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…”