The Great Days…

 

Let It Snow Cartoon Exhibition

 

My cartoon on display at The Duke of Greenwich Pub in their latest exhibition of fabulous cartoons until the end of January 2025.

Like TV “Christmas Specials” , I drew and submitted this in the early Autumn , and although the gag still makes sense to UK audiences , where the cold weather and loss of pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance are still topical , I reworked the caption for a possibly wider Christmas audience as part of my Advent Calendar series of cartoons on Social Media. 

Accordingly , I reprint it here , and offer Season’s Greetings to my readers, wherever you may be.

May 2025 bring Health and Prosperity

Merry Christmas One and All

 

Wild Man

Wild Man

 

I see them regularly, but the lingering light of summer evenings draws the eye and their almost silent passing still leaves a Mexican Wave of branches across the road.

 

They are taxis, and they are both state of the art and deplorable. Calling them city cabs might add a certain raciness for the occupants, but for me they will always be home too soon.

 

I am usually here until the small hours. Never earlier than ten but always until after the witching hour. Drinking beer I can’t afford in the pub and listening to my vast collection of music CDs on a battered player with massive cans.

 

The headphones serve two purposes. They have reinvigorated my love of stereo and they prevent passers by asking what I am up to. 

 

What I am up to is preserving the night. 

 

It started with the lockdowns. In the unlamented early days, it was more of a training regime. I thought it would be a short lived folly so I would leave the house around ten pm and walk up to my local and touch the wall , then walk back again and drink a couple of cans of lager on my front door steps.

 

As these are behind a gate they both satisfied my need to be out of the house , but kept me on the right side of whatever that week’s law turned out to be.

 

Week followed,dreary, week,but I managed to maintain my motivation and by the summer , a kind of normal returned , and so did I.

 

I reluctantly accepted the socially distanced tables and the perspex screens , but the ten p.m. curfew was a step too far. 

 

Against my better nature, and  at my wife’s suggestion, I tried going out at eight … 

 

Inside the pub , once I had signed in and caught the eye of a barmaid to bring a pint to my table , the atmosphere was pretty much the same.

 

Somehow , though , returning home before News At Ten had finished , while gentler souls were taking their dogs out for constitutionals seemed completely alien to me.

 

Luckily , I only had to do it once. For reasons I can’t quite remember , the North agreed to enter the second Lockdown in October 2020 and pubs were closed to all for a full six months before steadily returning with a lacklustre drizzle of further restrictions…

 

For a longtime, enthusiastic consumer of the night economy, the blow was almost physical. 

My earlier training regime became my focus.

 

I set out to replicate , as closely as possible , the things which were most important to me about a night out. This was not just about beer. It was about music and ,very importantly, about time.

 

I didn’t realise at that moment , but each of these weighed more heavily on me than the actual closure of the pubs.

 

The element you might think was missing from my mix above was idle chatter…but I soon found that the mixture of beer and music led to all sorts of idle thoughts in my mind , particularly when I introduced the Saturday Disco Light…

 

The decade prior to the pandemic, had seen a huge erosion in the quality of the pub experience for me. 

 

In the wake of Tony Blair’s shake up of the Licensing Laws in 2005 , my local could serve until midnight most of the week and 2am on Friday and Saturday. Other pubs in the area had similar opening times and a lot of people enjoyed some very late nights.

 

It started to go pear shaped around 2010. Landlords came and went , and each new broom curtailed the hours a little more. Disco’s finished earlier and Jukebox music began to be turned down after eleven o’clock.

 

By late 2020 , my doorstep disco running from 10pm to 1am was starting to look like the raciest gig in town… For a few silent lockdown months , I think it really was.

 

But I’m still here. 

Perhaps now, those quiet taxis look at me in passing and think I’m weird.

To me though ,changing CDs and opening another Bud around midnight is not weird.

 

It’s wild, man.

My Cartoon Award

 

Pleased to say I entered a Cartoon Competition , and came in last…

There was no prize for the winner as it was just for fun , but anyone who got no votes was awarded a virtual Crackerjack pencil.

People of a certain age , and older may remember Fridays at five to five for the compendium of comedy, music and games that was BBC tv’s “ Crackerjack” which ran from the late 1950s to sometime in the Seventies ( I think) with hosts including Eamonn Andrews , Leslie Crowther and Ed “Stewpot” Stewart.

I think Stu “Crush a Grape” Francis was part of the ensemble in the later years…

Anyhow , along with all sorts of exciting prizes kids could win like tennis rackets , train sets , cabbages etc everyone got  a Crackerjack Pencil.

Alongside Blue Peter Badges , these seemed to be the most desirable trophies of my formative years.

Unfortunately , I was far too lazy to win either in the natural way , so it pleases me more than I can say to be the recipient of this overdue , but virtual award.

There are so many people I ought to thank , but the kettle is boiling…

Summer Lovin’ Cartoon Exhibition London June 2024

Just some of the brilliant cartoons on display at The Duke of Greenwich from June 6th.

This is a brand new collection following on from the very well received exhibition in the new year.

I’m very honoured to be sharing space with some of the best known names in the business.

Close up of my two entries can be seen below , but do take the time to see the rest if possible , and perhaps enjoy a meal and a drink in very convivial surroundings…

 

It’s Not The Horse’s Mouth

 When I filled in the Careers teacher’s card , I specifically said NO to two things … factories and farm work. The rest of it was open ended. Don’t Really Know… But Life had other ideas…

 

Loraine and me hadn't been together long. I knew she had history . 

 

Years spent on a remote farmstead on top of the Pennines as a child. Herding cattle at four years of age in tiny wellies. Sheep in the kitchen , sort of stuff … but that was long ago.

 

Her dad kept ducks and geese on an allotment , and a goat , and an old yellow Morris,but Loraine had left the countryside for a flat in nearby Doncaster and was training to be a Registered General Nurse .

 

Her urban lifestyle of late night movies and nightclubbing was like a magnet to me , although the only midnight movie we went to together , I managed to sleep through…It's the concept that counts though…isn’t it ?

 

Anyway , we had several blissful months like this , without a whiff of country air ... 

 

It was the early eighties . All over the place people were suddenly buying houses instead of renting. A new age of owner occupation had begun. Loraine bought a house.

 

Along with the house came the usual set up costs. Decoration, furnishing and in this case central heating. It was the latter that Life had been hiding behind.

 

Loraine had to travel to Wakefield to settle a bill connected with the central heating.  

When she returned in the evening she said to me , matter of factly “ I’ve got you a present ... a horse” … Life chuckled ethereally and drew a fat line through my list of life preferences.

 

Did I mention , by the way , that tucked away with the ducks and the geese and the old yellow Morris there was another horse ? 

 

With her dad’s help , Loraine had also acquired a young foal which she called Beauty.

I had so far had very little (i.e. nothing) , to do with horses or livestock of any variety , and I knew even less about old yellow Morris vehicles.

 

Suddenly we were a two horse family. 

 

My new horse , a strawberry roan called Rowdy , was already considered elderly at 22 years of age.Loraine had seen a card in a Wakefield shop window searching for a new home for him. New home or no home . There was no alternative.

 

Loraine rescued Rowdy,as we have since  rescued many other animals. 

I think even she thought he would be an old plodder, a bit like me . The truth was quite different. 

 

Rowdy lived to the ripe old age of 37. His ability to escape from secure stables and fields made him a local legend. Beauty lived another ten years after that.

 

Within a year my urban dream was sandwiched between slices of hay and straw , pockets full of twine and wellington boots became my must have accessories …

 

I was also working in a factory

This version first appeared in The Daily Mirror in January 2023

The Thief of Bad Gags

 

About ten years ago , I contributed a few cartoons to a book which was to be titled “Ell Oh Ell. You Have To Laugh…It Says So”

The editor liked them so much that I was invited to illustrate the entire book , which was a compilation of humorous stories , poems and cartoons.

I tried to add a humorous picture to every other piece , so as not to overload the text with imagery.

I believe that writing should allow readers to use their imaginations , but an odd illustration can effectively break up solid walls of text , which can be tiring to read.

There was one story that I was particularly taken with. Written by a gentleman called Eddie Summers , it introduced us to the haphazard adventures of a couple of hopeless detectives named Bennett and Perry.

Set in a familiar cop show London , they were constantly being sent off to look for clues and meet people in long vanished parts of the old East End. This was the root of Eddie’s message , one which will resonate with many more people in the 2020’s…London ain’t what it was , and every year more remnants of the old communities and traditions fall foul of the developers. 

Bennett and Perry could never lay their hands on the culprits , but they leapt off the page for me , reminding me of Jasper Carrott and Robert Powell , mixed up with Groucho Marx’ quick fire corny gags.

I liked them so much that I contacted Eddie directly and offered to illustrate any future Bennett and Perry stories he produced.

He posted these on a blog for a little while and I contributed a new cartoon which he added to the story.

