My homemade card for Simon is my tribute to Gary Larson’s cartoon ‘The Holsteins visit the Grand Canyon’. Larson later wished he’d done a whole series and sent the family off to different locations, ‘such as Three Mile Island’.
I was tempted to replicate his gag of one of the Holstein calves ‘doing the old hoof-behind-the-head trick to its sibling’ but Larson concluded that this was just too subtle in the original and that most people (myself included) read it as one of the calves wearing a ribbon. Even knowing the artist’s intention, I still see it as one of the calves wearing a bow!
It’s 5 or 6 years since we last got to walk around Kew Gardens with our nephew Simon, so I hope we can join him again there before too long.
The Day of the Triffids
Triffids and I go back a long way. In Mr (Bill) Hughes’ English Literature class at Ossett Grammar school in the summer term of 1965, we read John Wyndham’s novel. Unusually I coloured it in watercolour paint rather than my usual pencil crayons. I remember that these watercolours were in a box in round pans, an inch or in diameter. They’re quite opaque, so perhaps they were a solid version of gouache.
I used a blue Biro, a refillable one that was shaped like a curvaceous fountain pen, even though that worked out more expensive than the ubiquitous Bic.
There’s bit of product placement in this Piccadilly Circus scene: the H.J.N.C. News was our club newsletter (the Horbury Junior Naturalists’ Club ran an ambitious programme of exhibitions, performances and movie-making. Not sure how I ever found time for school work).
There is a love interest but John Wyndham soon moves on and we get on with the action. A petulant triffid would be a great literary device for livening up a dreary novel.
It has to be said that staffing the supermarket with triffids wasn’t a great success. I love the little details I’ve added such as the obligatory sheet steel sculpture in the shopping mall and my package design for ‘Vinkar’ wines.
‘So we moved to the Isle of White and got read of the Triffids by flame gun’.
As captions go, that’s one of the best.