Barking

This week’s Westmorland Gazette features two splendid candidate stories for the front page cartoon.

The first story is a plan to reduce costs by selling off police stations in some of the local towns and villages. This will, of course, leave the local bobbies with nowhere to complete their usual reams of paperwork. So we’re going to have mobile police stations.

Eschewing the obvious Tardis joke, I pitched a couple of ideas for this.

The second story also involves vital resources being flogged off for short-term gain. The government is proposing to sell off the Forestry Commission forests and hand them to the private sector. Genius. That should ensure no one gets access to them for recreation. And it will almost certainly reverse the Forestry Commission’s enlightened policy of planting broadleaf trees in amongst the conifers.

Once again, I pitched two ideas to the editor for this story.

You can see all four ideas sketched out below, as the editor saw them. Now, if you were in his position of power and authority, tasked with the responsibility of choosing a cartoon to amuse the inhabitants of Lakeland tomorrow morning … which would you have chosen?

Find out which the editor chose by buying the Westmorland Gazette or hiking over to my website tomorrow morning, where I’ll put up the final cartoon. I may even colour it in for you.