Great fun, but one day the blog disappeared and we lost contact. Most of the drawings went down with the blog , but I came across two the other day and thought I would commemorate the collaboration.

Both pictures hint at the sometimes surreal quality of the stories , derived from Eddie’s love of American writers S.J.Perelman and Stephen Leacock.

The jokes were frequent and leaned deliberately towards the groan , to the extent that I encouraged Eddie to collect the stories and my illustrations together in a slim volume. He liked the idea of that , but we never got there. I never got to tell him that my proposed title of the collection would be “ The Thief Of BadGags”…I think he would have liked that too…

                                                          “ Leacock Hurls A Question…”

That’s Me In The Corner

 

The picture above is The Johnson Bar at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub overlooking Fleet Street. 

As if by magic , my Avatar is sitting in the corner on April 6th 2024 , raising a glass of Samuel Smith’s Bitter on the 60th Anniversary of The Cartoonist’s Club of Great Britain.

The Club was born at The Feathers on Fleet Street on April 1st 1960. Sadly, The Feathers no longer exists and but plans were afoot to hold the 60th Bash at The Punch Tavern in April 2020 .

Unfortunately fate, in the form of the Covid Pandemic , bowled everyone a massive googly and events everywhere were cancelled summarily. 

Subsequent attempts to reconvene were scuppered by strikes.

A change of management at The Punch Tavern resulted in changes to the terms and conditions of the club’s booking which were unacceptable so it was decided to move the event to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese , which has a long and venerable history, with links to the newspaper industry generally , and cartooning specifically.

So from 4pm onwards on 6th April 2024 The Cartoonist’s Club of Great Britain will be celebrating its 60th Birthday Bash…four years late.

I can’t be there in person , but my avatar will have a whale of a time .

If you squint in the half light of the Johnson Bar, as the afternoon eases into evening , you might just catch sight of me .That’s me in the corner…

The Starbeck Orion Magazine

Rare opportunity to see me reading some poems wot I wrote , in Paul Brooke’s new online compendium

“The Starbeck Orion” a sumptuous collection of words and art from around the world…  

https://the880.substack.com/p/the-starbeck-orion-1-7a0?r=33jsyn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

My Silent Disco

 

Mozza , Wagga and Baz love it. They came late to the party but their enthusiasm is immense.

Saturday night has always been Disco Nite in my view. 

From the early days when a bloke (always a bloke) sat behind a box which glowed it’s way through a sequence of colours , to my mate Paul’s wall of lights and dry ice , which made dancers into silhouettes in a multi-coloured fog, I have always felt that if the weekend started with Ready Steady Go , it didn’t really get anywhere until the following evening.

Wozza, Bazza and  Mog have come to it from different places. Mog is some sort of physicist and knows everything about Genesis. He has a lot of albums by Yes and Emerson,Lake and Palmer. 

Bazza cut his teeth on Northern Soul but also likes The Jam and Two-Tone Ska. 

Wozza thinks music was invented in 1990.

I guess we could have some lively debates , but we don’t . Our cans are parallel universes. We cut a groove to different tunes but the emotion is powerful and shared.

I am eclectic. I irrigate a course winding from the sixties to yesterday with a selection of craft beers.

Bozza , Mazza and Wiz share a love of the late hour and we can often be found after midnight swaying silently around my disco light. Only on Saturdays , though.

Show Don’t Tell

Show Don’t Tell

The curvy line was in the sand,

etched with a stick in his left hand

That’s a snake is what he said.

The story starts here,at the head.

Along the middle words abound ,

and this is where the clues are found.

Just down here , around that bend

the tail’s in sight and that’s the end.

Tony Noon

 

Not In The New Yorker This Week

Leather and Light

I

Worn souls. Waiting to display

humour and economy in line. 

A camaraderie of shared intent

ripples along this high corridor, 

but at the desk it is a knockout 

punch which wins column inches.

Rejection weighs heavy. It makes

the ride down quicker but they will

keep coming back in new shoes.

II

Cyberspace has no emotion

and no smell. No imprint left 

by inky fingers.Quick and certain 

as flashlights finding brick walls,

or laser rings around the moon,

this receipt for dreams offers

no sure acceptance but suggests

the door is open to virtual success.

Tony Noon

I don’t think The New Yorker is going to publish this poem , which is a tribute to the intrepid Contributors to the world famous magazine. For many years , the only way you could hope to get a cartoon published was to turn up on a particular day and queue with all the other hopefuls to get an instant yes or no on your latest creations. I always loved the idea of this. Although they were competing , literally hand to hand , for scarce space in the mag , the ritual and the queue itself created a shared experience which in turn created lifelong friendships in a profession better known for the isolation of many individual artists.

