The blog post in which my Galaxy Note obsession gets real

I tried to outstay my welcome but Manchester’s shops were far too accommodating. Between Carphone Warehouse and PCWorld, I had enough of a hands-on with the first generation Samsung Note 10.1 to raise more questions about the second generation than I already had.

I’m now more intrigued to see how the new 2014 tablet has turned out. I read yesterday that Samsung have used a PenTile display in the new Note which some people claim produces brighter images, while other people claim it can diminish the resolution. I guess I’ll have to wait and see but the screen on the first generation Note 10.1 was bright and certainly felt clearer than my old iPad 1. The tablet was thinner than I expected, lighter too, and pretty snappy switching between apps, though, surprisingly, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the S-Pen. That might have been down to my mainly trialing it on a Carphone Warehouse display model which probably wasn’t set up to be as sensitive as I’d like it. The one in PCWorld did seem more responsive but it had more annoying salesmen loitering around and asking me if I was okay. It’s a bit of a shame because until I have chance to get it just right, I won’t know how good this tablet really is for my style of cartooning,

If I had one other complaint it was that the S-Pen was too small. It wasn’t ridiculously small – big, even, compared to the pens on every other tablet device – but I was a little shocked at how small it felt in my hand and I wouldn’t like to use it for drawing for long periods. I’m not exactly a giant (6’ 2”) but the pen felt just a little too small in my big hand. However, I see there’s a larger pen available to buy separately which would probably be my choice and since I carry pencils with me wherever I go, it’s wouldn’t exactly be an inconvenience.

Simply because I thought I’d be able to use it quicker than the others, I concentrated on using the Photoshop app which did prove problematic. I was particularly struggling with the palm detection. My clumsy fist was leaving all manner of marks in the bottom right hand side of the page, occasionally opening menus. However, Photoshop was remarkably easy to use, like a cut down version of the real thing, with all the key features in the same place.

I’m really not interested in talking about the other note taking apps, Jelly Bean’s features and Samsung’s extensions to its feature set, or even how easy it is to copy things from the screen (though pressing the pen’s button allows you to draw a lasso around any content you want to grab which is a pretty good trick). From the point of view of drawing cartoons (which I only did scribbling since, for the life of me, I couldn't master the zoom), I think the Note 10.1 is as perfect a device as I’ve ever seen. Ideally I would have liked to have tried doing a little true Photoshopping on it but so far it suggests that it might be ideally suited to cartooning. The sheen of the screen would take some getting used to. Cartridge paper has a resistance which is noticeably more than Bristol Board. Working on board, as I’m doing at the moment, is a real pleasure and it does affect the quality of the finished work. However the difference between Bristol Board and drawing on a tablet is so huge that, at first, I felt barely able to draw. Also, I did have problems trying to draw smaller detail but this could have been a Photoshop problem or down to the device sensitivity. Only at the end did I switch to one of the other drawing apps and they felt much smoother and I felt like I might have more control. Trying these apps is the main reason I’m now thinking of biking over to my local PCWorld next week. By then, I hope to have figured out how to zoom.

However, as it stands, I think I did enough yesterday to satisfy my itch for a short time but getting hands-on with the updated tablet will be what will convince me.

Other than my bouncing between high tech shops and trying to fit in with the gangster types who can obviously afford these things and not like a cartoonist who can’t, yesterday turned into a bit of an epic day. Waterstones was crowded with people there to gawp at Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian thriller writer. I managed to take a picture but the fuzziness proves how little I know how to use the phone camera. I got home anticipating an early night and ended up working until half three in the morning. I should never do that but I got so carried away with work that I didn’t realise the time. When I looked up, I realised I had to go to bed even if I didn’t want to go to bed. Of course, my brain was so switched on that I couldn’t sleep and then, when I did, I slept too long, meaning a today’s late and rather rushed blog.

My Letter to Samsung

I’m not here. I’m out. And I’ll be scuffing my heels as I go. Even now I’m probably standing in PCWorld in the Arndale Centre, Manchester, staring forlornly at a first generation Samsung Note, wondering what happened to all the optimism that was there at the start of the week. Five days on, I’ve still not heard from Samsung. No early morning knocks on the door from keen-limbed couriers with mysterious cartons. Not even a sniff of high-end electronic goods to which I could dedicate my attentions in five star reviews for the rest of the month.

It’s gutting, of course. I’m wondering about a protest march, a Kickstarter campaign, a hunger strike. Looking back, perhaps my letter lacked a little punch, some pizazz, a cheque written out for the sum of £400, but that was a mere oversight, I tell you.

However, I’ll push on through this disappointment. Next week I might rename the blog to some part of the body, if only I could think of one. The current banner is beginning to mock my delusions of significance, shallow though they were.

Ms. Ines van Gennip                                                                              9th September, 2013
Marketing Director UK & Ireland
Samsung House
1000, Hillswood Drive
Chertsey, Surrey KT16 0PS

Dear Ines (if I may),

I was sitting here doodling a cartoon (enclosed) when it suddenly struck me that you’re probably overworked down there at Samsung HQ. Oh, don’t deny it. With an exciting range of new electrical doodadary destined for the nation’s pimpled salesmen, you’ll be kept very busy in the coming months and in need of some light relief. And that’s where I hope I come in…

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Waywell and I am a writer, cartoonist, and blogger, though you might know me by my pen name, Stan Madeley. More significantly, I run the website ‘Samsung Beauty’, which, as our expensive new banner proclaims, is ‘the world’s only blog dedicated to Samsung owners, users, admirers, and people in charge of deciding which bloggers get a Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet (2014 edition) to review.’

You’re a canny operator, Ines, so I won’t try to sweet-talk you. I bet you’re already thinking this is one of those desperate attempts to get a free Galaxy Note 10.1 inch tablet (2014 edition) to review. But there you’d be wrong. Is it ‘desperate’ when a man dedicates his life to ensuring that the hard-working folk in Samsung’s UK marketing department are happy? I don’t mean on any deep metaphysical level because who then is truly happy? But as Ernest Hemingway once put it: ‘happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.’ It’s my belief that just because you have the intelligence to match your wit, beauty, and very evident humanity, there is no reason why you should suffer from the burden of your job. You do such good work on behalf of Samsung, as well as your charitable causes, you deserve a bit of a lift. I’m therefore enclosing a personalised copy of my last book with the guarantee it will make you snort with laughter and pop a spring back into your step. Feel free to share it around the office as a team building exercise, especially with your PA who I hear is one of the best and always passes on letters which are clearly well intentioned and full of the old joie de vivre, as they say over at Samsung France.

No doubt you’re touched by my generosity but please think nothing of it. I normally charge £399 (rrp) for my cartoons but I want you to have this one for nothing. The wellbeing of you and your team is more important to me than money! It must be so depressing sending review products to semi-articulate simpletons in the technology press who don’t appreciate your efforts or the genius of the Note 10.1 (2014 edition). What do technology journalists know about technology? They have a quick glance at the features, make a big fuss about the luxurious faux-leather back and then spend the rest of their time talking about quality the bezelling. You deserve more than a bit of racy talk about quality bezelling, Ines. Will they talk about the 1024 levels of sensitivity in the stylus with the perspicacity of a jobbing cartoonist? Will they really appreciate the reduced weight by using it to produce top quality work, week in and week out, as it would in the hands of a quality blogger? How many of them will use it in everyday situations, learn to love it in a way only a truly individual cartoonist and writer could come to love it? Will they even bother to give it a name? Would they ever call it ‘Ines’?

Yes, Ines! That’s right! If only I had a Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) to review, I’d name it after you! Because how many of those gel-fringed prima donnas in the gadget press will road test the Note 10.1 (2014 edition) every day for the next five years and recommend it to their readers? And did I mention that my blog is read by trend setters and top of the line professionals?

Listen, I better leave it there before I resort to verse and then we’d all be sobbing into buckets. On behalf of myself and all the readers of ‘Samsung Beauty’, may I send you all our very best wishes and hope that you continue to dominate those swine at Apple. We also look forward to hearing from you, hopefully in the form of an environmentally friendly carton delivered by courier. There’s always somebody in, so no need to fret on that score!

Your friend, eager to hand out the five star reviews,

David Waywell (nee Stan Madeley)
Samsung Beautywww.the-spine.com

Deliberate?

New Shoes

You might have noticed that I’ve joined Instagram. It seemed like a sensible thing to do, plus I finally have a good reason to embrace this powerful form of voodoo. You might already know about my love for all things Samsung, especially the people in Samsung who decide which bloggers get a 10.1 inch (2014 edition) tablet to review. (Though my cunning scheme doesn't appear to be working...) Well, today I started to pack a Samsung S2 phone. Yes, big news!

The S2 came my way because my sister has now upgraded to something more powerful. Her contract had come to an end and she had a spare phone. I’m just happy to have something running Android. I rooted it yesterday and finally broke O2’s mind-lock so I could use my old Vodafone sim card. Turned it on and all manner of spectacular things began to happen. I’d spent a quid for a day’s Pay as you Go mobile data before I even knew how to switch it over to Wi-Fi. The camera excites me but I’ll try to think of interesting things to do with it, possibly involving nudity in public places...

Such positive vibes are unusual but this cool weather has revitalised me. My work always suffers during the summer when the heat slows down my higher brain functions. I need the cooler weather of autumn and early spring. Winter too can also be productive but I have to remember to hit myself with plenty of artificial sunlight or risk running my brain into a black wall. But for the moment, I have enough endorphins and the weather is cool so I can wear my favourite item of clothing: a thick Peter Storm long sleeve sweater bought from Millets.

I attribute the reappearance of my sweater with yesterday’s productivity. I’ve drawn a few cartoons for the blog but my main effort has been the four page short story I’m attempting to illustrate and write. I’ve been stuck on the fourth page for weeks. Until yesterday I couldn’t think of a way to join the middle to the end. Now I’ve done that so it’s just a matter of putting in a few more hours with my Kuru Toga Roulette (the best pencil ever made and which makes drawing a pleasure) and then the inking begins.It can get pretty tedious but I find that I can get through four pages in the time it takes me to watch two entire series of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I’m also getting together a collection of my best cartoons to send to various outlets. My intention is to keep plugging away, though I’m beginning to worry about posting too much of my work here. Does that constitute publication? I worry that it does, meaning everything I’ve ever posted here is already lost, hence my posting one of my less polished cartoons today.

 

A Classical Cartoon

I Wish Samsung Ran My Council

Listen. I need to talk seriously about a subject many of you will find appalling. I don’t mean ‘war crime’ appalling. I mean about as appalling as a serious incident on the High Street on a Saturday night but not involving car keys, eyeballs, or members of the Parachute Regiment.

Yes, that’s right. I want to talk about weekly bin collections.

Christ, I know. I know… Dark days and all that. And it’s tough for me too. Just remain calm and remember: deep breaths. This is only going to be a thousand words long and, if you squint, you might already be able to see daylight in the distance.

Easing myself into my dreams last night with a mental image of Rachel McAdams stroking the contoured lines of the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) tablet, it suddenly struck me that Samsung should really be in the wheelie bin business.

Beautiful thought, isn’t it?

Now, it takes a special kind of depraved mind to go to sleep combining Rachel McAdams with wheelie bins but until I have a chance to move with Rachel to Samsung’s own island off the coast of South America, sometime around the year 2050, I will have to endure the misery of living in the St Helens area of Merseyside where wheelie bins are a business as serious as my idle fantasising.

Up here it's troll country. We don’t go in for any of that fancy ‘thinking’ in these parts. Reasoning is something you do by smelling the end of your finger and trolls, not being the brightest of beasts, spend a lot of time smelling their own fingers. Take, for example, the trolls in St Helens Council who squeeze out bad ideas like they’ve been fed nothing but slugs, fish oil, and polished ball bearings.

The council are currently introducing new arrangements for our refuse collection. They announced this via bright shiny stickers that appeared on our bins a fortnight ago and promptly stuck to every surface they came into contact with. I forget the exact words because I was blinded by our sticker for an entire day but I do recall mention of an ‘improved service’ as a friend helped peel away the sticker along with most of my eyebrows.

‘An improved service! Whoopee!’ we both cried and then began to examine the small print.

The council are now promising to empty our regular brown bin one week and then, seven days later, empty the green bin that contains all our garden waste. Each bin will be emptied twice a month and this is the improved service.

‘Whoopee,’ we both cried again and then we began to do the maths.

Currently the council empties our brown bin every week and the green bin every fortnight. That means they provide six bin collections per month. The new arrangements mean that we’ll have only four bin collections.

That wasn’t the kind of improvement I was expecting. In fact, I would have furrowed my eyebrows if I’d had any.

An improvement is going from a 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, A8 processor to a 1.9 GHz octa-core Samsung Exynos 5420 SoC processor, as Samsung have cleverly done with the new 2014 Note. An improvement is doubling the resolution, replacing a 1280×800 pixel display with one that has 2560x1600 pixels. An improvement is increasing the ergonomic design by adding a faux-leather back to the tablet design.

A thirty three percent drop in the number of bin collections is not what I’d call an improvement. It sounds like one of those ‘Apple improvements’ when subsequent models of iPad got heavier, battery life shortened, and you needed to stick a wire coat hanger up your sleeve just to get a half-decent Wi-Fi signal.

Yet the part that gnaws me to the bone isn’t the reduction in our services. All our councils have to make cuts and I understand the concept of austerity. But I do believe that if a government or council are forced to reduce a service, they shouldn’t lie about it. Just tell it to me straight, like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears. I’m not an idiot. I know that six is bigger than four. In fact, if I had a Samsung Note (2014 edition) in front of me now, I would scribble that sum onto the screen, wait a fraction of a second for the cutting-edge handwriting recognition software to decrypt my scrawl and then an infinitesimally small space of time as it did the calculation. Instead I’m counting on my fingers and my curled pinky and ring finger show me that it’s a decrease of exactly two bin collections a month.

I detest bad news dressed up like some gormless ITV rhetoric promising the year’s best entertainment over shots of Simon Cowell and mad old men playing tunes on their armpits. It implies we’re too dumb to spot that we’re being lied to. A man could get angry at the way my council talks-up a cut. He could get angry that they’re wasting money providing expensive colour leaflets that promotes some lousy policy as revolutionary thinking. A man could get…

Oh hang on! They’ve drawn eyes on the bins to make them look like cheerful characters. Everything I’m saying must be wrong and life in St Helens is peachy!

Today more glossy leaflets arrived through the letterbox and, as you can see by the accompanying diagram, we now have a friendly cast of characters to cheer on.



In addition to our main brown bin, we have one irritatingly happy black plastic box dog for tins, one drunk single-but-has-joined-Friends-Reunited pink bag for plastic bottles, one so-studious-he-probably-reads-The-Telegraph blue bag for newspapers, a sweet little ‘kerbside caddy’ (probably from a broken home) for fetid and stinking food, and one green bin clearly on the game and ready to pleasure our garden waste. The ‘Red Bottom’ is just my addition to the leaflet so ignore it for a moment…

Now, at this point, you’re probably thinking: isn’t he getting a little too excited about the bins? ‘Hey! Burke Bevel,’ you shout. ‘Isn’t this what old people talk about? Soon you’ll be complaining about the low necklines of BBC newsreaders and wondering why the Queen hasn’t knighted George Alagiah.’

But isn’t this the stuff that really matters? Isn’t this the warning sound of the creaking rope that holds up the great bureaucratic chimp swing that will eventually collapse and bring about the end of western civilisation? We won’t pollute ourselves into oblivion. Our brains will simply evolve to the point where most of their functions will be given over to figuring out what we’re meant to do with egg shells and what day we put out the potato peels.

Take this final piece of troll logic as an example.

For years we’ve all been using our green bins for cardboard. Only we’re now told that the green bin is to be used only for garden waste. Of course, between October and March, nobody cuts their lawn or trims the hedge so under this brilliant new scheme our green bins will stand empty for about half the year.

Meanwhile, we are now told to squeeze two weeks of cardboard into a box sized approximately 60x40x30 centimetres. That will be fun. After two weeks, our green wheelie bin is usually so full of cardboard that we can’t close the lid. I’m going to have to buy an industrial strength press just to deal with a week of cardboard.

If the whole thing sounds like an utter mess, there’s only one man I hold responsible.

The name Barrie Grunewald might not mean much to you. It sounds like the name of a troll in Beowolf or some ancient Norse myth. In a way, I think it is. Barrie is my local council leader and resembles a troll in publicity photographs. I never did write to Barrie about the council’s lousy policies for cyclists but it now seems they have an equally absurd policy for recyclists. That’s where the ‘red bottom’ comes into play.

I would humbly like to suggest to Barrie that he takes all his council leaflets and sticks them… Well, I’ll let him figure out ‘what goes where’. I’ve even provided a helpful diagram to guide his hand. And if he’s angry or thinks I’m wrong, I’d simply point out that I’ve added a pair of cartoon eyes to my diagram. Cartoons eyes excuse every kind of stupidity, don’t they?

Dear Samsung

The people in my local Post Office didn't notice the editor of the newest technology blog, ‘Samsung Beauty’, standing among them. Nor were they aware that Rachel McAdams figured so heavily in my thoughts or that she too was excited by my plan...

The queue was at least twenty pensioners deep so it left me running late today, plus I also smell of Werther's Originals. But isn’t that the kind of detail that we technology journalists crave? One point three inches of caramel toffee, wrapped in a golden polyethylene wrapper laser cut into perfect squares. The caramel itself was luxuriously smooth, with class-leading performance when worked between dentures...

Why I was at the Post Office will become apparent in the coming days but needless to say that I’m hoping that my £1.60 was wisely spent. You see, I’m trying to open high level negotiations with the people at Samsung about my doing a review of the Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) preferably in black. I say ‘preferably in black’ but realise that I didn’t specify that in my letter…

Damn me and these careless beginner mistakes! Not that I would complain about a tablet in white but if we’re going to establish our reputation as the premier Galaxy Note 10.1 inch (2014 Edition) website, then we need to get these fundamentals right. As right, perhaps, as the faux-leather back of the new Galaxy Note…

We are now in for a few nervous days, perhaps even weeks, as we wait to see what happens. Will Samsung reply? Will they forward the name 'Burke Bevel' to MI5 for inclusion in a list of agitators and political malcontents out to undermine the capitalist system through a cunning use of comedy begging?

Comedy begging? I like that phrase and I think I’ll make it my own. After all, I’m not ashamed of what I'm doing. What is technology journalism other than a form of high-level begging? There was a time when a product launch involved a warm buffet in a third rate hotel in the middle of Bradford. These days, companies pay for journalists to travel the world, play basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters before being taken on a helicopter flight to some star-studded product launch at Everest Base Camp. The only difference between technology journalists and myself is that I’m willing to put on some extra effort up front.

That effort comprised this morning’s bundle: a large brown jiffy bag containing two pages of tightly-written prose, a copy of my book (inscribed and signed), and one A4 sheet of expensive (and mounted) Bristol Board on which I spent a good part of yesterday drawing and then inking a cartoon. Will they appreciate the gift I’m giving them or will it end up in the bin?

I go cold at the thought of that particular cartoon ending up in a bin but I guess if I’m foolish enough to send these priceless things to people who might not appreciate them, then in all likelihood they’ll end up covered with filter coffee and chewing gum. I suppose that’s part of the fun. It shows what a truly valueless world we live in.

I suppose that’s why I do it. In fact, I don’t suppose. I knowingly give my work away to strangers because it raises interesting questions about the way we value the things around us. How much would it cost to walk into a shop and buy that hand-drawn cartoon? Is it vulgar to ask? What price on my labour, even if I put zero price on my talen? My nearest shop selling cartoon originals, the Cartoon Gallery in Chester, sell them for nearly £300 a piece or about the same price of the old Samsung Note 10.1. Is that too expensive or too cheap for a drawing? What price would I set mine for if I were selling? £10? £50? £100? Of course, there's no upper limit on what you can ask, just a limit on what people might pay. I’ve seen sellers asking many thousands for original drawings by artists such as R. Crumb and even more for Golden Age superhero illustrators such as Fred Ray. Jack Kirby originals are priced like vintage cars.

Of course, I’m not a Crumb or a Kirby. I’m just me. So what price my originality? A mass produced lump of consumer electronics or the totally original piece of artwork drawn with a Rotring and dip pen over the course of ten hours? Does that seem like a fair swap?

If only it were that easy… Is that cartoon enough to make them think I’m serious or too much so they think I’m mad? Should a man aspiring to road test a Samsung Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) tablet even think this way? What would Jason Bradbury do? What would Burke Bevelling do?

The Descent of Man

The Launch of Samsung Beauty

Well, the digital elves might be on zero hour contracts but they worked hard into the night and, if everything has gone to plan, you’ll have noticed that things look a little different around here. Yes, yes! Thank you but save the applause for the trial. Once ‘The Gadget Show’ comes after me, I’ll need you cheering in my corner.

Of course, if you’re reading this via an RSS feed, then you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about. Well, today I’m relaunching this blog as 'Samsung Beauty', the newest super-hip technology blog staffed by twenty somethings who look like Jesse Eisenberg but are usually called ‘Tom’. It also excites me to change my name, so please, from now on, I’d like to be known as ‘Burke Bevel’, IT journalist and freelance gadgeteer. I’ll be modelling myself largely on the great Jason Bradbury so my habitual scruffiness and intense introversion are things of the past. Burke Bevel is all about primal sexualised baldness, big glasses, and an even bigger personality made for popular television, or, failing that, Channel 5.

Hey guys! It’s me, your gadget guru, Burke Bevel here! And we’ve got an exciting show for you this week. I’ll be getting frisky with the 2014 edition of Samsung’s 10.1 inch Note, whilst Tom dresses like a pineapple in order to explain everything micro-USB. Plus we’ve got the usual tech news and competition in which you can win half a million quid’s worth of tech gear simply by leaving your name and address on our £10-a-second phone line and then we’ll be investigating the perils of £10-a-second phone lines and how scammers lure you in with the promise of ridiculous prizes.

See what I mean? I’m so happening and now that it’s frightening to think how fifteen minutes ago I was just fifteen minutes ago.

So, what can you expect this week on ‘Samsung Beauty’?

Well, there’ll be the usual mix of cartoons you won’t want to share on Twitter and essays you don’t read all the way to the end. However, everything will have increasingly irrational references to the Samsung Note 10.1 inch (2014 edition) tablet! It's a format I'm copying from popular technology websites such as ‘Gizmodo’, ‘Crave’, and ‘Trusted Reviews’ but with more emphasis on the nervous breakdown caused by a man’s unrequited love for unobtainable Samsung hardware.

By the end of the week, I’m hoping to have a hands-on review of the Note 10.1, depending on when they get the new model in stock at the local PC World and providing they don’t chase me off like they usually do once they realise I can’t afford to buy. I’m just hoping the short porcine manager with the attitude problem won't recognise me with my shaved head, big glasses and bright yellow dungarees…

Of course, there’ll also be the usual news, reviews, and tips about how to use a fantasy Samsung Note 10.1 inch (2014 edition) tablet and because it’s a fantasy tablet the tips will involve appearances from Rachel McAdams, Natalie Portman, and members of 1980s supergroup Bananarama.

What else can I say? If you’re interested in the Samsung Note 10.1 inch (2014 edition) tablet, then this is the place to be.

Laters tableters!

A Serious and Meaningful Cartoon About the Real Dangers of Solvent Abuse

Dear Samsung: Please Take My Soul For A Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition!

Does whoring yourself out over the internet ever work?

Most mornings of the week I arrive at my desk to discover at least one email from a web marketing company offering to buy my soul. They don’t phrase it as succinctly as that. They talk about this great opportunity to fill my blog with high quality content written by their talented team of writers and ‘totally in the style of your blog’. It’s all bullshine, of course. They really mean they’d burden this blog with the same steamrollered prose as fills 99% of everything these days. They just want to use my smiling (ha!) internet presence to sell something to you without you noticing that I’m being paid to slip you a lie.

That doesn’t mean that lots of bloggers are immune to taking their shilling. Perhaps I’d even take it myself if they offered me enough, though my soul does come with a hefty price tag attached. It would take life-changing amounts (so that’s many thousands not hundreds of shillings) before I’d even consider sticking an ad for online gambling on my blog. Even then, I’d probably feel so guilty about the deception that I’d highlight the whole sordid business with large red arrows and write personal letters to every single one of you asking for your forgiveness.

Having said all that, I’d now like to sell my soul to Samsung but I don’t know how to go about it.

I’m beginning to seriously obsess about Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition and that’s never a good sign. It’s very rare that I really obsess over new technology. I pride myself on not desiring things. Despite my loving technology, technological abstinence has become one of the ways I’ve managed to keep writing, drawing and blogging. There hasn’t been a single Apple launch that excited me enough to want one of their products. My mobile phone (an old Sony Ericsson Cybershot) is about ten years old. I haven’t got a mobile contract, never bought anything with 3G or 4G, and I don’t really want to start now. There was a time, about a year or so ago, when I needed a better graphics card to help with my 3D animation work but that wasn’t twitchy as much as needy. The last time I felt this twitchy about a product was about the original Nintendo DS but, luckily, I had a job at the time and could satisfy my craving.

The problem this time is that the Samsung Note uses Wacom technology and there’s no word in the advertiser’s lexicon that gets me quite as excited as ‘Wacom’. Wacom make the graphic tablet I use (Bamboo), the graphic tablets I really should get (Intuos), and the graphic pen monitors I lust after (Cintiq). Microsoft also used Wacom tech in their pricier Surface tablet which was also lust worthy, especially after a video surfaced of Penny Arcade's artist, Mike Krahulik, using one.

The Surface tablets run closer to £1000 which takes them well into dream territory. The Samsung Note is cheaper and would fulfill all my needs. As much as I love using pen and ink, there are times in the day when that’s simply not possible. My logic then begins to run down this narrow and utterly immoral line of reasoning: a mobile tablet would allow me to work seamlessly at home and away, blog more often, and produce more graphic content. It would double my productivity, at the very least, and would surely pay for itself over a year…



Oh, get thee behind me… This kind of thinking will lead me to the madhouse unless I can get creative about my predicament.

