Apparently he regularly used a shorthand way of writing notes and messages. This has transmogrified into the now dreadful way that companies or organisations rename themselves. For many years now the local mental health division of the NHS has rebranded itself as “2gether” if you can believe that! For crying out loud, both parts of that are wrong, there’s no such word as gether and 2 is a sodding numeral. I suppose someone at the head of this division had already spent too much on the branding that there was no way of going back. I suppose the thing that … Continue reading I blame Winston Churchill

8 miles apart but it’s light years really. Cheltenham is very close to Gloucester physically, but light years apart in reality. There are people in Cheltenham who have never ever visited the fine City down the road, thinking it a dark and dangerous place. I actually love Gloucester for all its rather ‘gone at the edges feel’, it’s full of history and the people are grand, and it has in built history in almost every step. Continue reading Light years apart…

I’d been a freelance cartoonist for just over 30 years and had sort of passed my ‘sell by’ date. At the time I was 58 years old and my typical day was to get the kids in the car to drive them to school or meet a friend half way, and take his, or he’d take mine. A good arrangement. David was the sales director of Severnprint, a company who I had used to print various things for me and my clients over the years. The company wwas based in Gloucester and had a good well deserved reputation. One morning … Continue reading A sad farewell to Severnprint.

Stroud hits the headlines. On the BBC news this morning a video of a shed blowing over. Tragic news indeed but from close examination of the clip I can report that it blew over in one piece and can hopefully be restored to its former glory, when the wind dies down. You needed to know. This is my allotment neighbour Steve’s shed, similar to the famous Stroud Shed, and a thing of great beauty. Steve is an engineer, his shed will not blow over. Picture taken just days before the storm. Continue reading A shed blows over in Stroud

As we await the return of the binmen, though one is not supposed to call them that any more, but that is what we do, and we can reflect on our Christmas. All our four grandsons came for a while so the house became a sort of Brands Hatch at times and noise levels reached a high. It was a joy to see and hear them. The LA lot were the last to go and had the furthest to travel home, and even that took them twice as long as it should after being ‘bumped off’ their flight. A family … Continue reading Cheesy bits.