Leather refers to the worn shoe leather caused by schlepping across the city to join the queue for weeks and years…

Light refers to the internet with its infinite corridors where we can wait without chatting.

The cartoon is pure fiction. Enjoy…

A JOURNEY INTO COLOUR

The earliest things we notice are movement , colour and sound. My very early years were the dull second half of the nineteen fifties…Way too young to appreciate the emergence of rock & roll , but hooked way too early by the box in the corner. I can remember most of Talking Pictures Channel’s extensive archive , first time round. Then , as now , they presented a window on a black and white world , which was reinforced by piles of albums filled with grainy photographs of family and friends.

For a long time , this was how I remembered my past. Monochrome.

I have , from time to time , found myself defending the integrity of black and white imagery , as if the drab tones actually added another dimension to what some may call a bygone era. 

Alongside this 425 line perspective there was another journey.

My escape from drabness was via the comics I loved to read .

Beano , Dandy and Topper , of course , followed by Sparky , TV Comic and later TV21.

The DC Thompson titles always mixed full colour , spot colour , and black and white. TV Comic and , particularly , TV21 offered glossy full colour and dramatic artwork.

Even at a very young age , I was particularly taken with spot colour. 

In hindsight , I know that this was a by product of the printing processes at the time , and was utilised as a cost saving measure , rather as an aesthetic quality in its own right.

I just found it particularly pleasing , and even today I take pleasure in creating an essentially black and white cartoon with elements of colour added.

This is not spot colour in the truest sense , but it works for me.

Having said that , I always had a secret desire to be able to produce full colour cartoon panels like I had seen in American comic books. I was particularly fond of Casper The Friendly Ghost , and his pal Spooky , who had his own book.

As a kid , this really was dream stuff. I was already pretty good at cartoonish drawing , particularly characters like Superman , but I would only draw and colour in pencils .

It would be ten or more years before I felt happy with ink drawings . Some of this , in all honesty , related to technological developments with pen and ink itself. 

Many cartoonists swear by dip pens even now , but for a severe left hander , who had to learn to write with a very crude dip pen , when every desk had it’s own inkwell , even writing my name was , for a long time , a smudgy mess and my fingers were forever blue.

I eventually mastered the fountain pen and , more happily , the cartridge pen , but as I used these from Mathematics to English Language , I couldn’t make the giant leap to drawing with them … particularly as the colour of choice for writing back then was blue.

Cartoons , I knew from hours of reading Punch in dentists’ waiting rooms, had to be drawn in black.

I had a fleeting phase of scribbling in ball point pen but was always disappointed with the hit and miss line it produced and the annoying habit such pens have of depositing an unexpected extra dollop of ink where you didn’t want it…which smudged horribly if you tried to blot it.

Felt tipped pens began to offer me the opportunity to experiment with colour , but were no good for me as drawing implements as I found the ink bled too readily into the paper I used . 

Trial and error led me into the use of technical pens for drawing and for a long time , when I wanted to use colour , I used pencils. 

I was happy with this until I learned how to use a scanner in conjunction with my computer… Cartoons which looked full of colour on paper , looked washed out on screen. I realised that if I wanted to enter the digital age in any meaningful way , I would have to strengthen my colouring before I scanned.

Back then , to marker pens. These had moved on a bit since I last used them. They now offered me not only a more subtle range than the twelve pack of bright colours I had used before, but they had fine brush tips which helped me to keep the colour where I wanted it.

A combination of these and an old version of Photoshop helped me to up my game , particularly with regard to blocks of solid colour.

The real game changer came last summer. 

After a number of false starts with illustration software , Loraine bought me an iPad 9 , and I was able to install Procreate . 

With the addition of an Apple Pencil , I have been on a steep learning curve. 

Learning to produce artwork which looks like my traditional pen work has took a bit of time , but I’m getting there.

I have to say that I have particularly enjoyed playing with colour.

When I showed Loraine , her first comment was how vibrant the colours are.

Importantly , I thought , she saw the colours before she saw the gag.

My usual way of working starts with the gag , then I decide how to

represent the gag in a line drawing. It’s usually at this stage that I decide whether it will be full colour , black and white , or something in between.

For the first time , I have been able to experiment with the notion of colour and work backwards. I hope it works.

In one sense , I have realised a dream , but whether that will change the way I work in future I don’t know.  

Whatever happens , I have enjoyed the journey immensely.