Bye George

After a week of blood and tears I've finally started to make some progress with the  website, It's still very much a work in progress, but at least the damn thing now loads, which is something. As before you can have a wee gander at www.talesoftheboxingnun.com. The ten thousandth unique visitor wins a potato that looks like Gary Oldman.  I would have like to have created something special for it, but instead I farted out the below. It's a rejigged version of a strip I drew many, many years ago called Myxamotosis (so named because random non sequiturs are the same thing as wit, right? Right?!). It was - and I hope I don't sound too conceited here - deeply, deeply shit, but out of the fifty or so strips I managed to create before friends and well wishers intervened there's perhaps two or three that I'm fond of - or, at least, don't find offensively bad.

As all true Ingerlish patriots know it was St George's day Thursday gone. It something of a meme that this our national day is something that we, as a nation, are actively discouraged from celebrating. As with the similar urban myth about how Christmas has totally been renamed winterval so as not to offend the Zoroastrians, this can be readily disproved by the highly scientific method of wandering around any medium to large English settlement with your eyes open and noting the surfeit of red and white flags outside and on top of  every pub, church and government building.

What is true, or at least truer, is the general lack of enthusiasm expressed by the general populace to for a possibly fictional Lebanese guy who never came here and probably never even fought a dragon. But apathy is not the same thing as censorship and, really, what could be more English than a half hearted shrug and mumbling "s'alrite, I guess,' when asked to comment on our national heritage. We all carry our own version of England around with us; some of us carry it in the chambers and vestibules of our heart, some of us in a metaphorical Tesco's carrier bag, pulled from a pile of of other metaphorical carrier bags that we keep stuffed under the sink (also metaphorical). For John Major -via George Orwell - England is long shadows on cricket grounds and old maids cycling to communion through morning mist, for me it's more ill advised daytime drinking, going to Greggs the bakers when you can't be arsed to cook and using utterly unsexy words like 'knockers' and 'bonking' to describe otherwise sexy things. The point being that it is private and peculiar  to each English man and woman, which to my mind is far preferable  to waving plastic flags and getting wobbly lipped over Elgar (private and peculiar is also as good a summation of the national character as I can be bothered to come up with at the present time).

Far better, if we must celebrate something around this time of year, to make a song and a dance about it being Shakespeare's birthday; he invented, like, a million words, bequeathed his wife his second best bed and may have really been two tiny Catholics dressed as a single big Protestant in a trench-coat. Also Language can be a more positive force than nationalism, and when it comes to language the English are the best word guy people around. Way better than the French.

In other news I'll be running in the Sunderland City 10k next week, because I am good like that. Look out for me, I'll be the purple faced one with the tears rolling softly down his face As is the custom with these things you can sponsor me, with a donations going to Shelter.


Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Public Service Announcement

Apologies about the lack of an update. I'm currently on trying to set up a proper, grown up website for the various bits and bobs of creative detritus that I've uploaded here as, if I'm honest, Blogger is not a particularly good platform for displaying images. Unfortunately, as the north east of England's techno-weenie in chief this is taking rather longer than I anticipated, by which I mean I've spent the last two hours trying and failing to get an image to display on an otherwise empty screen. Friends and well-wishers assure me that technology has now progressed to a point where tasks such as setting up a website are basically idiot proof. This leads me to the somewhat discomfitting conclusion that I exist on a level somewhere below idiot and should not be let out of the house without adult supervision.

Intellectually I know that throwing my computer out of the window and sobbing like a child will do nothing to further my goals, but on a gut level this feels very right. I shall keep you updated whether head or heart wins; in the case of the former by means of this blog, if the latter, by means of shouting git loud off somewhere high.

As and when I get the fucker working you can get your peruse on at www.talesoftheboxingnun.com (link not currently working because of course it fucking doesn't you worthless piece of shit I swear if you were a man I would straight up kick you in the bastard throat scrattumfrattum......). In the interim here's a picture of a boxing nun, because that is the thing what the thing is named after

Pictured above: Art

In other news, the precious moments I've been away from my computer screen have been spent wheezing my way around the Tyne and Wear metropolitan area as I'm currently in training for the Sunderland City 10K. As is customary with these things you can sponsor me by clicking the following link, all donations will be going towards the UK charity Shelter

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Electioneering

The bi-decennial festival of equivocation, obfuscation and all round bullshit that is the British election is upon us, heralded this year by a series of television debates. The first was between the Prime Ministers and the leader of the opposition. Except it wasn't, as the PM outright refused to partake in anything resembling a one on one debate and what we got instead was two back to back interviews with Jeremy Paxman, a walking advert for the dangers of believing your own hype, and an audience Q and A featuring such hard hitting questions as "Who is your favourite Power Ranger, and you can't say the green one,' and  'Potatoes: roasted or mashed. Discuss.' The whole thing, therefore, could be written off as a colossal waste of time if it wasn't for the incumbent government's frankly bizarre strategy of depicting their opponent as a man so incapable he couldn't relieve himself in the wilderness without pissing on an electric fence. While the meme of Mr Miliband as an awkward dork didn't exactly spring from nowhere - please see literally any interview the guy's ever done -  the Ed as Mr Bean line of attack has been so overplayed that we've now reached a point where 'man answers question reasonably coherently' suddenly becomes a political turnaround on par with Marc Anthony's 'honourable man' speech in Julius Caesar.

Then, of course, we had the multi party debates or - as they were somewhat inevitably referred to - the massed debates, featuring every political leader in the land who A) have  MP's sitting in the House of Commons and B) aren't Northern Irish, because fuck those guys (apparently). 

For those who are A) unfamiliar with British political party leaders B) don't care C) are unable to recognise them from my shitty drawings - l-r we have David Cameron (Conservative), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nichola Sturgeon (Scottish Nationalist), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Natalie Bennett (The Green Party)

Two observations about the gratuitous mass debating have already been discussed by far cleverer people than me at great length: that 1) when the full range of mainstream political opinion is given a platform it quickly becomes apparent that the UK is a lot more left wing than a perusal of The Sun would have you believe, and that 2) it's generally nice to see more XX chromosomes on the podium. For me though, the takeaway is - again -  how significantly our expectations have been lowered with regards to public discourse in this country. That UKIP's Mr Farage, a man who couldn't be more of a spiv if he grew a pencil moustache and began operating a coconut shy, and the physical embodiment of the sort of received wisdom that ascertains that Jews can hear gold and that Asian ladies have sideways fannies - is welcomed by the media as some sort of rebel voice, while Nichola Sturgeon, the leader of a reasonably progressive party with a solid record of competent governance, is regarded as a dangerous unknown quantity, depresses me more than I can articulate at present.

The other point I would make is that British politics has become so fractured that the first past the post system we currently implement is fundamentally broken. But that is rant for another time.

With regards to the above scribblings, I feel I should apologise to any supporters of Ms Bennett, who generally speaking, I have some time for. At the risk of explaining the joke, her line is a reference to a recent car crash interview in which she lapsed into an embarrassed silence when asked to cost some of her policies and later blamed this on a case of the sniffles.  

I also apologise for the reduction of complex political positions to infantile soundbites (although what's good for the goose...). I am to political satire what farting in the bath is to perfumery

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton