The cat, the witch and the wardrobe

Of course, all wardrobes lead to Narnia. Billy and Bella certainly think so - they love hiding in there, nestled in amongst the wooly jumpers. We have two wardrobes in our bedroom. Billy takes my wardrobe, while Bella has taken residence in Linda’s.

More memory foam

It may not make a very good platform to launch from, but it makes a great crash pad for when you want to get down from the wardrobe again. However this route is not recommended when there are people sleeping in the bed.

Dressing gown

There’ s usually a dressing gown hanging from the wardrobe’s door handle in our house. I’m not sure why - I never wear it at home. It makes an annual trip to New Mexico where it gets worn around Linda’s folks house, and then it comes back to the UK where it is parked on its door handle for a year, until we make the trip again. The trip from bed to bathroom is about five yards - I never think that sort of distance merits donning a gown.

Hup!

Hback to the ol’ hdrawing hboard.

Wobble wobble wobble

Smudge could spend a good half hour preparing herself for her jump onto the wardrobe, her arse wobbling gently as she prepared for launch.

The top o the wardrobe to ya!

Whenever something stressful happened in the house, like tidying up or vacuuming the carpet, the top of the wardrobe was always Smudge’s favourite hidy hole. It was never an easy place to get to - in our old flat she jumped from a dressing table, while in our current one she negotiated a complicated diagonal jump from a window sill (she’d yell at me to hold the curtains out of the way so she could negotiate the jump more easily). On top of the wardrobe sat her cat carrier, and she’d retreat into this wicker refuge until whatever it was that was upsetting her had gone away.

Now Billy and Bella have discovered the top of the wardrobe. But they haven’t learned the trick of getting up there yet…

The Blade Runner controversy

Cats always seem so deep, as if they know the secrets of the universe. Yet at the flick of a switch they can turn into playful kittens, and then instantly back into sage mode again. I guess this dual nature to their personalities is one of their main attractions - dogs by comparison always seem so one—note.

Hence the deep philosophical conversation about Blade Runner, interrupted by a fly.

The Blade Runner controversy is one I’ve been having over many decades with my friend Paul. I’m firmly in the Deckard is a replicant camp, while Paul thinks he’s a human being. The fifteen or so separate cuts we’ve seen since the movie first came out in 1982 seem to vindicate my theory, with contact lenses, unicorns and planted photos all helping to bolster my theory. But it still doesn’t explain what Tyrell’s motives were in introducing Deckard and Rachel in the first place, apart from a desire to mess with the heads of two of the most advanced replicants who lack the self knowledge of their origins. The only explanation I can come up with is that it’s a Ridley Scott movie - it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to look pretty.

Props to the io9 website for the Descartes theory.

Wap!

More on the cats and paper theme. How many times have you found your cat asleep on top of a tiny bit of paper like a subs form that fell out of a magazine, or with a receipt under one paw?

Rraaaagh!

Cats and paper have a strange relationship. I’ve told you about Bella’s favourite game of dunking paper in her water fountain in an attempt to make papier mache. Well, any bit of paper shat she finds on the floor is now officially a cat toy. Sometimes she’ll pick it up in her mouth, throw it in the air and then chase it from room to room. At other times, this happens.

Incidentally, things I’ve found in the water fountain recently include a completed Daily Telegraph prize crossword, several Christmas ornaments, and one of my shoes!

Realistic Goals

Here’s your first new dose of Scrumpy for the new year. I have no resolutions this year, in the hope that if I set no targets I may actually achieve something instead.

Aaaaaand he’s back!

Stationery nerds will be interested to know I’ve changed my pens again. I was using a Tempo pen for the lettering in the Sunday strips, but now, after much searching, I’ve finally found a calligraphic fountain pen with a thin enough nib for me to be able to letter the strip properly. Bear with it for the first few strips while the nib gets trained to my writing style.

The Inking is now done with Sharpie fine liners! Gasp! All that fiddling around with expensive Japanese imports and I end up using a pen you can buy for a dollar at WalMart.

Aaaand we’re back!

Pretty self explanatory. It’s a bit of a wrench to be returning to these shorter strips - I enjoyed the freedom that doing the Sunday strips gave me. I’m not ruling out a change to a squarer format in the future, but for the time being I’m sticking to the traditional linear format, as that’s the way my brain works.

There are a couple of big story lines planned for the Summer, and the strip is written up to mid-May (sometimes being snowed in in a small town in New Mexico can be really useful!)



Don't forget - you can click on the strip to see it in glorious high definition.

See you on Wednesday and Friday…

(Pause)

Harold Pinter, playwright, screenwriter, political activist, occasional dickhead, and adjective.

Famed

for the



pauses





in his stage work

originally meant to help actors act his plays in a more natural manner than tended to be fashionable in the 1960s

but which became more stylised and

mannerist

over the years

to the point that when he once gave a reading of one of his monologues, everyone complained because he was reading it too fast.

We’re back to our normal Monday - Wednesday - Friday schedule starting tomorrow. See you there…

In which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place

Originally published 15 October 2010

Of course, in the original story by A A Milne, Pooh got stuck in the entrance to Rabbit’s house. Here we have a rabbit stuck in the entrance to Smith’s house.

Plumph!

Originally published 11 October 2010

Self explanatory, really, if you can follow the maths.

Pow!

Originally published 6 October 2010

This is based on one of my sister’s cats. I forget which, it could well be her current cats, Tabitha and Timmy, but its hard to believe having seen them this Christmas. They’ve grown into loveable little metaphors for tertiary phase capitalism - they’re not just fat cats, they’re spherical! But in the old days they were big old rangy cats and this was how they used to deal with the cat flap in her rear door. You’d hear a crash through the door and then a scrabble of paws as the cat involved desperately tried to decelerate before hitting the far wall.

How come the cats get all the flaps?*

Originally published 6 October 2010

Happy New Year!

I won’t say much. We’ve probably both got serious headaches! Talk you you tomorrow, she we can both focus properly on the screen…

*A routine by Lenny Henry. See here