Have you been out today?

Well it was a weekend packed full of incident and excitement. At least it was relative to most of my days which are spent sat on my arse right here.

Not one but two, count them, two trips to the allotment which I have been neglecting terribly for far too long. Pretty much everything that isn't weed is dead now (and, which is worse, my resident frog seems to have deserted the place) but it did manage to yield up the marrowgette and a decent-sized pumpkin before it came to this sorry state. If we factor in the cost of tools, rent and other bits and pieces they probably came in at a bargain 30 quid a piece (more if you want to include labour, obviously). Still, I have a half-decent plan of action now to get the plot into some kind of manageable state over the next couple of months. This is about the time of year that it's best to start working on a new plot so the half-hearted efforts I made from getting mine in Aprilish were always a bit handicapped. Now though I have no excuse not to start a) properly getting it into shape and b) keeping it that way. And to make (b) somewhat easier (a) will mainly comprise covering up about two thirds of the ground with black plastic (to exclude light and thus kill off perennial weeds) and leaving it well alone for about 18 months. Before I cover it up though I'm first hacking down the weeds and grasses that have run rampant during the dark days of neglect and then roughly digging over the soil. This turns out to be somewhat akin to hard work which is, frankly, not the usual stuff of a cartoonist's day and thus comes as something of a shock to the system.

In other news, I offloaded an unwanted snooker cue and a temperamental VCR via my local Freecycle scheme (if you don't know what that is then google it, find your local one and join now - it's marvellous) and it was a delight to see my good friend Mark Stevenson, star of stage, screen and rock video, on Saturday evening during one of his rare return visits to Cambridge. Mark and I met when we worked together as, more or less, bouncers at The Junction sometime back around 1990. We are not now, nor were we then, cut out to be bouncers but back then the management seemed to operate a policy of employing scrawny youths weedy enough that it would be too embarrassing for anyone to pick a fight with. Anyway, we drank some beers, watched Mark's lovely girlfriend, Vic, gamely performing in a limb-gnawingly awful play that I shall choose not to name, and then drank some more beers (come to think of it I also drank some beer during the play so as to numb the pain). A tip top evening for all that.