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.
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
Love and Fishes
Dave Denton
No comments:
Post a Comment