I always end up playing a shepherd

I'm always pleased to see in my Blogger stats that someone has been looking at my analysis of how frequently characters appear in the Peanuts comic strip. You can check them out here if you're the kind of super-cool person who finds them interesting!

1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

But let's talk about just one character today - the forgotten one who was there from the start but faded away long before the end. I'm talking, of course, about Shermy!

Shermy is one of the three characters who appear in the very first Peanuts strip. Indeed, he's the one who delivers all the dialogue!

It takes him a while to get a name, unlike Charlie Brown (who, like a lot of the earliest strips, is an echo of Charles Schulz's previous comic "Li'l Folks"), but Shermy is a central character for the first few months. Snoopy is just a dog who shows up now and then; back in October 1950 there's a series of strips that seem to suggest he belongs to Shermy.

But as the series develops, Charlie Brown becomes the central focus and Shermy starts to be seen less and less. New and more interesting characters appear - first Schroeder and then Linus make their debuts as babies but soon come to take over Shermy's role as a sidekick and straight man to Charlie Brown, Snoopy or the new big star Lucy. By the end of the fifties, we're really not seeing much of Shermy at all.

1960 might be Shermy's last year as any kind of regular presence in Peanuts - he appears in twelve strips that year - so let's start this story with 1961 and follow Peanuts through the rest of the decade. It's an important decade, because as well as the newspaper comics we got the debut of the animated cartoon specials! There were also comic books featuring original stories (as far as I can tell, poor Shermy never showed up in them) and other merchandise too - Peanuts was big business in the sixties! Except perhaps for the original star...

Here is what we see of Shermy in the sixties!

 

1 January 1961

We start the new year by showing Shermy as one of 'the boys' - note the gradation of heights running from Shermy the tallest down to Linus the shortest, although Schroeder has by this point almost completely caught up with Charlie Brown. It's become very rare to see Shermy just hanging out with the others like this; he's only there when a strip needs a comically large number of people to be taught a lesson all at once.

11 April 1961

Shermy's next appearance, three and a half months later, shows him in the role he'll be most often seen in here - as one of Charlie Brown's spectacularly unsuccessful baseball team.

The team consists of the nine regular characters in Peanuts at the time it was introduced - Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Schroeder, Lucy, Linus, Shermy, Patty, Violet and Pig-Pen. We don't often see the full team gathered together. Sally made her debut in 1959 but doesn't ever join her big brother's team, and by April 1961 the strip had gained an eleventh character, Frieda, who was also seen on the baseball team at times, but Shermy remains a usually-unseen presence at first base.

It's become the only thing he really does in Peanuts - Schroeder has baseball and piano and Lucy jokes, Patty and Violet get to bully Charlie Brown outside baseball stories, but Shermy's only real purpose now is to make up the numbers on the baseball team. He does usually tend to be presented as a competent player, at least!

18 June 1961

Just a glimpse of the back of Shermy's head in the final panel.

23 July 1961

Sunday strips in newspapers had to be drawn in a strict format, so that they could be presented in one of three layouts, depending how much space the paper wanted to allocate to it. The above is the 'full' version, but it was also possible to omit the second panel and restructure it like this.

Or alternatively, the paper could also drop the title panel, and just show the three shorter rows. So each Sunday strip had to be written in such a way that the title panel was unnecessary, and the second panel was super-unnecessary to the overall story, because a lot of readers wouldn't get to see them.

Shermy is becoming the kind of character who appears in the first two panels a lot.

10 December 1961

Shermy again only features in the disposable first two panels, before Linus comes in and reiterates the opening line for the benefit of the newspapers that give Peanuts less space.

13 December 1961

This is an interesting one - Shermy shows some personality! In the service of one of Schulz's clever and subtle jabs at religion, our hero displays a materialistic streak that fits in with a recurring theme in the mid-1950s of Charlie Brown sighing despondently at Shermy having a much bigger train set than him, and similar. It's interesting that Shermy gets to feature in this one - it's more of a Linus thing to be overthinking Santa Claus, but this attitude is probably just too greedy to suit Linus. In later years it would suit Peppermint Patty, but she hadn't been invented yet, so Shermy gets the starring role for once!

1 April 1962

Into 1962 now, and Shermy has one panel caught up in the mob psychology and yelling at Charlie Brown. Which isn't really like him, but... well, Charlie Brown really is a blockhead, isn't he?

