Proper Charlies

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries

Like many people I've spent the last week utterly horrified by events in Paris. There's something about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, even when set against the atrocity exhibition that is the modern world, that was particularly ugly and hateful. The freedom to hold contrary opinions, to pick holes in the ideologies of pompous demagogues and to generally take the piss is an important one. There's not really a hell of a lot I can do in the face of the men with guns, but, hey, at least I can think what I want, and it's this that the gunmen were attacking last week. Unsurprisingly in the aftermath we've had the usual bell ends sounding off about how the best way to combat this sort of horror is to undermine our own rights, ramp up tensions with those of our countrymen who happen to be Muslim and generally do everything that the people who carried out the crimes want us to do in order to further their cause. Thankfully the vast majority of people seem uninterested in drinking that particular kool aid and have decided that the appropriate response is to celebrate our freedom of speech and to remember that our enemies may be murderers and war criminals, but they are also knob-heads who must be pointed and laughed at.

As well as being free to make points that may offend we are also free to make points that are incoherent and poorly presented, hence the above cartoon. I'm not sure if it works. It kinda hinges on your familiarity with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the figures are a bit on the wee side to be recognisable. While the above is a bit crap cartoonists from around the world have produced some brilliant work in response to the attack on, what is after all, their profession. (unless your Paul Thomas at the Daily Express, in which case the most pressing story in the world last week was energy bills. Ho-hum).

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Away from the world of current events I went to the Life museum in Newcastle the other day. I can imagine it's a fantastic place to go if your ten. unfortunately I'm a full grown man and was thus underwhelmed. I blame my sister, whose idea it was. Unfortunately she's having a bad time of it at the minute so I can't really shout at her and must content myself with shitty looks and slow shakes of the head. I'm also now eleven days alcohol free. I've lost weight, am breathing better and can now usually remember how I got to bed. You can still sponsor me, of course, because God knows that self improvement is no longer a good enough reason to do anything, but if you don't, please pay it forward in some way, such as buying a big issue or petting a particularly glum looking dog.

I also finished another page of Rag and Bone, so go me.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton