to stop overproduction. In the meantime, Africa starved, but it made slightly more sense than the previous policy of stockpiling the surplus in huge barns and leaving it to rot. It was quite the opposite of 'perfick'.

Big Screen

Curry's is the British equivalent of Best Buy, and masters at the selling of totally unnecessary product insurance.