Category: Blog

• Oscar Wilde

  16th October 2020

  

  Happy Birthday Mr Wilde.

• Kier Starmer

  21st August 2020

  

  

  In a provocative statement made earlier this year, which received little public attention, Labour’s new leader Kier Starmer announced a desire, which threatens to become reality once he takes office, to change the law to allow for the selection of new MPs, in some constituencies, from shortlists comprised only of ethnic minority candidates. The man chosen to set the two party pendulum swinging in time once more, knows that should the general feeling towards the current government continue for much longer, he is a shoo-in come the next election.

  Should this deluded scheme acquire the force of law, numberless British citizens will find themselves barred from representing their constituency in parliament , based solely on the colour of their skin and ethnicity. We should not allow ourselves to be bamboozled by claims that this statement and the results which will automatically flow from it, represent a noble attempt to redress an old imbalance; nor allow ourselves to be intimidated by those who will lazily denounce anyone who condemns it as ‘racist’.

  The law was not set up to discriminate. The non-negotiable principle of anti-discrimination has been hammered into us for decades. Now Kier Starmer would have you believe that these sacred principles are conditional and relative, and can simply be abandoned or reversed should the Labour Party see fit. Until recently the very idea would have been unthinkable and scorned as anti-democratic, insulting and fanciful. That it is even allowed public airing as a viable sign of ‘progress’ is a measure of how far we have fallen.

  The defense will argue that the plan was conceived with benign intentions in a bid to encourage minorities to govern themselves. As this is a right which they already enjoy and everywhere freely exercise to the highest levels of government, such a defense should be disallowed. Who cannot foresee that the sensible mass of white British will find these proposals sinister, humiliating and intolerable, and rebel against them? Is Kier Starmer really so lacking in foresight as to conceive and promote a measure guaranteed to provoke enmity and discord, with such inflammatory potential to undo decades of progress in race relations at one stroke, without any regard to its predictable results?

• Don’t Skip Leg Day!

  16th August 2020

  

  The Gyms are open again, but remember, don’t skip leg day or you might end up like this!

• Dishy Rishi’s Magic Money Box

  11th August 2020

  

  Want some money mate? Go on have some, I’ve got loads. Have a bit more -go on, there’s plenty more where that came from! Just enjoy and don’t worry about it, yer grandchildren can pay it back later.

• Chris Whitty

  26th July 2020

  

  Chief Medical Lock-down whatsname for England, Chris Whitty, does some more tough talking.

• Tyson Fury

  10th June 2020

  

  The charismatic, contradictory and controversial ‘Gypsy King’ has resurrected his career to become arguably the biggest draw in boxing.

• Shakespeare’s Birthday

  23rd April 2020

  

  Shakespeare died fairly young, at 52. Had he lived he would’ve been 456 today.

  In fact as no birth records exist, we cannot be sure he was born on this date. As he was baptized at Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-Upon-Avon on April 26th 1564, scholars have settled on this as the most likely birth date. Similarly, the exact date of Shakespeare’s death is not known, but assumed from the record of his burial two days later, to be April 23rd 1616; his 52nd birthday.

  Nor do we know with any certainty what he looked like. Only one portrait is generally accepted as reliable -the engraving by Droeshout in the first folio. Sentimentalists who prefer to imagine all poets as looking like Byron tend to be dissatisfied with it, as it is not the face of a modern romantic hero. The face is not the man. Not that the Droeshout can be claimed as anything more than a rough approximation of what Shakespeare really looked like. It was almost certainly not done from life, but copied from another that was and later lost or destroyed. However it received the blessing of contemporaries such as Ben Johnson, who knew him., and as such, is the best we have to go on.

  Given the doubts leave enough room for artistic license, I have attempted to come up with a likeness which is loosely based on that image, assuming a degree of idealization was already in it. The gentle caricature was then made from that imaginary ‘real man’. I intended it to be the likeness of a real face in which it is possible to discern a man of sensibility and rare intelligence. The task turned out to be far more difficult than expected. Numerous revisions couldn’t convince me that I was looking at a character of genius. In the end, all you can say is that Shakespeare probably, maybe, looked a little bit like this.

  The quotation, ‘we are such stuff..’, is from The Tempest.

   

   

• Muddy Waters

  10th March 2020

  

  Chicago Delta blues-man Muddy Waters gets his mojo working.

  This is a reworking of an older caricature which I thought could be improved. The intention was to make only minor alterations, but once I started I kept seeing other areas which I felt could be better and ended up modifying virtually the entire face. Glad I did though, because the result is a much punchier overall image and a more convincing likeness.

• Femme Fatale

  5th March 2020

  

• David Bowie

  9th January 2020

  

  Although he sadly passed away three years ago, Parlophone have announced that two new, previously unheard David Bowie records will be posthumously released on digital EP this year.