3 August 1962

Four months later, and this is more like the Shermy we love. A series of daily strips in which the entire baseball team quit, and Shermy is very polite about it. Okay, he doesn't entirely appreciate Charlie Brown's good points as a manager, but he's older than CB, a good player, it's nice of him to stay on a team like this one!

21 September 1962

And suddenly, in September, another Shermy strip! He gets all the dialogue, he even gets to lean on the brick wall, and Charlie Brown is just the silent stooge! This strip was published on a Friday, incidentally, so it makes sense.

Shermy is the only character whose hairstyle officially changes in the course of the Peanuts series - he gets his trademark crewcut in April 1953 and kept it forever after, but he obviously still cares about his hair now! 

14 February 1963

We don't see Shermy again until Valentine's Day 1963, but the day clearly goes better for him than it always does for poor old Charlie Brown.

25 March 1963

The baseball season of 1963 gives Shermy a few moments in the spotlight - first he joins in with the rest of the team as they share a hopeful outlook...

29 March 1963

And then a few days later, he stands in the background of one more panel...

4 April 1963

And then he gets to show off some not particularly impressive skills. But at least he's showing his face in the comic regularly for a change!

5 August 1963

Four months later, Charlie Brown's team are looking almost like they might win something for the first time ever... but Charlie Brown still manages to mess it up. Shermy's on hand two days in a row to watch in horror!

6 August 1963

Really, that unseen umpire is being very harsh here. Even if Charlie Brown is doing the same stupid thing twice in a row, give the poor kid a break, can't you?

1 March 1964

We don't see Shermy again until March the next year, and a 'movie line' Sunday strip. These became a regular thing in Peanuts, and are always a good opportunity to see a few seldom-seen characters. Shermy's at the back of the queue, but at least he's still here!

24 March 1964

And then it's baseball season again, and once more Shermy can't resist joining in when everyone's abusing their unfortunate manager...

7 April 1964

A couple of weeks later, Charlie Brown's arm must be fully recovered, and it's another entire-cast comic (except, bizarrely, Linus).

This turns out to be the last we see of Shermy for a whole year.

18 April 1965

It's baseball season again in 1965, and the whole team are there. Except, once again, Linus! I'm starting to think he and Shermy just don't get along. Although this time, Snoopy is absent too, and 5 and Frieda seem to be on the team today. Sally presumably isn't one of the team, but has just joined the discussion, as is her usual habit.

Patty's point about movie ads and general morality is interesting, because at this time Schulz and others must have been working on "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the first animated TV special. It's been widely praised for its moral themes, although a lot of modern commentators don't know about the integrated commercials for Coca-Cola that were originally a part of the cartoon. You could have a whole baseball game's worth of discussion about the whole thing!

27 November 1965

Seven months later, we get another brief glimpse of Shermy in another movie line. He hasn't said a word for a year and a half now. But we're about to hear him and see him move for the first time!

4 December 1965

If you bought TV Guide, you could see this trailer for the new cartoon special! Is Shermy one of the kids singing "Jingle Those Crazy Bells"? The girls seem to be Frieda, Patty and Sally, but it does look like it could be Shermy in there too. And he's coming to our TV screens now!

9 December 1965

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" made its debut on television on this date, and Shermy is visible right from the start, skating with the others in a yellow coat. He doesn't get involved in much of the story, but he shows up here and there. Most famously, he does his Frankenstein dance when everybody's ignoring director Charlie Brown at the Christmas play rehearsals!

And then Lucy tells him what he's going to be in the play...

Shermy turns to the camera and delivers his only line, a famous quote for the perpetually overlooked - "Every Christmas it's the same. I always end up playing a shepherd."

After that, he's nothing but a background presence. In the final scene around the Christmas tree he's either drawn badly or mistakenly drawn as 5 (who's on the other side of the group). But still, it's a memorable performance!

22 March 1966

Into 1966, and Shermy's never going to understand Charlie Brown's love life.

27 March 1966

And nor is he likely to understand Charlie Brown's motivational speeches, but he's still there with the rest of the baseball team.

8 May 1966

More baseball for Mother's Day, and Shermy laments "We're no good!" among the general lamentation. Which sets us up nicely for another animated special!

8 June 1966

"Charlie Brown's All Stars", the second TV special, appeared on the airwaves. Shermy (just about visible in the back of the opening scene here) is seen on the team in scenes repeating the gags from a lot of baseball episodes on the newspaper strip.

