Linked in are chasing me to apply for even more jobs and it looks like I’ve found just the one for me, the downside is that it’s for a seamstress so there may have to be some adjustments and stitching in place before the application can go in.

On the other hand I could opt for 2 days a week as a lingerie designer and spend the rest of the week in my jim jams, doing a bit of blogging and never getting out of my slippers.

Nope! I’ll go for the first choice as they pay extra when they are bust. First time I’ve heard of a company that pays extra when they go out of business, and it seems you don’t have to be able to spill.Simples.

I’ve been thinking again, perhaps I should n’t.

Phones: we keep them in our pockets and if we are really up to speed we talk to them with them in our pockets via headphones and wander around seemingly talking to ourselves. Out in the supermarket or on the street we see people who are hearing voices, and it’s considered normal. In days of yore such unfortunate people were sent to large brick built institutions and filled with mind numbing drugs so that the voices might go away.They were treated kindly for the most part and pitied by the rest of us. Now we ignore.Phone boxes, these red things still around on some streets, there are a few here where I live, were for people who had no phone at home at all of for emergency. People really did not always have phones.

Glen Campbell’s haunting tune ” Witchita Lineman” has almost been made redundant. We now have fibre in a box at the end of the road. The sort of fibre we used to get was in a cereal box  and was called “All Bran” and was the prefect way to keep you regular without resorting to drugs.

Some of these red phone boxes are being preserved and made into mini libraries and artworks. My own memory of them was an unfortunate pong and a very cold wind coming through the heavy door.

Just a very quick rough cartoon this week:

 

I thought this would be a good song title, what do you think? With its double meaning of: ” Nobody understands my marmalade” or simply as it is ” Nobody is going to be given a jar of said condiment “. The cartoon is entirley irrelevant to the subject, but I’m having one of those mornings. I’m seeing many levels of marmalade, I’d best leave it.

It might have been a folk tale but when I resided in that great city of Manchester, it was said that on a slow news day, the newspaper sellers would put the headline ” The Pope;no news!” headline on their little boxes from where they dispensed their wares. This was in fact true, within the pages of their papers there was no news of the Pope. So it was all factually true a it shifted quite a few of the papers as there are many Roman Catholics in the City ( generally the Manchester United supporters ) and quite a few protestants ( Manchester City supporters ) who might look just to see if they had grounds to upset the United supporters.

The sellers themselves would wear a non-commital scarf and the “endless” gloves were an essential fashion accessory, especially in the cold weather.

This is another drawing from the Missing Persons book and what follows are Gordon’s words from the book and give a flavour of the type.
Wordman

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Newspaper Seller

Any sightings should be reported to the Natural History Museum.

There are plenty of people who stand about selling papers but specimens of Newspaper Seller must, by definition, be recognisable in the dusk and rain by their cries alone. Saying ‘Big Issue? Have a nice day’ in a polite, self-effacing tone does not make one a Newspaper Seller, quite honestly.

The real thing was ever unmistakable. Anyone from north east Yorkshire would be able to infer from the distant cry of ‘Baybay! Scabbay! Baybay!’ that they were on the other side of the clearing from a man offering the paper, the Scarborough paper. That it was called the Evening News was a matter widely understood and so unnecessary to mention.

Strangers to the famous port 40 miles south would instantly realise that the man selling the late editions of the Hull Daily Mail was the one crying ‘Hawdiwinnahs! Skinnywinnahs!’ Like everybody else in Hull, with the possible exception of the specimen himself, they would never know the wherefore but would buy the paper anyway and without asking about the undernourishment of victorious horses.

In the Great Wen all those thousands of office mice, hurrying down their holes at the end of the day, used to lift their heads briefly at the familiar call of ‘Tennerh! Ee-inn! Tennerh!’ and, without looking at Newspaper Seller, drop a few coins into an outstretched hand in exchange for a copy of the Standard, the Evening Standard.On Sundays, no members of the type were ever seen. Nobody knew where they went. Possibly they hibernated for the day, venturing forth only to the corner shop to purchase a copy of the Tie, Sunnay Tie, or possibly the Zerv Erah, or maybe the Noodawer-eh.Scientists are still trying to prove that Working Men’s Club and Institute Singing Man has evolved from Newspaper Seller, for some reason.

