The eternal question: how do you pronounce ‘scone’. Some say it should be pronounced as it is spelled: ‘scone’. Others think ‘sconn’ is correct. Personally, I don’t mind either, so long as it’s covered in lots of clotted cream and strawberry jam.
Thanks to Daisy Estall, who posed this question on her facebook feed. The consensus was that it should be ‘scone’. To rhyme with ‘scone’.
That’s one of our Hastings fishing boats in the final panel. The real boat is pictured to the right. Photo by Tony Bates. Buy a canvas print here.
I had an accident with a bottle of Dr Pepper and a graphics tablet on the Sunday I drew this. It completely fritzed my graphics tablet and left me with no means to colour the strip so this black and white version had to be posted instead.
It ended up looking a lot better than I expected, but Jones and Smudge look undentical unless they’re coloured, so I don’t think I’ll ever be reverting to black and white, no matter how much time it may save.
I thought this was going to be a fairly standard joke about Scrumpy’s ears, so I wasn’t ready for the response it got. It appears that on the same day this was published, Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas beat Allyson Felix of the USA in the 400m track event in the most unusual fashion – she dived over the line. If the winner of the race is the first person to get a bodypart over the line, both Scrumpy and Shaunae won fair and square. In my opinion it’s just as valid as dipping at the line, and everyone does that.
As they say on the game show Catchphrase, say what you see.
The 2016 Olympics have started in Rio, and once again the cats are holding the backyard Olympics in the garden. It’s useful to have a set subject to write about sometimes. It’s also good to have any other sport than football to write about – I ignored the European Cup completely this year. So, it turned out, did the England team.
Who knew we were going to do so well this year? I was fully expecting us to have the hubris Olympics this time round, turning up expecting to get all the medals after our performance in the London Olympics and then choking on everyone of them. I was very glad to be proved wrong. Of course, half the Russian squad being in rehab helped, but even so…
I remember rehearsing a show with the West Kent Youth Theatre in the open air one summer. It was a beautiful day, so we were using a tiled quadrangle next to West Kent College’s science block, which was downwind of a field of dandelions which had just come into seed. The wind got up and we were suddenly breathing dandelions…
You can tell that I was sitting on some rocks in the middle of a grassy meadow when I was writing this batch.
The legend is that if you can see the gold reflected under your chin, then you like butter. Which is a bit pointless, when you think about it. Surely it would be better to hold 500g of Kerrygold under your chin, and then eat the Kerrygold.
I’m being pulled in two directions at the moment. The Hastings Independent has a preference for biting satire, something I only occasionally indulge in, as the last thing I want is for the strip to turn into a bitter whine-fest like Mallard Filmore. So, contrarian that I am, I did a week of gentle cutesy humour, in the way that sitting in a grassy meadow only can, and then didn’t bother to submit them to them. Instead I sent the following week’s three Olympic strips, and all three of them got printed.