 He joins in the group shoutings of 'you blockhead!', and delivers his line from the 3 August 1962 strip above when the team all quit.

Perhaps his coolest moment is in the skateboarding scene, when he's the first to skate through the girls' skipping. But he largely disappears from the second half of the story.

27 October 1966

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" was on TV for Halloween. Shermy doesn't seem to be in it, but a lot of online sources say he's there, crediting the same actor who played Schroeder with doing his voice, so maybe I'm just missing something. He might well be one of the ghosts in the trick-or-treat sequence...

He's certainly absent from the next two specials, "You're In Love" and "He's Your Dog". Shermy's cartoon career seems to be as short-lived as his time in the comics.

7 November 1966

He gets a bit of a run in the newspapers in November 1966, though - first in this one, which incidentally proves that Charlie Brown does know the little red-haired girl's name (unless even the school address her as such).

12 November 1966

And now he's defending Charlie Brown against Violet's gossip!

14 November 1966

And with good cause - Charlie Brown's got a promotion! But Shermy doesn't feature in the rest of this storyline.

13 February 1967

Into 1967, and Shermy's excited by the big arm-wrestling contest between Snoopy and Lucy!

23 April 1967

Another movie line, this time crossing over with the World War I Flying Ace. It might be the first time Shermy meets Roy (the one with the hat), if they sit close to each other in the cinema.

12 June 1967

"You're In Love, Charlie Brown" includes someone who's probably meant to be Shermy, running around with the rest of the regular cast. Or it might be 5. Anyway, he doesn't speak or do anything else.

17 September 1967

They're not much of a baseball team, but when it comes to critical analysis of the Book of Job, they win every time. Shermy, though, just stands silently and listens to Linus, looking as blank as Snoopy.

Now, as you can see, Shermy hasn't actually disappeared completely from the newspaper comics. But someone at Mad Magazine seems to have got the idea that he's gone, and used him as the lead character in their "March 1968" dated issue, which apparently went on sale a bit earlier than that...

26 December 1967

Now this is a bit different, but at least Shermy is being remembered! It doesn't prompt Charles Schulz to feature him more, but we still have half a dozen more appearances in the newspapers to come in 1968 and 1969...

1 February 1968

Back in his role of one of the boys to be sent flying by Lucy!

5 March 1968

And back to standing in the background of baseball-themed comics!

30 June 1968

He even gets a line in the latest pitcher's mound debate!

10 August 1968

It's a long time since Shermy and Snoopy were seen hanging out together, but Shermy still comes to his birthday party!

25 March 1969

You can learn a lot about baseball history from reading Peanuts. It was felt in the fifties that the game was too dominated by pitchers, and measures were taken which included lowering the height of the pitcher's mound. This caused a lot of laughter from Charlie Brown's team in previous strips, but Shermy seems less derisive about it here in his penultimate newspaper appearance.

15 June 1969

And this is Shermy's final word in the comics. "Really?" in the disposable second panel of a Sunday strip. After this, it's oblivion, I'm afraid. Someone who's probably supposed to be Shermy shows up in a movie line in 1975, and he's mentioned by name (but not seen) in a baseball strip as late as 1977. But he's no longer even a background character after this typically small appearance.

Shermy is gone from the newspapers, and the cartoons are soon to follow suit. But there's one surprising last hurrah for our hero!

27 September 1969

"It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown" is the last animated Peanuts of the sixties. Shermy had been entirely absent from the previous TV special, "He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown", but he makes up for it in a big way here! Maybe it's being trapped in summer camp, but he gets a very prominent role as one of the boys, all the way through.

Probably his best moment is scaring Linus twice in swift succession. "Hey! There's a spider on that log! ... I'm sorry, I was wrong. It was just a piece of bark."

Shermy is treated as a central character throughout the cartoon - maybe not quite as prominent as Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus, but getting there. He never attains that level again, though he continues to be drawn into the background of the cartoons of the seventies. This would be a good point to end this essay, but for the sake of completeness...

4 December 1969

To finish the decade, Shermy does show up briefly in the theatrical movie "A Boy Named Charlie Brown". But he doesn't speak, and doesn't even get together with the gang to watch the spelling bee at the end, which is a shame.

Here's to the eternally unimportant Shermy! The world needs someone to play the shepherd!

It's no wonder Lionel Jeffries went mad

 Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight comics are notable for having the characters recap the events of the past twenty issues at length, every time they open their mouths. This page is probably the single most impressive example of that tendency!

