Cup cake nation

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cupcakes as much as the next person, but I don't understand how they've suddenly become so totemic. Along with the ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' slogan they seem to have become a symbol of the cosy British response to the endless recession - we're fighting back by retreating to a cosy domesticity and nostalgia for a Kath Kidston past that never really existed. And, I hate myself for it, but I never miss an episode of the Great British Bakeoff myself. Why is it so addictive? Why? Why?

Millie Week 86: Mon 27 April - Sat 2 May 1992

King Lear was one of my set texts for 'A' Level at school, and I loved it. There doesn't seem to havebeen a Hollywood version of it made to date - I can find listings on IMDB for an austere 1971 English/Danish version, and the BBC's worthy 1980s TV production seemingly filmed in one room in the BBC TV Centre, but nothing really Hollywood. An Al Pacino version has been in development hell for a while - let's hope it ends up starring Fluffy the Wonder Hamster.

The comedy bit isn't actually from Lear. As the original script says: Because of a freak dubbing accident at the video manufacturers a small segment of 'The Comedy of Errors' has appeared on the soundtrack. This takes the place of one of those totally unfunny 'humorous' episodes between Lear and the Fool, as is, happily, just as incomprehensible and unfunny. OK, I've lent my copy of Lear to a Drama Students and now it's lost in limbo, so the Comedy of Errors is understudying for tonight.

No wall required

OK, hands up everyone that thought this sequence would end with Smudge knocking Smith and Jones apart as they attempted to get onto her wall.

Rolling rolling rolling...

I've actually seen animals in the wild do this trick, and they didn't need a mat between them to do it. There's a linear park at the bottom of the hill from my house, a thin strip of parkland that is about three miles long and three or four hundred yards wide. The southern end, near the town centre, is your standard English town park, with bowling greens, boating lakes and ponds, playgrounds and meadows for running around in. Follow the brook that runs its length upstream and the park gradually gets wilder and wilder until, past the miniature railway and the chalybeate spring, you reach a reservoir with a steeply banked dam leading up to it.

I was walking below this bank on afternoon when something caught my eye. Something grey and furry was rolling down the slope towards the brook. Before it reached the water, the furry ball suddenly split in who and became two squirrels. They chittered for a bit and then raced up to the top of the bank again, where in one carefully choreographed movement they jumped in the air, grasped one another's paws in the configuration you see Smith and Jones in, and then rolled down the slope again. They did it once more - then they noticed me watching and scarpered.

This amazed me. Normally when I see animals playing it usually involves play fighting or chasing - it's competitive play. This was the first time I ever saw two animals co-operate to make a game that would be impossible to play by themselves.

Just wait till the squirrels discover Zorbing...

This strip was originally intended to have Scrumpy playing Smudge's role, but I changed it for space reasons - I needed the extra level of Smudge's wall to be able to fit everything into the frame.

Bum 2

Millie Week 85: Mon 20 March - Sat 25 April 1992

Four people stuck in a car during a traffic jam. Not so much a cartoon strip as an episode of Seinfeld.

Pdoyynng

Another childhood toy inspired this one. Remember push puppets - those plastic figures held together with string that collapsed when you pressed on the base? Smith stuck on his mat reminded me of a Pluto toy I used to have...

Just flick to kick

I suppose the more obvious punchline here would be: "Have you ever considered a career as a rocking horse?" but I chose Subbuteo because of its local connection.

Subbuteo, if you're not aware of it, is a tabletop soccer game, played by very small men and a very big football. Each man stands on a semi-circular weighted base and is flicked towards the ball in the hope of hitting the ball and kicking it towards the goal without the ball hitting one of the opposing team's men, in which case posession of the ball goes to the other team. It's one of those touchstone kids toys, like Scalextric or Top Trumps, that will make any man of a certain age go all misty eyed.