So, my question is: how do I get Samsung to send me one of those Galaxy Note 10.1 inch beauties to review? I know this blatant kind of scheming works for some people. Things I’ve got free in my time as a blogger: one copy of a book of Clive James’s essays, a copy of ‘Hunger’ by the Norwegian Modernist writer Knut Hamsun, and a copy of a nameless book by a popular and multi-award winning blogger which was so appallingly bad that I quickly dumped it into a charity box and felt bad for inflicting such dross on a charity. (I won’t name the book but, if you’re interested, email me for details).

That’s a rather pitiful return, when you think about it, though none of those books came because I actively lobbied for freebies. This time I am and I'm aiming a little higher...

So, things to do in the next few days:

• relaunch this blog as one of those technology blogs that always get exciting new products;


• begin to act more like Brian Tong or shave my head and adopt ridiculous glasses like Jason Bradbury so Samsung begin to take notice;


• promise them a five star review and constant plugging for the next five years;


• get a large Samsung tattoo covering my buttocks (à la Cheryl Cole), which I also promise to flaunt in public over the next five years or until third arrest.

Hmm… Alternatively, perhaps those ads for online gambling aren’t such a bad idea...

A Buddhist Cartoon

A Quick Wine Cartoon

I’m slowly doing all the pencil work on a four page graphic short story so this doodle is all I've managed today. The more I look at it, the more I think it’s a lousy gag. I shouldn't really post it but I don’t have anything better. The weather has also changed. The heat and humidity has turned to warm rain and my brain has fallen into a resulting torpor. It doesn't help that web traffic has also dried up. Perhaps it’s because the schools are back. Perhaps it’s because it’s Friday and the entire population of Western civilization are trying to catch up with all the work they should have been doing for the past four days. I only hope numbers pick up when China and Japan wake in a few hours. Not only do we need them to kick start out economies, I need them to kick start my brain.

The Blog Post in Which I Realise I’m Worth Less Than a Buttock

People who hang wet mackerel and seaweed among their wind chimes assure me that this might be the last hot day of the year. That promise is the only thing keeping me going. This sultry air puts me in fretful state of mind. Yesterday was a brutal day, depressingly quiet on the web, no emails from real people, no human contact, while visits to the blog continued to degrade my faith in humanity. ‘Animal Crossing porn’ might now be the single most depressing search term I think I’ve ever seen, though the day also saw rank upon file of people searching for news about Cheryl Cole’s bottom.

Here’s a depressing thought for you or, rather, for me... Nothing I will ever do in my life will mean as much to people as Cheryl Cole’s arse.

Think about that for a moment. Even one half of her behind means more to more people than my entire being as it exists over the entire course of my lifetime. Every single thing I write, draw, say, and do will be insignificant compared to just one of her unthinking buttocks. Anything my brain can create or has created is meaningless compared to this lump of skin, fat, and gluteal muscle now tattooed with something Microsoft normally include as a Windows background and which you immediately change to a picture of your dog.

I don’t know how I’m meant to function now that I’m aware of this depressing statistic. It’s like realising that you entertain fewer people than the Krankies with their freakish-old-woman-playing-a-schoolboy-who-sleeps-with-the-curly-haired-guy-in-the-celebrity-sweater act.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Snap out of it, you miserable hack! There are better things to write about this morning such as the new Samsung Note 10.1 inch tablet with Wacom stylus technology. Excuse me while I wipe the drool on my sleeve. I just need to figure out some new ingenious scheme which might help be buy one of these suckers. Samsung swinishly price their tablets reasonably for everybody except me. It’s clear victimisation. Ideally, I need to sell some cartoons but what’s the chance of that?

Of course, Cheryl Cole’s buttocks could afford to buy a Samsung Note 10.1 inch tablet, but how would it handle the stylus? That’s a question I bet you’ve failed to ask amid all this excitement. Mechanically it is possible, I suppose. You might argue that her bottom is perfectly adapted to handling a stylus, though I wouldn’t like to be the person using it next.

Speaking of the vulgar abuse of technology, I read last night that we can now apply for a one-way mission to Mars. I suspect it’s really one of those thin-out-the-species deals or some kind of Hugo Drax Moonraker scheme where all you super-bright types disappear behind the moon while the rest of us go toxic in the Apocalypse which is initially mistaken for a case of mass twerking or twerping. Either way, I’m up for it and I’ve filled in my application. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m tired of living in a world that wants to read Suzanne Moore. I don’t get anything anymore. I’m not on the left, the right, or even in the middle. I’m just lost. I also read in The Guardian today that there’s no end to David Walliam’s talent, in which case, a planet where culture comprises swirling dust storms and endless rocks seems infinitely preferable.

There’s a limited availability of these tickets but I guess the upside is that if you do win a place, you would be more significant to human culture than Cheryl Cole’s bottom, which, in this horribly bleak moment, feels like it’s the pinnacle of human ingenuity and accomplishment.

Okay, I have a cartoon strip to finish. Until tomorrow.

Coming To Cinemas Soon...

One of those last-thing-at-night cartoons based on yesterday's blog post.

Terror On the High Seas

You know that final shot of Jurassic Park when a T-Rex roars and a banner drifts down proclaiming the time ‘When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth’? Well, I think I’ve thought of an idea for a sequel that brings it right up to date. We have a similar banner but it now reads ‘When Arseholes Ruled the Earth’ and instead of a dinosaur, we have a large CGI recreation of the soup-brained editor of Yachting Monthly magazine.

Of course, it needn’t be the editor of Yachting Monthly magazine. It could be any of the fiendish fuckers who miraculously achieve positions of prestige in this country of ours. Local councillors, civic planners, and the management at my local Tesco… Pick your fool of choice and I’m sure the CGI engineers at Industrial Light and Magic would be able to recreate them at a larger scale.

But you might wonder why I’m picking on the editor of Yachting Monthly magazine. I don’t know the man and couldn’t tell you his name. However, I have been reading Bill Stott’s blog post for September and it's a real white knuckler. Bill has been relieved of his freelancing duties providing cartoons for Yachting Monthly. As he himself explains:

the new thrusting young editor in this case [ of a sailing magazine which shall remain nameless, called Yachting Monthly] knew damned well he was doing wrong. He emailed to say how much he liked my work, and how it had really worked for the magazine but that he was letting me go because he was giving the slot to a cartoonist friend of his! Honest! Of course, in freelancing, there are no contracts. In editing, for some at least, it would appear that there are no principles.

I don’t know which shocks me more: that the editor is so brazen about hiring a friend or that he actually thinks it a good idea to drop Bill Stott. For a long time Yachting Monthly was Mike Peyton’s patch. Peyton has been described as the world’s greatest yachting cartoonist so it was only right that when he retired he was replaced by a cartoonist with an equally high profile. Bill Stott definitely has that. His signature is one I’ve recognised since I first started to take a studious interest in cartooning. If you’re unfamiliar with his cartoons, I suggest you check out his blog. His work has appeared pretty much everywhere that matters and most compilations of great British gag cartoons will usually include some of his more well-known panels.

Unlike many cartoonists who tread a very safe middle ground where the jokes follow established precedents, Stott’s work can occasionally wander into wonderfully surreal areas. I keep intending to write a long piece about why I adore his work and perhaps one day I’ll do that. Needless to say, if you read as many gag cartoons as I read, it’s hard to be surprised, yet Stott constantly surprises me.

There’s be an exhibition of his work along with that of Tony Husband, Chris Madden, and Bill Tidy at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester this coming October and I’m really hoping they’ll let me in.

Bill Stott was also one of the founding members of the Professional Cartoonists Organisation, which makes his treatment all the more disgusting. Personally, I’m up for organising marches and protests against this shabby treatment. Would a lynch mob be too much? I’m not so sure. We need hairy bikers with grim attitudes and we need them now. At the very least, can’t we cartoonists block harbours and prevent yachts from sailing to make a point about that we don’t live in a country that tolerates this nepotistic crap? What kind of organisation is the PCO if they can't organise a riot mob? It also makes me wonder what the hell a company like IPCMedia are thinking giving editing duties to a nepotistic dunderhead who has clearly been hit over the head a few too many times by a swinging boom.

On The Wisdom of Crowds and The Instincts of Cowards

They think themselves lions, stallions, perhaps the more imaginative among them unicorns or some rare form of tropical cuckoo, but the truth for anybody with the eyes to see it is that most politicians are pure bred mule. They are our ultimate beasts of burden. They carry our heaviest loads on the stoutest of legs because the political process has bred them that way. Crossing the stud Circumstance with the bitch Necessity we produce these strange snorting hybrids with small brains and hardened backs, able to move intractable loads over rough terrain. Yet they’re also cautious beasts. They move slowly on the hoof and even the best of them are rarely amenable to changing direction or choosing the hard trail over the easy.

