Donald Featherstone, creator of pink plastic flamingos has died, aged 79.

When I was a small child I used to love it when some of the cartoons in the Giles annual had to be accompanied by a caption to explain the news story they referred to and therefore why exactly they were so funny. And in that spirit here is the link to the news story!

Feel free to not follow the link. After all the hilarity of my cartoon is self evident. As is the disappointing truth that, in drawing it from my memory of the news story I got the figures wrong.

Doh!

I have a friend on Facebook. He's a friend in the Facebook sense of the word because I have never met him, but we have communicated via Facebook and we share some interests. At the beginning of this year, I think, he started to post pictures of watercolour sketches that he was doing on a daily basis, and they were annoyingly good. I say "annoyingly" because not only is Paul a good artist but he is also a respected author with a string of marvellous novels and audioplays to his name. Damn his eyes!

That's his blog, right there, and you may notice a certain amount of Dr Who-ishness about it. That's our primary link, though Paul spent some time at Lancaster University in the nineties, and I grew up in Lancaster. He's a nice guy and I would recommend his books. And he has also started selling prints of his pictures. I don't know if he is still doing them on a daily basis, but it certainly seems like he is.

However, much though I would like to praise somebody else all day, I am drifting off the point which is this...

I have decided to try to draw something every day.

When we started this website it was always my intention to fill it with drawings of chickens and cats and bees and Denise and, sometimes, me. And I was going to try to do something daily. But life gets in the way of plans, doesn't it?

Now, with my diet over, and having failed to persist in my challenge to do 100 press ups (I say that I've failed, but that's a bit anticipatory as I haven't actually failed, but I can feel failure brewing), I am going to give the old drawing a go again.

I started on the day before the summer solstice with this...

...and then because June 21st was also the International Day of Yoga I produced these...

I know it looks like I put a bit more effort into the first one, but actually I just drew the second one much smaller and so there's less detail.

And then, today, looking to see what was trending on Twitter and hoping that I could surf the zeitgeist and get some retweets (which I did not, except for one from the magnificent @LadyMalarkey) I drew this...

...which, for historians from the future, refers to Taylor Swift having a falling out with Apple over them denying recording artists royalties on the trial of their new music streaming service.

I have high hopes that the more I do these the better they will get and the more pithy will become their captions!

Midway through the day yesterday it became apparent that I had got a lot of the bodily fluids of a dog all over my work scrub top.

'Darn it!' I thought and then, on further investigation, I discovered that this had actually gone through to my work trousers.

'Fuss and botheration!' I declaimed. And then, upon additional probing, when I discovered that my underpants had also suffered seepage, I may have amended this to slightly stronger language.

Imagine the words I might have used if I discovered that these fluids had actually reached my skin!

Reader, they reached my skin. Words were used.

But on the plus side it was an excuse to finally go and but some underpants that fit me. So I went off to Sainsburys in my lunch break and bought some medium sized pants. For the first time ever. Please note that all of my other pants are XXL.

While I was there I bought a 2litre bottle of Sainsburys value (but made entirely from natural ingredients - I don't investigate this too much because what can they possibly be?) diet coke for 20p. What a bargain! And delicious and nutritious. Honestly.

It was a hot day. I left the bottle in my car.

At the end of the day I got in the car and...did I mention it was hot? Yes? Well, I thought I would have a drink so I opened the bottle.

And a fountain of hot diet coke exploded inside my car. Covering everything. Including me.

Which was annoying, but...

New pants! Medium! Which didn't get covered in dog fluids or coke fluids.