The local connection? It was invented in Langton Green, a village that is now part of the Tunbridge Wells metroplex, in 1947. At the time it consisted of a 22 weighted bases, two sheets of cardboard players you could press out and put in slots on the bases, and a stick of chalk so you could mark out a pitch on an army blanket (in 1947, two years after the war, every family had several). As the years went by, Subbuteo grew in sophistication over the years to the point where you could buy painted figures for every team in the football league, plus a whole host of accessories. If you wanted to take it to its extreme you could build a stadium so big and realistic that it was no longer possible to play the game any more. When my parents owned a driving school, they had an office that backed onto the Subbuteo warehouse in Warwick Park (both buildings are now part of the Brew House Hotel).

My favourite Subbuteo accessories? From the 70's, this streaker set of one male and one female streaker, plus two pursuing policemen.

Subbuteo was killed off a few years ago by computer games such as FIFA [insert year here], but was relaunched last year by Hasbro.

Dignity

The return of The Cat Who Stares at Stuff. I'm determined to get a photo of his real-life counterpart staring at laundry at some point but this winter's been so bad I haven't seen much of him since I introduced him to the strip. He'll take his position beneath the laundry as soon as there is enough sun for it to be worth anyone putting their laundry out for him to stare at.

Millie Week 84: Mon 13 March - Sat 18 April 1992

The week leading up to Easter brought forth this. Now the parents were in place I could now channel my memories of long bank holidays spent stuck in the back of a Ford Cortina in the 1970s.

The something beginning with J is of course 'Jam'.

Friday's strip is missing. Which is a pity, as Roger would have drawn it so well, and it's so much a vignette drawn straight from my own childhood...


FRIDAY 17th April.

1. OK, it's one of those Vistavison jobs*. Grouting terrace, early morning. The sun has barely managed to struggle over the horizon. We see a line of acrs parked outsode their respective houses. Each one has a their owner either stuffing hampers into the hatchback, attaching trailers laden with camping equipment, fixing canoes to roofracks or or strapping bikes to those precarious clampy things on the backs of estate cars. In short, the road is a hive of activity. Dads fiddle around with their cars while Mums wait patiently inside them, trying to stop the kids from starting all out war on the back seat. Millie's parents are much the same. Dad is trying to control whatever is hidden under a lumpy tarpaulin on the roof rack hile Mum fills the hatch back with Tupperware. Millie stands in the foreground in the far right corner of the frame, looking on.
MILLIE: BEHOLD THE EASTER RITUAL OF GETTING UP EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH ON THE M25!

* In other words, this is a single panel strip.

Smith the cat tree

Rrrrip.

This never quite happened to Gizmo when he was having one of his mat pummelling sessions, but he did have a tendency to forget to retract his claws when walking on carpet, with similar results.

The cat sat on the mat

Plot! Plus, watch me cycle through a variety of different background colours in the next few strips before the action moves outdoors.

Millie Week 83: Mon 6 March - Sat 12 April 1992

This must have been the Spring 2002 General Election - the last one that the Conservatives won outright. I say 'won' - to be fair, they didn't so much win it as have it handed to them on a plate by Labour leader Neil Kinnock a few days before the election. By the final week of canvassing it seemed inevitable that Labour would win the election - the Tories were tired and rudderless, Margaret Thatcher had imploded and the remnants of the Conservative party were being fought over by two different factions, John Major's well meaning but clueless moderates, and a venal bunch of Thatcherite robots. Labour celebrated by holding a massive political rally in Sheffield just before polling day. This was a mistake - we Brits tend not to trust big political rallies, especially not ones that take victory for granted before a ballot has even been cast, and you can double that for rallies in which the prime-minister-in-waiting roars out 'ALRIGHT!' to a baying mob for what seems like hours. A nation recoiled and the Tories waltzed into office for a fourth consecutive term. A few days later the currency collapsed and the Conservatives grimly held onto power for another five years of scandal and squabbling. It was the last general election they would ever win on their own (to date).

The Daily Mirror is a working class left-leaning paper. There aren't very many of them, in fact I'd say it's almost unique - the Guardian and Independent fight for the left wing intellectual professional market, and no-one really reads the Communist Party's Morning Star. At the time the 'i' (a concise remix of the Independent's content for the mid market commuter) didn't exist. All other British papers can be defined as conservative (except the Sun which just backs whoever Richard Murdoch has in his pocket at the time). Despite the Mirror's in-built bias I was determined to be even handed in the bile I handed out. Thus the first canvasser is a Labour party man, the second is from the Tories, and the councillor in the final strip is probably supposed to be a Liberal Democrat, though the colours seem more suited to the Mararishi's short lived Natural Law Party.

The strips were of course written six weeks before polling took place.

And yes, you have seen the Thursday strip before. I repurposed it for Smith for the 2010 election (the one without a result that led to the current inept coalition). This was written before I worked out the formula of letting the real world intrude on Smith and Jones via the TV set.

The awful thing is that the current parliament is rapidly proving there actually isn't anyone left worth voting for. When Ed Milliband seems like the most credible choice, you know things have gone very very wrong.

Pummel

A tribute to Gizmo, who inspired this entire storyline. He fell in live with the doormat outside the front door of the flat next door. Every night used to get back from work and put the key in my front door, and no sooner had I opened the door when this beige blur would rush out into the corridor and make a beeline for the doormat opposite. He would then pummel at the mat with all his might, purring loudly, pulling the mat around the floor. Eventually the man next door bought a new mat and gave the old mat to Gizmo so he could play with it whenever he wanted.

Billy and Annabelle update - Cat Tree

It's been two weeks since the last update, and the news is that Billy and Annabelle are maturing into nice well-adjusted cats. They now greet us with their tails raised, will sniff an outstretched finger, and will subject themselves to being stroked, Annabelle enthusiastically, Billy reluctantly until he remembers how much he enjoys it.

Annabelle has turned into Bella in this household, so that's how we'll refer to her from now on. She's becoming a small, lithe, graceful and cunning sister to her much bigger, clumsier, endearingly goofy brother. Billy's likely to grow to be the size of a panther.

Which is why we've bought them a section of fun-fur and sisal covered rain forest to play on. Here's a photo of the top section of it. It's huge, and we've put it in front of the book case in the living room because there's nowhere else to put it. It runs from floor to ceiling, with platforms to jump up and down from, hammocks to lounge in, tubes to jump through, poles to climb and sharpen claws on, and a cave to sleep in. It's so big I can't get it all in one photo. They both love it.

Bella has developed an obsession with a green feather duster. Here we see her chasing after it. It was originally much more feathery than this, but she's pulled most of the feathers out.

There tend to be two different climbing techniques going on. Billy will hop from platform to platform, collecting magic rings as he goes, while Bella prefers to take a shortcut. She will pick a pole and then shimmy up it until she reaches an obstacle, like the underside of a platform. Then she will twist and turn until she's negotiated the obstacle and then continue up the same section of pole till she's reached her objective.

Bella rests on top of the cave. The cave tends to be Billy's. He'll lie down inside, Bella will hop on top and then they scrabble at eachother. He's also adopted the right hand hammock as his own.

"What do you mean I'm meant to sharpen my claws on the other side?" Bella can be seen just off frame in one of the hammocks. There's a card I drew for Valentine's Day just above Billy's head, from the cats to Linda. It shows the views we usually had of the two cats at that time (only six weeks ago, believe it or not), of single eyes and ears poking out from the side of the page, or a set of back legs underneath a bookshelf.

This is a pose that was unimaginable a few weeks ago. Billy, sitting down right in front of me, having just had his ears scratched and trying to pretend he hadn't liked it.

When not bashing seven bells out of her feather duster, there's nothing Bella enjoys more than an episode of American Dad on BBC Three.

Doormat

 This rather unprepossessing strip is the start of a major month-long storyline. Who knows where this will go...

3D

If you believe this, may I suggest you check the date at the head of this post. Oh, and don't bother getting your 3D glasses out either - all I've done is shift the green channel five pixels to the left, and then shift the writing back again...