It’s the nature of their existence that politicians want to be liked by their masters. The cycle of election and re-election encourages the characteristic moderation obvious in their species. The political system is inherently reactionary and this is one of the great benefits of our parliamentary democracy. No one government, in theory, can harm it enough within four years to destabilise the country.

The great irony, of course, is that this breeds a tendency towards caution that ensures that the majority of our politicians remain largely anonymous. They never get the fame they so obviously crave. We only remember those rare few with the red flash of devilment in their eyes. It’s the wilful and bold who catch our attention, those that relish the difficult decision and the principled defence. Those politicians we rightly remember as either great representatives of the state or twitching fools who led us ankle deep into our historic follies. Sometimes the separation between the two is hard to distinguish. Margaret Thatcher was, for some, our finest post-war Prime Minister because her convictions were stronger than those of the weak gents hanging around the old Tory Central Office. Others consider her a divisive ideologue whose policies continue to harm the country which has never truly recovered from the splits her policies deepened and spread.

Which brings us to Syria…

This side of a nuclear Tehran, no subject wears down the scratching post as quickly as Syria. You can trouble your skull until the bone flakes under yours nail but you’ll find no answer to the question ‘what do we do next?’ This ethnic civil war is as deathly and impenetrable as the darkest well of the deepest missile silo. Yet despite the complexity of the situation, it doesn’t stop newspapers from printing polls that boldly proclaim that the British public are against intervention in Syria by about two to one.

I’m never sure how to take these figures other than with an antacid. News reports present them as unquestioned statistics. The implication is that there is an innate wisdom of the crowd that politicians should heed. We’re reminded that the very same democratic process put them into power, so perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians never dismisses the numbers by pointing out the obvious truth that all polls are an exercise in canvassing the ignorant.

In 2008, a poll of 3000 UK teenagers revealed that a fifth of them thought that Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character and 47% thought Richard the Lionheart was a figure from English myth. Presumably, nearly six years later, many of those teenagers are now adults able to express equally profound insights about a situation that has baffled most Middle East analysts.

This problem has long been held as one of the faults of democracy but as Winston Churchill said ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.’ Of course, less often quoted was Churchill’s statement from 1919 when he wrote that ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’ which just goes to prove that even the wisest of us can be misguided at times.

I’m not saying I’m any more enlightened than the average teenager or the man routinely voted the greatest Briton of the twentieth century. I’m as stumped as anybody about what would make a suitable response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people.

America argues that we must do something because genocide by nerve agents should never be tolerated by the international community. They conveniently forget that the West did nothing after Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds of Halabja in 1986, let along their use of chemical weapons throughout the Iran Iraq war in which America supported the Ba'athist regime. The only difference is this time they drew a line in the Syrian sand that Assad deliberately stepped across.

At the same time, we’ve seen the problems of limited involvement in the past. In the aftermath of 9/11, questions were asked about the Clinton administration’s limited response to the 1988 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Had Clinton been bolder, the critics argue, the horrors of the Twin Towers might not have occurred.

Then we have the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, where American might was thrown at a problem and the whole thing quickly developed horns and a poisonous bite.

So we have three examples from recent history: of doing nothing, of doing very little, and going all in with troops on the ground. Somebody has to now choose which path to take.

The most likely outcome is that Obama will take Clinton’s line. America warships will stand off the coast, destroy a few bases and this whole exercise in saving face will have only cost them a few hundred million dollars in cruise missiles. Syria will protest but things will soon return to the potent state of twisted normality once Assad realises that he’s got away with a geopolitical slap on the wrist.

That, however, has almost become a secondary issue. Ignoring the rights and wrongs of action against Syria, what has the last week shown us about the political processes in the UK and US now that the Prime Minister asked Parliament to vote and the Commander in Chief has now passed the problem to Congress? Some claim that democracy has been served and that this is the end of conviction politics. But is that really what we expect of our leaders?

There is no evidence to suggest that the average Member of Parliament (or, indeed, member of Congress) is any more enlightened about Syria that any member of the public, albeit, one of the few who still buys a newspaper. Not every politician voting on Syria will have had a thought-through position on the crisis. Few will have studied the evidence. Our MPs voted on one issue but will have judged it on a thousand unrelated news stories. Some will have ignored the situation in the outskirts of Damascus and voted ‘no’ because they still remember Tony Blair’s dossier of WMDs. Some will have voted ‘no’ with an eye to their pay packets and the next election. Some might have voted ‘no’ simply to spite the Prime Minister. At the same time, some will have voted ‘yes’ because they believe in the politics of red lines in the sand or because of they have a munitions manufacturer in their constituency or because they get some twisted sexual gratification from the idea of it being in their power to launch cruise missile attacks and their new mistress will be impressed… At least two missed the vote because they didn’t hear the division bell ring.

My point is that what we saw last week might have been democracy in action but it was also a decision made less informed and based on the whims of people less qualified to judge. The result was shared indifference, an unclear moral position, and no single person standing up to say ‘this is what we will do and I take the responsibility for these actions’. To put it more succinctly: aren’t there some instances when it’s simply not acceptable to say that 51% of our country believes what you did to be a crime against humanity?

Syria is a gnarly problem but whatever the Prime Minister had decided it must surely have been superior to the current impotent display of political manoeuvring and point scoring. The term ‘conviction politics’ may have fallen out of favour but is this really the best alternative we have? There is nothing wrong with conviction pacifism as there might often be a reasoned case for action. Rightly or wrongly, Tony Blair acted out of his convictions and he was judged by those actions. Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he acted as a Prime Minister should. Instead, Cameron and Miliband have created a situation in which no decision was taken. We threw a coin and decided to abide by the result. That is worse than appeasement. It’s abandoning principals in favour of a boorish yob neutrality borne out of ignorance. We would have been served just as well turning the debate into a glitzy ITV primetime show, completely with a telephone vote.

Our political system might be a democracy over the course of five years but it is run day-to-day as a constitutional monarchy in the same way that the United States America is a presidential system. Both Prime Ministers and Presidents are meant to make hard but informed decisions based on the best advice of experts and the evidence provided by the intelligence community. It is the role of voters to judge them on those decisions at the end of their terms is office. By placing the question before the House of Commons, David Cameron abdicated his responsibility for the most difficult decision of his Prime Ministership. His motivation for doing so was supposedly his belief in parliamentary democracy but it resembled shrewd politics. Had the Commons voted for military action, he could have moved forward with a mandate that absolved him of blame. In the case that they didn’t vote for action, he steps back, as he’s done, with a shrug of his shoulders and a clear conscience. In either case, he doesn’t have to stand by his decision.

David Cameron washed his hands of Syria the moment he knew he could no longer be blamed for choosing the wrong action or the wrong inaction. He is hoping that responsibility diluted is no responsibility at all and he might be proved right. It has played well with the country and won’t hurt him at the next election. But self-interest has always been one of the very few convictions he has as a politician. He is our affable, likable Prime Minister who loves the job he does so long as he doesn’t have to make any hard decisions. He’s a consummate politician, wanting to be loved by all and, for that reason, he’ll be ultimately remembered by few.

Journal from the Plague Year 2013

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

My mood is foul tonight. Perhaps too foul but I’ve not blogged in two days… It’s well past midnight and I’m of a mind to hurl stones even though I know I’m not completely without sin. Vanity is my foremost wickedness; vanity in believing I might actually find the words to complete this nasty piece of propaganda I’ve sat down here to write.

My aim was to talk about my town, my people, perhaps even my country, but I don’t know if existing in a place is the same as belonging. Perhaps I’m still affected by the ‘ghostly aspens’ of Colorado, a place I’ve always wanted to see. I want mountains in my life. I’m tired of living in flatlands.

The true measure of my vanity is my frustration that things aren’t generally better. Vanity is writing a blog you hoped more people would read and enjoy. Vanity is in believing you are part of a larger conversation. It is waking every morning and going to sleep every night hoping for fresh emails from interesting people with intelligent things to tell you and opportunities you might grasp… Vanity is the wish for human contact. It is the need for affirmation.

The reality is that it’s only the blue moon that brings mail, usually from a confused mayor who thinks I’m a celebrity. The reality is that people want porn, tattoo designs, and naked celebrities and I don’t want to give them any of those things. The reality is that my work gets borrowed, lifted, stolen, quoted, used, occasionally abused, but never once considered valuable or worthy of payment.

So forgive me if I insist that stronger men than me would be drunk tonight, hog tied in a midget bordello with the shutters down until dawn. My weakness is allowing myself to feel so abysmally dejected but if the choice is prose or poison, words or whisky, I hope I’ll always choose to write. And if you can endure to read what follows, then please excuse it for the ramblings of a man whose moral compass is stuck pointing hard north, towards a notion of how things used to be before the sickness came.