I mean, at least they're explaining relevant information to the unfortunate Dr Jeffries - a lot of the time, they just tell each other things they already know, for no reason. But since Lionel starts the page by saying "Let me see if I understand this..." I can only assume Alpha Flight have just this minute finished telling him this whole story, and his apparent uncertainty led them all to rehash the entire conversation again!

Meanwhile, Lionel's brother Madison has got a bit confused. It looks like the "To Bochssie's chagrin..." speech bubble should be a thought bubble, and the "Then Langkowski, on turnin' human again..." should have been spoken out loud. I bet he's embarrassed that he accidentally said what he should have just thought to himself. It's no wonder Roger Bochs went mad, too!

Another favourite page

'Bits of books that I really like', part 2. This is one of the many cool things you can see if you buy the Order of the Stick books, above and beyond the bits you can read for free on the internet. I love how this ridiculously convoluted chart really does give you all the information you could possibly need about the OOTS characters at that particular point of their history (the start of volume 4), as well as a big helping of silly and clever jokes!

Xykon and Redcloak want to control the god-killing abomination The Snarl, while Roy wants to control his wild teammate Belkar, and Roy's father wants to control Roy. This is why I love this comic so much.

A fun one

 This time I will write about Dr Who, which proves I thought this one was all right. Just a few observations before I go and read what everyone else has said about it and argue with them...

I'm surprised they've never done John Logie Baird before, actually - it's so obvious, if you're going to do a stereotypical Russell T Davies hidden-mind-control-messages thing, that you'd think it would have been the first story in 2005. Maybe he was waiting for the hundredth anniversary but got fed up.

Nice to see Mel, and I was really expecting a reference to The Nightmare Fair, but I guess it really didn't happen after all.

The climactic ball game was underwhelming - couldn't they have spent some money on making it look acrobatic and exciting?

It was a nice episode, but I really want to see something that makes me go "Ooh, that's clever," and I'm not really doing that about this one.

But despite all the negativity, it was good! More of the same at Christmas, please!

3001, a sedentary odyssey

I'm happy to say my knee is recovering nicely, but this first post of a new millennium of bloggery is still more of a 'sitting around on my backside' thing than venturing into space or the Aegean Sea. And I'm catching up this morning with everybody who's sent me condolences or friendly messages or insults in the last week or two, so I'd like to especially thank Tom for leaving a comment here on my blog, and urge more readers to do the same! People don't comment here nearly enough! Let's build some kind of Zoomy-fan community, so I can think I'm appropriately great and famous!

Or you can continue talking to me in less ego-centric venues, I don't mind. Anyway, I didn't really feel like writing about Dr Who last Saturday night - it wasn't terrible, it was at least watchable, but that's as far as my praise goes. We'll just have to see what the third and final 'special' tonight is like, and then hope that one day they'll make it back into a proper weekly series like Dr Who should be, every year, for say six months at a time. I don't mind if it looks cheap, just hire some capable writers!

And when I say good writing, here's a literary example. Not an example of how to write Dr Who, a completely unrelated thing in classic Zoomy blog style to confuse the readers. I've mentioned before, several times, how much I love 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay', and it seems a good place to start a series of posting examples of great pages from favourite books. It's a cold day in late 1939 New York, and teenage Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier have just been given the okay to create their own comic book. They go out to find a team of artists, meet Sam's friend Julius "Julie" Glovsky and go with him to the apartment/studio where Julie's older brother Jerry lives with two other artists. When nobody answers the door, Joe (with a completely unnecessary display of acrobatics) scales the fire escape, climbs in an upstairs window and immediately provokes a scream from the naked woman asleep on Jerry's bed. It's his first meeting with Rosa Saks, who will play a central role in the lives of both Joe and Sammy. And, as we learn in this one beautifully-written scene, the whole incident had a lasting effect on Julie too...

 Michael Chabon should be writing Doctor Who. And I've always thought someone needs to get David Renwick writing it as well. And there are other candidates too - you know, proper good writers is what the series has really been lacking, it's not about the expensive special effects. Sort it out, BBC!

Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man

 This is my 3000th post on this blog! The big round number crept up on me a little unexpectedly, and I wanted to do something special and lengthy for it, but then I'll probably want to write something about Doctor Who tonight, and it'll probably not be very good, so I thought I should write a three thousandth post before it's on.

But it seems a good opportunity to announce something I've felt reluctant to tell people, possibly worried that they won't think I'm cool - I've been officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, although it's not really causing me any serious symptoms and isn't likely to in the future. But if I mention it here, and people still don't know about it if it comes up in conversation, that'll be because they haven't read my blog. And if they haven't read my blog, that means they aren't cool!

Largely unrelated to that, I fell down last week and emulated Augustus Carp's father, who in the process of denouncing the new lectern at his church injured his knee and suffered "extremely severe contusions of both his larger gluteal muscles". This made me want to read the book again, and recommend it to anyone who hasn't heard of it - "Augustus Carp, Esq, by Himself"

Published anonymously in 1924, it was written by Dr Henry Howarth Bashford, and it's hilarious. Funnily enough, it's only on this latest reading I noticed that Augustus is 47 years old at the time he's writing his autobiography, meaning he's exactly a hundred years older than me. I think I should be emulating him more - by the time he got to that age, he'd long since "commenced his life's afternoon", and despite having lost his job despite all the pious blackmail and swindling he'd used to get it, has married into enough wealth to live comfortably as "sidesman, churchwarden, Sunday School superintendent and secretary of the Glee Club, no less than as President of the St Potamus Purity League". It's an example we should all follow!

The amazing world

 I'm sorry to hear that Mike has died. Mike as in Mike's Amazing World of Comics, that is. The long-established, universally loved and admired, comic cataloguing website. It's been my first go-to site for any obscure superhero comic trivia I might be interested in for longer than I can remember.

I then spent a heck of a long time searching the internet to try to find Mike's surname, because I knew I knew it at one point but couldn't remember it now - I'd almost decided he kept it a secret from everyone and I'd never known it at all, finding him universally referred to just as "Mike" by everyone mourning his loss. I did find it in the end, but it seems to be the done thing not to mention it, so I'll just leave it as RIP Mike. A true hero of the comic nerd universe.

It was pretty good, really

Yes, and that's high praise, compared to the last ten years of Doctor Who. I won't spoil it, but I'd advise everyone reading this to watch the new episode. Although I have to ask - what's with David Tennant's hair? 

But in all fairness, I was worried that even "bring back Russell T Davies and David Tennant and Catherine Tate and write a story based on a classic comic" wouldn't be a solution to the decade of badly misguided attempts to make Doctor Who, so I was prepared to be disappointed. But actually, it was pretty cool. Let's see if they can use this as a template for the future!

Best ending ever

 For want of anything more productive to do with my time, I've been re-watching my way through the entire run of Regular Show for the last few months. And really, there could never be a more perfect ending to a series than the final montage. I defy anyone to watch this without a tear in their eye...

Well, possibly you do need to know something about the characters and settings to get the full effect, but even so, I'm sure everyone finds it impossibly beautiful, right?

I feel it's also worth pointing out that Hi-Five Ghost is my absolute favourite character (closely followed by Eileen and Rigby), which might say something about how I see my role in life as being that of a sidekick. Now, I'm aware that there are people in the world - quite a lot of them, indeed - who don't think of me in that way at all, and would think it downright weird if I say I've always been a smaller best friend to some or other larger and more dominant personality, floating alongside them and high-fiving where appropriate, but I still do feel that that's the position I always automatically slide into at every opportunity, and certainly the kind of character in a well-written show like Regular Show who I'll always most empathise with. It's really got me thinking about how realistic my self-perception actually is...

See, what other comedy cartoon show can give you a tear-jerking finale and a healthy dose of psychoanalytical prompting? It's genius, I tell you.

The sensational debut of a supervillain

 It's 1993, Wolverine is a very cool character in the coolest Marvel comics, his arch-enemy Sabretooth is also extremely cool, and the market is absolutely flooded with new characters who are trying to be just as cool as them. It helps if your name sounds a bit like "wolf", definitely. So how could this new character fail, with a cover like this?

Aardwolf. A name that just screams "picked up the book of animals of the world, turned to entry number 2 and stopped looking." He was probably doomed to failure from the start. But Aardwolf's background is Madripoor (the Asian island nation chock-full of evil businessmen who are also crimelords, where Wolverine spends a lot of time), so the cover decides to stress not only how much like Sabretooth he is, but also that he's like a famous businessman. Donald Trump. Yes, that's not going to look at all silly, thirty years down the line.

The cover of Night Thrasher #3 is drawn by Javier Saltares, who was supposed to be the regular artist of the series, but inside it's a fill-in story pencilled by Ken Lashley and Fred Haynes, and inked by six different people, taking a few pages each to get it done by the deadline. The letters page tells us that David Boller and Don Hudson will be drawing the next issue, and Saltares will return to his regular role with #5. Hudson isn't actually credited on #4, but Saltares does come back for #5, only to disappear once more, and for good. Boller became the regular penciller after that.

The writer, though, was Fabian Nicieza, and you'd think he must have had something to do with creating Aardwolf. But he cheerfully acknowledges that it's a funny kind of thing for an Asian crimelord to call himself, having him explain that it's a childhood nickname, and "a hyena-like mammal which feeds mostly on termites and insect larvae, would you believe?" He tries to justify it by saying he kills termites like Night Thrasher (who of course also has a silly name that's had a lot of jokes made about it over the years, but Nicieza isn't to blame for that one - Tom DeFalco thought it up), but it sounds more than a little forced.

And speaking of silly names, Aardwolf's real name is Chon Li. I mean, seriously? Street Fighter II was a very big deal by the time Aardwolf made his debut! Chun Li, busty female street fighter, was a name on the lips of everyone in the target audience of comics like Night Thrasher. How could Nicieza, or whoever, not have heard about her?

To cap it all, Aardwolf is completely the wrong colours on that cover. Inside the comic, he's got grey skin and dark red hair. He's also rather lost among a lot of other rather better characters, and he is never seen again after Night Thrasher #4 (though he ends the story still a businessman/crimelord in Madripoor). Donald Trump had more staying power.

PS The letters page in Night Thrasher is titled "Talk - or I'll gladly break your jaw" after a famous line of his. Other people suggested "Nocturnal Submissions", but Marvel decided against it.

PPS Would you believe there's another Aardwolf in the Marvel Universe? He's part of the "Hyena Clan" who showed up in a Fantastic Four story involving the Black Panther, in 2012. He also hasn't become a supervillain sensation, but at least he lives within a thousand miles or so of actual aardwolves. 

If you're in Sheffield train station...

... take a look at the new shiny stainless steel (what else?) commemorative plaque under an arch of poppies! The plaque was unveiled yesterday by the Deputy Lord Lieutenant, accompanied by a whole lot of speeches, exhortations, prayers and Last Posts. It was actually a remarkably big spectacle for such an obscure family as the Pridmores; I never thought I'd see the like.

But then, if there's one thing our family specialises in, it's quantity rather than quality (though of course we've got abundant supplies of that, too). And yesterday's event was a great opportunity for a rare gathering of our branch of the family tree - the four soldiers' little brother Sydney's eighteen grandchildren and their various descendants couldn't all make it yesterday, but an impressively big chunk of us did! It was quite a day, all in all.

Mind sports updates

 I did indeed get knocked out in the first round of the Microsoft Excel World Championship at the weekend, but as I told you, I was drawn against the sixth seed, and now that the dust has settled after yesterday's third and fourth rounds, he's one of the eight Excel masters who are going to Las Vegas for the grand final in December!

And I still think it's a great achievement to get to the round of 128 two years in a row, but I'll need to buckle down and get good at this if I'm going to become official world champion in the years to come - preferably before more talented Excellers find out that the competition exists! So that's my resolution for the next year or so, anyway.

Meanwhile, if you remember that thing I used to be world champion at before the more talented memorisers found out that it exists (but still want to read a really rather good article about how the whole memory principle works and be inspired by it to start taking part yourself), check out this interview with Katie Kermode!

I like the repeated namechecks of the Ben System - that's something that hasn't gone away, even though Katie (like all really good memory masters) has given it her own individual twist and would be fully justified in calling it the Katie System instead. Modern-day memorisers are less inclined to name things after themselves these days.

And moving on to the mind sport I've never been anywhere near the world's best at, but still very much enjoy anyway, the World Othello Championship is happening in Rome right now!

After seven of thirteen rounds, it's still all to play for! See, one of these days I might still be world champion at othello too - I'm just waiting for all the really great othellists to forget that the competition exists.

Halloween - the most important annual festival in a world where adults rule

 I promised, a while ago, to tell my blog-readers all about the coolest dream I had as a child. And no amount of apathy from my loyal readers will stop me fulfilling this promise, don't you worry! Now, I don't remember what year I had this dream, but from internal evidence it must have been around this time of year, probably late October. One major date-indicator is that the new season of television programmes always started in September, and this dream must have been heavily inspired by the kind of children's drama series on BBC or ITV that would always start with the new season and run for six weeks or so. It's really not the kind of thing I could have dreamed up all by myself, though I can't remember a direct source for the story.

