Why does nobody tell me these things?

Lew Stringer's got a blog! If you haven't heard of Lew, you're obviously not a thirty-year-old British comic fan - he was the guy who drew "Robo Capers", and "Combat Colin", and for that matter "One Cat and his Cod", the hilarious little comic strips in Marvel UK's comics like Transformers, Action Force and Thundercats. In the mid-eighties, you bought Transformers comics because it was Transformers, and kids in those days couldn't get enough of anything Transformer-related. It was just a happy coincidence that the Transformers stories were often brilliant pieces of work, the backup strips were usually readable and the Lew Stringer strips made you giggle all week until the next one came out. Marvel didn't need to produce anything good, kids would have bought anything with an Autobot sign on the cover, so I'm eternally grateful that they turned out such a quality product anyway.

Lew also draws strips for Viz on occasion (Tranny Magnet was sheer genius), and he's one of those rare names that you're always delighted to see in any comic anywhere, because you know that it's going to be great. Back in the heady days of 1998, when I first got a computer and started poking around on the internet, someone on a comics forum asked what ever happened to Lew Stringer, and I mentioned the last couple of things of his I'd seen. He then sent me an email detailing the comics he was currently drawing, and I was all giddy with excitement. Lew Stringer - officially the first celebrity to write to me!

Anyway, I should stop acting like a giddy groupie before it gets embarrassing for everyone. Another thing I noticed on the internet today is that the list of alumni on the Horncastle Grammar wikipedia page is growing at a steady rate! To recap, it was just Robert Webb when I first came across it last November, when I mentioned that fact here one of my fans kindly put me on the list too, and now we've also got the Reverend Jonnie Parkin! So that's three famous pupils in the school's four-hundred-year-plus history! And I notice nobody's tagged his entry as non-notable. Anyway, I've never heard of him, but he was in Robert Webb's year, apparently.

I take this as a challenge. We need a Wikipedia page for someone else from my year so we can add a link. The only person I can think of who went on to be famous is Helen Wikeley, who was one of the vets on Rolf Harris's Animal Hospital. Sadly, that sentence comprises absolutely everything I know about Helen, except that she was in my form and lived in Woodhall Spa on the same street as Chris Timony and John Gray. That's probably not enough for a proper wiki entry. Somebody out there must know all about her - create a profile, link it to the QEGS page and restore the honour of the class of '94!

In other other news (I've had a busy day today, because I decided to take a day off from memory practice and book-writing and things - I also went to a car boot sale this morning, and in the afternoon talked to James Kemp about this Cambridge Memory Championship website, which is actually going to be really cool, but I've waffled on too much tonight already to go into that, especially seeing as I've already embarked on a lengthy tale about train journeys) I went to Nottingham today, just because it was an unseasonably warm day, thanks to global warming and everything, and I felt I should go somewhere. On the way there, the train was sitting outside Nottingham station for about twenty minutes because of engineering work at the station, and the guard made tannoy announcements every five minutes or so with enlightening updates like "We're still here, but we might be moving in a minute or two."

On the way back, the tannoy announcement on the train before it left was even more helpful - "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I'm your senior conductor. This is the..." (roughly a minute's silence) "this is the 16:48 Nottingham... er..." (two minutes' silence, during which the train departed from the station, followed eventually by details of where the train was actually going). This kind of thing fills you with confidence in the ability of the train crew to get you where you want to go.