I saw that sickness this morning. I’d paused outside a second-hand furniture shop in town in order to watch a round shouldered man standing as his dog, a piss yellow strangle-haired mongrel, enthusiastically shit between his feet. I watched the pair of them, feeling abject at the sight. At first I thought that the man was oblivious to his dog as he gazed through the dusted windows at stained mattresses and chipped refrigerators. Then I realised that his focussed gaze was merely a way of covering for the dog’s business. When the man stepped away, he was careful not to walk in the wet caramel already spreading across the pavement.

The plague probably began with these small acts of indifference, no worse than my own unwillingness to say something. I like to believe there was a time when selfishness such as this wouldn’t have happened but perhaps that time exists only in my imagination. The streets of my childhood were thick with excrement and litter. Perhaps my moral compass is merely stuck pointing in the direction of my own expectations, formed from even older notions of manners, politeness, and responsibility that were themselves no less of an abstraction.

On the corner, a woman was standing with her five children, a family fun pack of sizes but all sharing the same brutish dirt scowls. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a heavy pregnancy, a cigarette flaring between her livid pink lips. Her ugly breasts crowned her tight vest top, their bad skin freckled and pimpled, and across her shoulder ran an angry tattoo that read ‘Only God Can Judge Me’. Isn’t that the truth? I’m not qualified to argue theology with a tattooist. My life is full of qualifications that nobody wants and, as if to emphasise the point, my back was against the grey shutters of the Job Centre. Backed into a corner, you might say, yet it was also the perfect place to watch and see that the anger in the woman’s face was real. Her razor cut husband or boyfriend looked at her five year old boy and then he raised a finger and spat ‘this is all your fucking fault’ before he turned and walked away. She laughed defiantly and I moved on when she glared at me for watching.

The children around here are already marked by the plague. A small girl on the arm of a grandparent wore flaking false tattoos from elbow to wrist. Given a few years, the ink will be real and stand proud like an embossed cliché. Yet it’s not the tattoos I hate but the conformity to blandness, the lack of individuality that pervades everything. Growing up, I admired outsiders and they all had tattoos. I’m now marked as an outsider simply because I have none.

And conformity is the plague in its truest form. The plague is a disease of the surface, of skin not bone. It is characterised by an obsession with image, self, and possession. We now live on the other side of celebrity culture where we are all stars. Our sickness is our perceived specialness which is fed back to us from everywhere we look. Yesterday, I took a train out of Manchester and the conductor wore her hair and make-up like Elizabeth Tailor, an insane contrast to her otherwise manly uniform. She was a fading beauty in a no hope job yet also in a perpetual state of being only moments from fame.

Friends tell me that I’ve outgrown the town but then so have thousands of people like me across the country. Towns now reflect Britain’s investment in surface at the expense of depth. The false facia business is big. Cheap plastic covers the beautiful brickwork of every shop front, hiding centuries of life behind thin sheets of pristine banality. It’s erected by companies with vibrant logos on white vans and men with electric screwdrivers and tight schedules. And everything is run to a tight schedule. Gardens are cut by professional gardeners who strim the lot in fifteen minutes and are gone. Windows are washed by professional teams with expensive vans and tools and a refusal to climb ladders. From the end of a long pole they rinse the centre of the window once, take your money, and then they’re gone for another fortnight. We’ve become a nation of dirty windows, uneven hedges, and identical high streets.

Meanwhile I’m stuck watching the post office queue stream sickly to the door. It’s a wheezing creature with many legs but a single wet hawking voice. At its head stands a man who went to school with me. A lifetime and a few stone now separate us. We’re long past the point where we feel the need to acknowledge each other and, as he walks past, I gaze at his profile. The fat on the back of his head is folded onto his thick neck, forming a bulge like the hood of a raincoat tucked into his collar. He’s counting so much money that I feel ashamed for looking. I wonder what he does for a living, this man made from the dim-witted child I’d known at school.

Outside, he climbs into a long white truck, the length of two reasonable cars and worth a hundred times the value of my bike. It’s an Isuzu, a 2x2 cabin at the front and a huge enclosed space behind. A year ago I’d never seen one of these monstrosities and now the town is full of them.

‘Only God Can Judge Me.’

The words of the tattoo now seem well chosen. How can anybody judge these successful men? If it were London, Manchester or Liverpool, we’d think them footballers or benefactors of some high financial ruin. Here amid the plague victims, their wealth is just more of a mystery, though a mystery that everybody has quietly solved. We mutter about the guy just out of prison driving the luxury 4x4 whilst claiming unemployment. We tut about the Ferrari that sits outside a cheap terraced house. Down the road a guy was done for badger baiting, spent six months inside, and came home to expensive fireworks and a new car. Every street has a family like that: ugly people with seemingly endless means, who greet strangers late at night and hold unusual conferences in their parked cars with the lights turned off.

‘Only God Can Judge Me.’

It’s nonsense, of course. There is no judgement, just homes and cars and families and holidays and memories that fade and are eventually forgotten. And my judgement on this grim night is that I’m really tired of being me, of choosing hard paths and depth, and of being on the outside, and of struggling as though the struggle were indeed a noble thing. I now want the tribal tattoos and I want muscles on my arms which are too thin because all I do is write and draw and read. I no longer want my legs strong from cycling. I want them strong from doing deep squats in the gym and I want huge cars with high emissions and friends who know friends who can arrange things. I want drugs to sell and cars to steal and I want to be involved in armed robberies because all the things I have been taught have brought me only a sadness so much worse than the threat of arrest or punishment or even the eternal damnation of my soul. Time in prison might make me a better man. I might learn a trade there, how to deal, how to lie and cheat, how to be callous and cruel, break women’s hearts and not feel ashamed about it afterwards because they were just Playboy models with large breasts and dense smiles and hate in their eyes and deep sorrows in their lives…

Except, of course, I don’t want those things. All I know is that I’m tired and I’d like my sleep. Tomorrow I’ll start my work again and hope everything will be different.

 

Winding Up Important Civic People

I’m heading out this morning, so, if you’re reading this on Friday, 30th August, 2013, I’ll probably be in Blackwell’s university bookshop in Manchester, no doubt thumbing a copy of The Comic Journal and otherwise making the most of the quiet before the new university term begins. I’m also running off early to avoid any emails from angry civic leaders. Not that I’m in the habit of annoying civic leaders but sometimes it just can’t be helped.

There might be some sharp people who enter into local politics but I can’t say that I’ve ever met one. People who enter into local politics tend to be the last people who should be involved in local politics. To paraphrase the great Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have those prats as members.

As evidence, I'd like you to consider the following email exchange which took place yesterday, but first, I need to set the scene... You need to know that my old blog, ‘The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society’, was supposedly written by the real Richard Madeley, star of UK TV and the husband of the equally famous Judy. Of course, the blog wasn’t written by Richard Madeley but by me. Richard Madeley had nothing to do with it. You also need to know that I’ve not updated the blog in a long time but that it still attracts the occasional visitor.

What usually happens when a visitor arrives is that they ignore the blog completely. They don’t spot the disclaimers in the banner. Suspicions aren’t raised by Photoshopped pictures of Richard in various freakish costumes or the generally twisted nature of the blog. They just rush straight to the email address at the side and think they’ve got a hotline to a bona fide UK celebrity.

That’s when I get an email such as the following:

Dear Richard,

From the small town of Pud, Glossopshire we  would like to have you sometime to speak at Pud Town Hall if possible. How do we go about making a booking if you would be interested. You remember little Pud from your Glossopshire days  ? – we heard you recall your memories of the County on a recent Radio Glossopshire programme.

I am an ex Councillor and Mayor of Pud and I am a Player and Committee Member of our local Brass Band (Pud Marching Band) and have arranged successful fundraising events before.

Best wishes

Barry and Rita Elbow

To save the embarrassment of the individual who sent me this email, I have changed a few of the details. He wasn’t called Barry Elbow and there is no Pud or county of Glossopshire.

Now, you would think that the kind thing to do would be to email back to explain how they’ve fallen for a hoax. That, however, is the very worst thing you can do. I’ve replied like that many times and it usually results in a severe bollocking from some self-important Reginald quoting advertising standards, scripture, and the law of the land.

I don’t mind the anger. It’s always good to annoy these people. However, I don’t see why I should be punished for their shallow pursuit of celebrity. I’m also of the opinion that I shouldn’t let them down so lightly. If people can’t be bothered to read the blog of the person they’re contacting, it suggests they’re not interested in the person they’re contacting. Even though I’m not Richard Madeley, I do think that the real Richard Madeley deserves more respect than somebody buttonholing him to provide free entertainment during some rainy afternoon in Pud. If you’re going to ask a favour of the man, at least have the common courtesy of learning a little about him and don’t just ask to borrow his celebrity for a couple of hours.

Because, if you do that to me, you’re going to get a reply like this:

Dear Mayor Elbow and Lady Mayoress,

Thank you for your generous invite! I would dearly love to come and speak at Pud Town Hall, though you don’t mention a topic, so I presume it’s my choice! In which case, I’d love to talk to you about my new passion for the English whelk, to be seen next year in my new BBC2 documentary series, ‘Richard Madeley’s Whelk Summer’. A talk at Pud Town Hall would be just the thing to kick off our nationwide publicity about the show.

Did you know that British waters harbour 127 varieties of whelk, of which my favourite is definitely the thick-lipped dog whelk (aka nassarius incrassatus)? If that sort of information excites you, Barry, I could manage perhaps two or three hours on the subject, plus I have some rather amusing slides including one from the first time Judy tried to eat a whelk. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that she has a shellfish allergy so she ballooned considerably, as you’ll see from the slide. The air ambulance was a bit of a white knuckler but at least we can laugh about it now! Well, I can laugh but Judy has a slight residual puffiness around her lips which makes laughter almost as painful as yawning.

Barry, let’s talk wheelbase… Is there ample parking at Pud Town Hall? I’m currently driving a six-berth Majestic motorhome in beige as part of a promotional deal the Beeb have arranged with the makers. I must warn you: it can cause congestion in smaller town centres. In other places (Bridgnorth), local scout troupes were used to guide me into the parking bay. I’m sure with your connections, you could do the same. Nothing too fancy, of course. Just a small procession, perhaps with the Pud Marching Band providing the music. The theme to ‘The Damnbusters’ is a personal favourite. Do you know it and, more to the point, Barry, can you play it?

I don’t know about you but I think the best marching band music came from the films made about the Second World War. The Spitfire Prelude, The 49th Parallel, the theme to ‘The Great Escape’… Steve McQueen was never better, don’t you think? Little known factoid for you, Barry: he made that entire movie wearing a truss. Makes the mind boggle as well as perspire! More recently, of course, we have the music to ‘Saving Private Ryan’ but it doesn’t produce the same swell in the breast as ‘The Dambuster’s March’. I suppose it’s because it’s about Americans. Judy just reminded me about ‘Colonel Bogey’ which was another good one. Good tune, I mean. Not good American though perhaps he was. Now I think about it, if you don’t like the whelk idea, I could talk about World War 2 marching band music. Hit me with your thoughts, Barry (you too Rita!). You’ll both find that I’m very open minded.

By the way, I hope you're not contacting me after finding the blog 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' on the internet. I should mention briefly in passing that the blog was a spoof written by a man of limited intellect and very little talent in the field of comedy writing. He thought himself funnier than he is and occasionally pretends to be me under the name ‘Dick Madeley’. You should watch out for him and try not to get too involved. His real name is Stan Madeley. He wrote a book mocking me but thankfully it was under marketed and therefore a bit of a flop despite it being a proper rib cracker.

But let’s not sour the good tone we’ve set with talk of internet pranksters. These spoofers are just one of the many down sides of being a national celebrity/treasure. Another down side is Clare Balding but best not to go into that over unsecure channels. On a more pleasant note: I’ve just hopped onto Google Maps and eyeballed the width of your High Street. It looks very exciting if a bit narrow for the well-equipped motorhome. I’m intrigued by the look of your ‘Caramel Floom’ tea house, though I’m very disappointed to see that ‘Pud Domestic Applicance Ltd’ has now closed down.

What’s happened to the British high street, Barry? Some people blame internet shopping but I read a story in Judy’s Guardian the other day which said that only 30 percent of people shop on the internet. Well, that just made me want to cry: what about the other 70 per cent? Out-of-town shopping is clearly the problem and I think it should be taxed until B&Q squeak! What we need is for councils to work more proactively to bring new commerce into our small towns. It’s why I’m excited to see your Caramel Floom. In my opinion, every town should have a Caramel Floom, along with a bookshop, a shop selling plumbing supplies, and somewhere to buy nails.

Before I forget: my agent will need to know the numbers you can fit into the Town Hall. The biggest crowd I’ve ever had to work for a talk was 27, though they thinned out a little during the final hour.

But perhaps it’s too early to talk logistics. Let’s just get this sucker organised. Send me more details, size of hall and details of your audio visual equipment (I’m hot on multimedia, Barry), so we can begin to lock down some of the arrangements ahead of what is sure to be a night of slightly saucy crustacean fun.

Again, thank you for the invite. I’m sure the kind people of Pud will give me a very great whelkome!

Sincerely yours,

Dick Madeley
‘The Nation’s Favourite Uncle’
http://richardmadeley.blogspot.com

So, how do you reply to a letter like that? With good humour? With a snide remark to indicate that you’re angry at the deception? Perhaps you don’t even reply at all. You allow the silence to convey your disappointment…

Well, not Barry and not Rita. Barry and Rita still think I’m called Richard but Barry is now harbouring some doubts….

Dear Richard

Thank you for your reply – will consider.

Barry

And we sometimes wonder why the country is in the state it's in?

A Meat Cartoon

So today’s cartoon makes little sense but I like it. I doodled it watching Curb Your Enthusiasm late last night, so my humour was probably set to full twisted. Meat products must have also been on my mind, perhaps because yesterday was Baconface’s birthday. I don’t use Facebook, detest Facebook, and wish I’d never opened any of my Facebook accounts. Yet I went on Facebook to wish him a happy birthday on such a special yet arbitrarily chosen day. My main purpose was to see if I could prompt that bugger into bringing his lumberjack wit to the rest of the UK. It won’t happen any more than my Sparks strips brought them back to Manchester. However, you’ll never know if you don’t ask…

My other purpose was to make the point that I think I’m owed some free bacon since he used my cartoon on his website. It’s ironic that certain other comedians loudly complain that their fans are downloading their shows from torrent sites. That might be true but they never once took a cartoon from a blog and didn’t even provide a backlink. I think it must be a Canadian thing, like hoary marmots and the four string Yukon banjo (aka the Yokonlele).

Okay. Time for a bike ride and then this afternoon I’ll start something new. It’s a shame that Baconface's shows have come to an end. His strips are actually the most fun to draw simply because I do them purely to amuse myself and as a technical exercise. But perhaps all good things must early end. His mask was getting smaller and his bacon less artfully arranged. It’s harder to draw random bacon and, had he toured, the next strip might have tested my limited skills to breaking point.

Some Heartfelt Thoughts About Cheryl Cole’s Horrendous Bottom

There aren’t many blogs that have stayed in my blogroll from the very beginning but Bryan Appleyard’s ‘Thought Experiments’ is one. It’s always certain to get my brain working in ways that are helpfully tangential to things I’m already thinking about. Today, for instance, the reinvigorated Bryan is talking about ‘people who care’ and, naturally, that immediately made me think about the bottoms of attractive young women in their mid-twenties.

We live in a society where we are routinely expected to adopt positions we might not instinctively support. ‘Caring’ is one example. Even though it makes me sound hammer callous about the truly poor, I’ll be honest and admit that I never really cared all that deeply about ‘feeding the world’. I never went to any ‘Live Aid’ concert but I bet that many who did and bought the t-shirt weren’t actually all that interested in famine or food economics. They furrowed their brows and spoke in platitudes but, deep down, where all our bestial motivations snout around for brushed chrome phones and comfortable underwear, they were just there to see Bowie and Jagger perform.

That isn’t to say that I’m insensitive to suffering but growing up surround by media hype about films, bands, and national celebrations, it tended to make it difficult to recognise the actual reality of the world or to understand the true levels of hardship. I doubt if I’m alone. Once something exceeds the brain’s ability to comprehend scale, it’s as if the brain retreats to failsafe positions: ‘surely the government should do something’ or ‘isn’t it terrible…’ It is bystander apathy on a global scale and totally understandable because to fully commit yourself to the cause would mean changing your life, altering your routine, and sacrificing your comfort.

It’s just one example of the casual hypocrisy we’re taught to exercise between our schooldays and the Pearly Gates. We say we want to see businesses run ethically but the capitalist fat slides thick and heavy though our veins. What we really care about is the price of the new iPhone or the quality of our socks. It’s like people who declare that Michael McIntyre is funny. They don’t really think that but the BBC has filled them with a conviction as solid as slimed drivel nailed to a door.

The worst example of this quasi-doublethink is ‘political correctness’ which often applies a thin veneer of tolerance over more deeply held forms of intolerance, prejudice, and conviction.

I was reading an article in The Guardian yesterday about the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom. On the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom, the horrendous Cheryl Cole has had a large horrendous tattoo of flowers inked by some American artist who probably has a side line in wallpaper design. Jane Martinson, the writer of the piece, suggested the tattoo might be read as a feminist statement, as if to say: ‘men might think I’m ruining a very attractive bottom but I’m showing that my bottom belongs to me, the horrendous Cheryl Cole, and I can do with it what I like.’

The implication in both the article and comments that followed was that I’m not allowed to think that the horrendous Cheryl Cole had a rather nice bottom or that she has now ruined it forever. That would be an example of my being sexist and patriarchal about bottoms that are none of my concern.