A description of this dream will need a lot of explanatory notes, so be prepared for some lengthy analysis.

The premise of the dream, which I think was just understood rather than directly narrated, is that adults have taken over the country or the world, and treat children as slaves - this involves the children all wearing handcuffs.

'Country' and 'world' were essentially the same thing to me at a young age; I don't know if the dream specified which it was that the grown-ups had taken over. Nor does the fact that adults already rule the world seem to have bothered me - really, 'parents' or 'teachers' taking over would have made more sense, but it was a more general 'adult' seizing of power I was dreaming about.

The story started with our hero (me) in a newsagent's with my mother - me in handcuffs, looking at the new year's annuals on the shelves, and being excited to see that they not only had the ones with the next year's date, but also the year after's. My mother asked which of the two Beano Books I wanted; I said I'd rather have both, and she said I could only have one.

This scene's intention was apparently to demonstrate how horrifically cruel the adults are to their innocent children. I apparently can't imagine anything more evil than only getting one Beano Book when two were available. That the adults are still required to buy things like comic annuals for children is an unshakable rule throughout this dream. 'My mother' in this dream didn't resemble my real mother at all; I'm thinking blonde hair and glasses, and get vibes of 'TV actress' from her. The comic annuals in Britain come out in September/October and have the following year's date on them - so if I dreamed this in 1986, the Beano Books would have been dated 1987 and 1988.

I don't recall if there was any transition from that scene to the next, but now we're in Woolworths in Boston, at the back of the store where the photo booth was. I have to get my picture taken. My mother gives me the coins to put into the slot - lots of different coins, all with old-money names which she tells me one at a time. One of the names was along the lines of "a jack o'nickel".

Pre-decimal money (which became obsolete in 1971) is obviously something that grown-ups would want to restore if they took power. The coins all did have unusual names, which adults would talk about to the mystification of 1980s children. This is exactly the kind of thing that would have been on a kids-versus-adults TV show, although again I don't remember one that did it.

Sensing an opportunity for escape, since I'd be alone and unsupervised in the photo booth, I cunningly said that I wouldn't be able to put the coins in the slot wearing handcuffs, and so my mother unlocked and removed them. I immediately made a run for it, racing down to the front end of the store, grabbing either a tin of beans or a pot of yoghurt from a shelf and giving it to a pair of handcuffed children (an older girl and younger boy).

The front part of Woolworths, near the till, was where the sweets were sold. There might possibly have been yoghurt there, but not beans. Nor would a tin of beans have been likely to be in my subconscious mind, probably explaining the confusion if I'd seen a similar scene with beans involved.

The girl was unimpressed by my heroic act, saying that it wasn't much help to them. I replied something, and ran out the front doors to continue my crusade.

A streetwise girl, the same age or a bit older, would routinely feature in TV shows with a male child protagonist. This one might seem to have a point, but in the dream I felt she was being unfairly ungrateful. I have no idea what I said to her, but I hope it put her in her place. I'm sure she would have made a reappearance later in the saga.

There might be a missing scene here, because the next thing I remember I'm outside the back entrance to Woolworths, at night, and looking at the sky above the shop, where fireworks are exploding. "Of course!" I thought to myself. "Halloween! The grown-ups' favourite special occasion, because it doesn't require them to spend money on children!"

To get to that location I would have had to go a long way around or back through the shop I'd just left. At that point I woke up, sadly. But clearly the point was that I would do something to resolve the whole situation at Halloween, the biggest event in the evil adults' calendar. Obviously I'm conflating Halloween (October 31st) with Bonfire Night (November 5th), which is when we have fireworks, but they're so close together it's quite understandable. We didn't do much for Halloween where I came from - trick-or-treating was an American thing that hadn't quite made its way over here yet. There was usually a Halloween party and a costume competition, but in our neighbourhood it was understood that costumes should be hand-made rather than store-bought (and thus in my mind didn't cost the adults any money). Halloween being a non-present-giving festival obviously means it's a cheap event for evil grown-ups.

Really, words don't do the sheer coolness of this dream justice. I just wish I knew exactly how much was my own invention and how much was just cribbed from something I'd seen on TV before bedtime...