The Big Guns

The South Lakes is, apparently, a key marginal in the fight for the next General Election. It's a tense battle between the Conservatives and LibDems and one the Tories need to win to be sure of a majority in the Commons.

This means we'll be seeing some of the Westminster heavy hitters campaigning in the area.

The story was front page news on last week's Westmorland Gazette, so I produced a series of ideas for the cartoon. You can see these below, along with the one that made it. Note the changes to the final cartoon - partly for legal reasons but mostly because it made the joke stronger.

Monkey Business

One of this week’s Westmorland Gazette stories concerns a monkey. It had escaped from Dalton Zoo and after five days of heady freedom, was recaptured in a local church.

Here are the sketches which led up to the front page cartoon. Oddly enough, one or two were deemed unsuitable for a family newspaper. You can see which one got in by buying tomorrow’s paper, or, for the geographically disenfranchised, visiting my website.

It Begins

I had a letter from George Osborne last week. You know, the shiny-faced Chancellor of the Exchequer wannabe. This was shortly followed by a letter from William Hague. He is apparently no longer a failed Prime Minister but is now Shadow Foreign Secretary, responsible for acting a bit cross when the real one does something he doesn't like.

As jet-setting international cartoonist, I receive letters from the great and influential all the time. After last year’s Copenhagen Climate Conference, in response to posting a message on his website, I got a friendly email from the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. "My fellow Californian," it began, which I took to be a term of endearment. It was a really thoughtful touch and made me want to watch The Terminator all over again.

George Osborne's letter was less exciting and, to be frank, a bit vague (which is entirely appropriate as most of us are a bit vague about him). There was some stuff about the economy and balance of payments deficit, none of which I bothered to read. He finished by asking which person I would rather see as Prime Minister - Gordon Brown or Big Dave Cameron?

He’d written Nick Clegg out of the race before it had even begun.

A dramatic surge causing the LibDems to sweep to government is bordering on the unlikely but it would have been kinder to at least pretend there was a possibility. We may get a hung parliament, in which case they’ll have to take turns like on Have I Got News For You (as long as Brian Blessed isn’t one of them).

I suspect Shiny George had baser motives. He was hoping I’d panic and forget about my local LibDem MP, Tim Thing, and thereby vote for the Tory candidate, Gareth McGareth. Yes, the election has come to South Lakeland. Oh hurrah.

A golden host of LibDem signs has already sprung up throughout the area: “Tim, the local choice”, “Tim - winning here” “Hurrah for Tim!” and “God sacrificed his only Tim for Mankind.” (I may have got that one a bit muddled over Easter).

Tory signs are less obvious. I have seen one for Gareth McGareth but it was alongside a bigger one for Beatlemania and I couldn’t tell if the two were connected. 


We could all end up voting for Ringo instead.

I intend to enjoy this election. How about you?

Peddling Filth

Two excellent stories vie for the cartoonist’s attention in this week’s Westmorland Gazette. 

The first was about road works in Kirkland, Kendal. After weeks of disruption, attractive stone setts have been laid along the main street … only to be dug up again in order to instal faux Victorian street lights. Brilliant. (And that’s not the lights.)

The second was about a series of rude pamphlets found at Townend, the National Trust cottage in Troutbeck Valley. These saucy stories were called Chapbooks and once sold door to door. They’re extremely rare (most have dissolved over the years through being dribbled over) and have gone on display just in time for Easter.

Here are my four cartoon sketches which competed for the front page. Find out which one got in by buying the paper or visiting my website tomorrow.

Cats, Clients & Communication

This is another in the series of guest blogs which have been organised by Emily Cagle and Adam Vincenzi. Today’s post is written by Sue Windley, Marketing Director of the Pragmatic Performance Group, a business acceleration consultancy based in south-west England that works with small and medium sized businesses to help them increase their rate of growth profitably and sustainably. You can also visit Sue's blog Dangerous Marketing or follow her on Twitter as @DangerousMkting.

My guest post - about dogs in the office (what a surprise) - is over on Sue's blog.

I am a marketer and have been for many years.  I specialise in getting businesses to communicate properly with their target markets.  I am also newbie cat-owner. It's been a while since I was a beginner at something - and it's scary!

Last year I adopted 2 strays who had been rescued and brought back to health by the Cats Protection League who'd named them Matisse (self-assured and chilled out) and Mefistofelees (who acts like a little devil). Their names certainly seemed to match the cats' characters so I kept them. 

But after 6 months, the joys of coping with a devilish cat started to wear a bit thin. Mefistofelees likes attention - lots of it. If you ignore him, the volume goes up. If you still ignore him, the carpet gets wet (leave that to your imagination). But hey - I use psychology for my business and some of my clients are like herding cats, so same principles should apply to training my own cat. So I treated my cat like a naughty teenager and reacted accordingly.

But it didn't work - he just got louder and the carpet got wet more often 

Luckily I have a friend who is an animal trainer and behaviourist, so I asked her what I was doing wrong. She asked me an interesting question: Describe what the cat actually does, rather than what I expected which was to describe his behaviour. She knew if I was describing behaviour, I would naturally put my own perspective on it. But simply describing what I saw enabled her to understand what my cat was trying to communicate.

He wasn't being naughty at all. In fact, how can cats be naughty when that is a human description? He was being a nervous cat - unsure of his territory because of the other cat, so he sought reassurance from me, his surrogate mother. Only I kept ignoring him. The answer was simple - I changed my behaviour to respond to what he was actually communicating now that I had been given a lesson in cat talk. I now have a confident cat who is (nearly) as relaxed as his house mate. 

My misinterpretation of the context of my cat's attempt to communicate with me resulted in the exact opposite result I was seeking (more of the negative behaviour that I was trying to stop). Only when I took a step back and understood the context, was I able to understand correctly. How often do we misinterpret what other people are trying to say to us because we interpret the context based on our view of the world, rather than theirs?


It's a vital lesson to learn - see things from another person's perspective and suddenly communicating gets easier. Hopefully you too will find it a much more positive experience!

Singin' in the Shed

This is another Guest Blog as part of the #bemyguest campaign by Emily Cagle and Adam Vincenzini. Writers are renowned for working in sheds (think of Roald Dahl and Philip Pullman). But how about composers? Shedworker and freelance journalist Alex Johnson investigates.

(You can catch my contribution to his blog - describing my ideal shed - over on Shedworking.)

Lamb and mint sauce. Tom and Jerry. Sheds and composers. Although for many people the third pairing is a less well known coupling, it's nonetheless one with a considerable and venerable history.

One of the great attractions of shedworking for composers in particular is the peace and quiet it provides. Joseph Haydn wrote several of his great creations in his composing hut on Bürgerspitalgasse, Eisenstadt, which is surrounded by his well-kept (and now recreated) herb garden.  In 1891 Edvard Grieg had built and then worked in a lakeside hut at Troldhaugen, Norway, following a spate of visitors and noise from the kitchen in his house, although he then found that the lake provided other, albeit more delightful, distractions such as boats going past. Whenever he left the hut, he left a message for intruders: If anyone should break in here, please leave the musical scores, since they have no value to anyone except Edvard Grieg. 

Gustav Mahler had three composing huts, as architect Keith Clarke describes in his groundbreaking study, Mahler's Heavenly Retreats. Mahler had a particular aversion to noise  including birdsong, the barking of his architect's dog, and the performances of nearby military bands   but also demanded that the servant who brought him his breakfast in one of his huts left via a route that meant Mahler would not see her so his train of thought would be undisturbed. Mahler's need for a place away from people and noise, for peace and quiet in which to compose his music, drove him to work away from his family, says Clarke. He arranged for the construction of workspaces, buildings built separately from his living quarters and constructed, one after another, in three different locations. They were created for him alone and visitors were not generally welcome. Mahler had composing huts at Steinbach, not far from Salzburg, where he wrote part of his second and all of his third symphony; Maernigg in southern Austria (symphonies four to eight); and Dobbiaco on the border of Italy and Austria (Das Lied von der Erde, his ninth symphony and sketches for the tenth). Mahler's Third, his Nature Symphony, is a celebration of the natural world in all its forms, its beauty, serenity and power, its comic and grotesque, says Clarke. The heavenly retreat at Steinbach, perhaps like no other, perfectly served Mahler's needs. It was a laboratory for his art. Director Ken Russell also made use of Mahler's huts in his film on the great composer, including a scene where one of them gets burnt to a crisp. 

Composer Harrison Birtwistle is another serial shedworker who has worked in garden offices in Twickenham, an island in Scotland, France, and now in his current home in Dorset. He works inside for seven hours a day and says he is now dependent on it as a retreat. Aren't we all?

Planes, Trains and Number Twos

This week's Westmorland Gazette presented two likely subjects for cartoons. The first of them, a little unsavoury; an influx of slurry into a local river was saved from being an environmental disaster by the unseasonably high rainfall in the Lake District. (It rarely rains in the Lake District.)

The other story revolves around a website which offers up the use of driveways as a solution to the problem of urban parking. Oxenholme railway station, just outside Kendal, has high charges so a couple of houses nearby are renting out their drives.

Here are the unexpurgated sketches. If you want to know which one got in, buy tomorrow's Westmorland Gazette, visit my website or see which one Clare votes for below.