It’s a hard slap to take. Even before I read this article I would often find myself wandering around in life and occasionally looking at an attractive female bottom before an inner voice would start to shout Guardian propaganda at me. There I was on the train into Manchester just a week ago, leaning slightly into the aisle to admire the rear of the departing guard (female), when the voice of my inner Toynbee began to bark and I fell ruined back into my seat. I live wracked with all kinds of guilt about my attraction to female bottoms, which I swear isn’t abnormal. There’s nothing illicit about these bottoms, which are usually in their mid-twenties and fully clothed, possibly in tight denim. Think Jacqueline Bisset in ‘The Deep’ or Emmanuelle Seigner in ‘Frantic’ and you’ll know what I mean…

Yet it's this discrepancy between thoughtless actions and thoughtful reflection that makes hypocrites of so many of us. It is partially why political rhetoric is so shallow in this country. There are too many things we cannot say, cannot admit, and are prevented from addressing. Politicians are forced to issue the most jabberingly stupid of statements on subjects which demand more nuanced debate. They lie to us, not because they are deceitful, but because we as a collective have allowed these lies to take on the appearance of moral truths in the hope that at some point everybody will begin to believe them.

For instance, it’s increasingly hard to insult Clare Balding these days lest people intuit that you’re insulting her sexuality. But Clare Balding isn’t annoying because she’s a lesbian. To say that 'she’s an annoying lesbian' should register exactly the same as if one has said that 'she’s an annoying commentator'. You wouldn’t interpret the latter to mean that commentators are inherently annoying and in a proper liberal society that should be also true of the former. The prejudice exists the moment you infer anything else about the statement.

Language mirrors thought, not always as succinctly as we wish, but in a way that we can usually presume it has a basis in a person wishing to communicate what they think. What advocates of political correctness fail to acknowledge is that merely changing the language does not change the underlying thoughts. To pretend that it can is, at best, hypocritical, and at worst, creating a generation of men who feel deeply conflicted about the horrendous Cheryl Cole’s bottom and its hardy perennials. And, as much as I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear this: I don't like them. I really don't...

The Library Cartoon

Your Philosophical Questions Answered

New Cordless Technology

Classic Fables

Let’s Just Shoot All The Cyclists

I’m beginning to see the sense of it. As a cyclist, I mean. After all, I’m nothing but a drain on local resources, a constant thorn in the side of customer service departments. How is Willard told to deal with Kurtz in Apocalyse Now? With extreme prejudice? Well, I feel like Kurtz, muttering ‘the horror, the horror’ here amid the brutes. I’ve clearly gone rogue, off reservation, or, if you prefer, quite quite mad. I’ve lost all rational sense having gorged myself on a diet of existential cycling philosophy and the foolish belief that we were born free to choose how best to live our lives.

Even if you’re a cyclist, you must see that there is a hard-knuckled truth to my words so open your mind and let them in. Society carries on not through the rational will of individuals but because the great barrelling mass of the majority is steeped in some husky pheromone and brazenly ruts behind council refuse bins when dim on Bacardi and sad dreams. Evolution happily coincides with the squirting dash of sperm towards eggs. It’s no more profound than that and for every conscientious couple concerned about world population there are a thousand drunken pricks with immortality on their tips.

Yet all societies eventually neutralise their radical elements. I’m now beginning to see that we cyclists are more radical than most. We try to present a better vision of the world, of communities, and of towns. Yet we’re also immensely disposable since we lack the genetic code for survival. We’re like the dodo birds so friendly to sailors that they never learned to run away even as they were having their necks wrung. Cyclists have a naïve quality. We put ourselves in harm’s way, laying our necks before the heavy vulcanised tread of wiser souls protected by air bags and 4x4 traction. What benefits do consideration, moderation and environmentalism provide for the species other than to weaken it and turn us all into Guardian readers? So I say again, they should just shoot the cyclists. We’re an evolutionary dead end.

Cycling is for dreamers and who needs dreamers in a world of bankers and rat-tailed business suits? Being a cyclist is for another me in another lifetime. It’s of that same mad idealism that made me think I might make it as a writer, humourist, or cartoonist whilst living in small town England. Dream followed dream and now look at me. Tesco’s customer complaints department already treat me like the horsemeat they deny exists in their burgers. Shoot the cyclist. Some hot fragment of lead placed at considerable speed into my ear would solve quite a few problems. After all, I don’t conform to the identikit picture of the British working male that these companies encourage in order to exploit. To do that, I would need to impregnate at least 2.4 women, buy myself an old arse rattler of a car, and then do the shopping once a month at Tesco whilst sucking on a Mayfair king size or packing the Bud.

Yesterday highlighted how selfish I am by continuing to dream. It was one of those mornings at Tesco when my bike got in people’s way. I would have gone to shop elsewhere but there was no alternative but to endure their bike racks. It was also a Friday which meant the town was busy and the bike racks full.

Well, I say ‘full’ but there was one space and I bet you can’t spot it…

This photo illustrates why we cyclists are an extravagance and why Tesco are right to hate us. Here is a perfect example of a cyclist demanding too much. The room taken up by that bike might have held another trolley, pram, baby, mother, other woman, and another oddly angled youth. Just ignore that sign saying ‘bicycle parking’ above their heads. That’s just a little in-joke between Tesco staff. This is actually an example of high level ergonomics and how to maximise space in a dwindling world. This is people folding done the Japanese way. The message is a simple one: let’s just shoot the cyclists…

But even as I type that, I finally feel my sarcasm running dry. I’m left only frustration and a shrug of the shoulders... These are dog-eat-dog days requiring snarling teeth not smiles.

Yesterday showed me that I’m fighting a pointless battle. Tesco have still haven’t adequately replied to my complaint. It’s now over a week since the polite email from ‘Alex’ the Customer Service Manager and, as is shown in the above picture, the situation hasn’t changed. I’m tempted to write again but I’m deciding whether I should give up or open a second front in this attritional war.

A second front, you ask?

It was almost predictable that as soon as I ask for more cycle stands in one part of town that my local council should rip out the bike stands in one of the few places where they were providing a good service.

Bike stands! I can’t believe my life has come down to something as meaningless as these hoops of metal in the ground. Yet here I am thinking of petitioning my local council leader, Barrie Grunewald.



Since he took office in a local government coup earlier this year, I’ve been impressed by Barrie and his ability to grab a headline. He plays labyrinthine politics like some Greek sandal slapper on the trail of the Minotaur threatening to cut council budgets for the third year in a row. Believe me when I say that this man is marked for the national stage. In ten years, look for him on the back benches, quickly shuffling his way to the front. Government posts. Minister for God knows what. Perhaps party leader, Prime Minister, and the world… He also looks like the kind of forward thinking folder snapper who can explain local cycle policy without looking at his notes. To be fair, I can also do that without notes but only because St Helens Council has what appears to be a simple cycling policy:

Let’s just shoot all the cyclists...

Barrie will probably say that he doesn’t make every decision but I bet he knows which pencil chewer in St Helens Council decided to remove these bike stands.

For the last few years, we had two bike stands at the ends of a small street running through our town. They appeared one day as part of a town upgrade and proved very handy if you were going into one of the nearby banks, shops, or opticians. I went there yesterday expecting to leave my bike at the same stand I use three or four times a week. Only I discovered the stand gone. Another stand down the road had also been ripped out. There are now three stands around the corner at the end of the street. I guess it’s a provision of sorts and I also guess that I’m just being lazy. I’ll just have to leave my bike there and walk back to whatever shops I need...

Except, isn’t this another example of the mentality that councils have towards cyclists? Isn’t this the same begrudging nod we always get? Somebody in the last five minutes of a long dull town planning meeting has said:

‘But what about the cyclists?’

And somebody else has tutted, chewed the end of their propelling pencil and then scratched their oversized car-friendly behind.

‘Oh,’ they’ve said, ‘we’ll give them some stands out of the way somewhere so they can’t complain.’

Except I can complain and I do complain. Why did the council take one step back after making a good step forward? Cycle stands aren’t like car parks. You don’t centralise them. You spread them out to aid mobility and increase access to different parts of town. And what harm was there in having bike stands outside shops? That’s just good planning. One small hint of civilisation in this rabbit hutch town.

Of course, they’ll say it’s the cuts. They’ll say that the council once had money to spend on painting bicycles on pavements and putting up cycle racks. They’ll say that austerity has now bitten so hard that they’ve been forced to spend yet more money ripping out the bike stands and building a large and frankly pointless flower bed further up the road. They’ll say the town has been improved.

Except it makes no sense to me. Enlightened thinking has gone back to inside-the-box thinking.

Perhaps I’ll write to Barrie and ask him to explain. Or perhaps I’ll just ask him to shoot me. One way or the other, at least he’ll have put me out of my misery.

A Nice Cheerful Cartoon About Art Meant To Make You All Laugh...