There’s a local on line newspaper, and others do this too, where they tease you to take a look at their ‘non story’ and if it’s football related it will be headlines something like “Premier League Ace now emptying bins in Rochdale”. The immediate reaction is of course, who can that be? And it. Is always someone you have never heard of, ever, and who played twice for a Premier League club when they managed to visit the Premier League on a short visit in the 1980s. There’s a picture of him in action on the pitch wearing their shirt … Continue reading I never quite made it to the Premier League.

Where to start? Well we can begin with the phrase much used by politicians avoiding questions: ‘but what I will say’, and then going on about some issue that bears no relation to the question or statement. Anyone doing this would be made to pick up litter with a pair of tweezers for a week. Hard landscaping, that euphemism for concreting over a garden will be outlawed. Anyone with a substantial garden will be obliged to grow things in it. Potatoes at the very least. Supermarkets will be obliged to water any plants they try to sell. Local ones frequently … Continue reading When I’m Prime Minister.

In my illustration/ cartoon career I only ever did one movie poster that was used. I did one or two others that did not get beyond the rough stage. I had the call from a large ad agency to go in and see an art director and writer to discuss the brief. There was none. I’d been invited to see the film in a viewing theatre belonging to the large film company that had made the film and spent a vary enjoyable afternoon laughing a lot at the tale of a house purchase by a young couple, in the States, … Continue reading “The star of this movie is the staircase”

We all take influences in our work, even if you are a cartoonist. I loved the work and easy line of the late Bill Tidy and he also told brilliant jokes. But the person who I think of as the master of his craft, and he tells no jokes, is Graham Thompson. Never heard of him? Well you should have and anyone reading this will now have heard of him. If you are a jig saw fanatic then you may well have done one of his puzzles as he did loads of these later in his career. I came across … Continue reading Graham Thompson : the Master.

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