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Another from the book: Some Missing Persons . Again the golden words are crafted by my chum wordsmith Gordon Thorburn: Wordweaver

I hope you’ve enjpoyed them as much as I enjoyed drawing for them.

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Visitors to this remote and historic ex-hostelry, far up in the hills where rivers rise, always used to enjoy looking at the old photographs on the wall. These reflected a bygone age when the local produce show was held here, customers formed football and darts teams and turned up in Toyota pick-ups.

Those were the days, my friends, when the pub was the social sine qua non of a scattered rural community. The community is still scattered but if anybody wants a pint now it has to be a widget tin from the supermarket down the valley; no pints have been sold at Ye Tomatoe for a twelvemonth.

Yes, in that short time Signor Pomodoro Lambretta, front of house, and Darren ‘Sharon’ Maclaren, chef, transformed the place. Before, you could only get bitter, lager, Guinness and two sorts of sandwich: cheese and pickle, or cheese. Under Pommy and Sharon, you could have Saltimbocca Siciliano, Fegato alla Milanese, Pavarotti alla Mariolanza and various fusion dishes, including Szechuan Ostrich Stroganoff and Thai Broken Harbour Soup with Wild Orkney Octopus. You washed these down with 35 different sorts of Bardolino and 27 of Frascati. If you got too merry you could have bed and full Italian breakfast for the price of a farm labourer’s week’s wages.

It was not long before the two proprietors discovered that Upper Weirdale was no place for a gastropub. Their loan was called in and they had to sell the place as a private house, so that was that.

Here’s another from Some Missing Persons with lovely words by my chum Gordon. Wordsmith’s site

He would know a lot about this subject as he was an enthusiast for frequenting such places, “all strictly for research though old chap”. This drawing is rare for me these days as it’s in colour. The original is in colour too, so it has all been hand crafted as they say, a bit like artisan bread.  £3-50 for a loaf of bread?

In this case the colour is added using the old fashioned magic marker and then enhanced with chalks for the geeky illustrator types amongst you. All this made rather redundant by photoshop these days, but adding to the argument that there is really no such thing as an original any more. There’s no such things an original, is there?

It also makes a change for me to draw places rather than just people, must do more! I suspect that Gordon used the Princess Louise Pub in High Holborn, London as his model for his words, and it still exists, as I noticed the other week when in the area. Whether the interior is changed or not I cannot say as I did not venture in. Please note in the detail, a small fly trapped in the perspex pork pie cover. I did once witness this and upon complaining to the landlord was told that this was where it lived. Also note that this was written before smoking was banned from such places, so if it does still exist as it was, it will no longer have the same atmosphere as being in Bejing on a foggy day.

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This city-centre pub is very popular with exiles from the old Iron Curtain countries, since it reminds them so much of the railway-station waiting rooms back home. Connoisseurs of 1950s minimalism will also enjoy the five well-seasoned South American banknotes pinned to the stone-effect wallpaper above the bar.

Other establishments near-by offer a full menu plus blackboard specials,and live music in the evenings. The King’s Breeches provides for a niche market to one side of the business-lunch crowd, with a small selection of superheated pies out of a Perspex cabinet. The free paper serviette assists easy eating rather than forcing on customers the embarrassing refinements of cutlery and plate. After dark, a juke box can be switched on by special request and any record played, provided it is Crystal Chandeliers.

Lecturers from the art college, attracted by the working-class atmosphere, drink no more than two units while chattering incessantly and waving their hands about. Journalists and flat-capped regulars prefer to ensure inner cleanliness with sequential pints of the memorable local bitter, reading their sporting papers in silence while flicking ash into dampening lagoons on the mahogany tops of original Victorian tables.

The tenant landlord, a dark taciturn man who is never rude to anyone but never friendly either, is greatly distressing the brewery by not dying. The predictions of the Chief Actuary of the Publicans, Sinners and General Insurance Co indicate that pub landlords’ shortlivedness is second only to those who combine lion taming with drug dealing and cave diving, but our man is past 70 and showing no signs. When he does die, the brewery will rip the pub asunder, rename it The Tup and Tart, install satellite TV, a juke box, and a manager who will have to call the police on Fridays and Saturdays.

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