To celebrate the postal strike tomorrow...

...here's a postcard I designed for San Diego (provided I get it hotfoot to the printer). It's less hoity-toity and more sassy.

Its a seriou's problem!!!

What is going on on the BBC news website today? Its apostrophe armageddon! Everywhere I look, willy-nilly misappropriation. Its a disgrace and I will be writing to those fiend's about their slapdash effort's! Perhaps it is the new strain of life in Brown's (Browns) Britain.

In other, correctly punctuated news, I will put eight hoity toity prints (of 20) on sale on the website next week. I have run out of archival paper and I don't think you want them printed on toilet paper or old gas bills.

ONWARD'S TO VICTORY!

Hoity + toity = HOITY TOITY

I have almost completed a new print. Whether I will sell it on the web site or in San Diego, I don't know. But it is very hoity toity and that is the main thing. Anyway everyone can look at it because here it is. I drew it in "Manga Studio", the futuristic tool of champs, chumps, no-goodniks and captains of industry.

Indignities

Reader, as you may know, I am thirty years of age. I could grow a full beard if I wanted to. I have climbed the jungle gym of life and stand atop the monkey bars bawling about the terrible sights I have seen.

So why is it that I am no longer able to buy a drink without being asked for ID? A note for American readers, in the UK you almost never get asked to prove your age unless you arrived at the bar in a pram sucking a lolly. I don't think I was ever refused a pint of foaming, nut brown ale when I was 17. Now, wizened and decrepit, I have to repeatedly prove that it is not 13 years ago.

This came to a head in Marks and Spencers when I was buying an expensive bottle of liquor as a Father's Day gift. The cashier had plainly seen me coming, I could feel the skunk eye being applied. "That's right, I'm a child," I said. "I'm going to drink this in Piccadilly Gardens then choke on my own vomit in the gutter".

I didn't actually say that, as I was too busy reaching under the cushion in my luxurious baby buggy for change. Plus I had a lollipop in my mouth.

Then, THEN, this morning I received some free samples in the mail which included "anti aging cream - for MEN". I am tempted to apply it just to see what happens. My guess: nothing good.

Turkey Ham

Now come on, turkey ham. Is it "ham" from a turkey, or turkey-like meat from a pig, or worse, some kind of grisly mutant beast? No one is telling us what "turkey ham" is and there's only a picture of a farm on the packet. No doubt, behind the dry-stone walls of this farm are machines extracting pure swine from the traditional holiday bird.

Ban this sick stunt!

In my world "funny" is never going to be a noun

It's the 11th of June and boy is it ever warm. The sun is going beserk and we will cook like clams on concrete.

It is just 7 weeks until San Diego Comic-con, the premier event in the comics calendar. I haven't been for the last couple of years because it is expensive and about 18,000 miles away. As a working man at a working show, one starts in a negative financial position and hopes to move oneself into a positive financial position through charm and weasel words. This is a lot harder when you're 8 hours adrift and surrounded by fat, sweating stormtroopers.

So as I will be a walking dead man when I hit California soil, it is Up To Me to Arrive Prepared. Here are the tasks I have assigned myself:

1. Crank handle on button machine, making badges for the ages
2. Draw a small and terrifying "mini-comic" then fold that mother
3. Make "limited prints" for people good enough to show up with too much money/gratitude

I can work the button machine like a devil, and small, terrifying minicomics are just a matter of sitting down for a couple of hours in one place, folding folding folding. But what shall I render on these "limited prints"? Nothing works, nothing works!

I think the immense efforts of SECRET PROJECT X (now 71% complete) might have broken my brain. More later.

End of an era

On Wednesday the last dangerous appliance that I bought with my house is being rooted out and cast into a dustbin. Following the deaths of Exploding Oven, Rusty Fridge and Carbon Monoxide Production Specialist Fireplace, later this week I bid farewell to Gas Hob That Doesn't Spark On The Left Hand Side And Sometimes Leaks A Bit Of Gas - or as I call him, Steven.

The passing of the last of the "enemies within" will be marked by a five-gun salute outside Chadderton Town Hall. Anyone who wants to come down and twist a sticky dial, or wave a match around a suspicious-smelling burner one last time, is more than welcome.

I also intend to make flapjacks from the 17 years of crumbs firmly wedged between the lip of the hob and the work surface. These are strictly for display and not to be eaten.