Morris day. (but not the Time.)

It's been over a week since my last post, but I've been busy working, drawing, shouting and drinking. I've nearly finished page three of Septic Isle, which has a panel on it that shows the blown up bus from the 7/7 attacks. Most of last week was spent drawing an exploding mosque, which is all fairly heavy, and doing research (ie. finding pictures on Google images I can copy!) was kinda harrowing, with the internet not being afraid to show you the bits (of people) that the telly leaves out of its reports of these atrocities.
Also, I had to draw the MI5 building, which is a really difficult thing to draw. It looks like it was made out of Lego and it has about twenty-eight thousand windows. I couldn't find the bit of the building where Pierce Brosnan launches armoured speedboats from in any of my research. I'm beginning to think that those Bond movies are made-up stories! Still, it's done now and it looks good, but all this intricate stuff is slowing me down a bit. It seems strange though that the Secret Service decided to put itself in a very famous, immediately recognisable building.

Totally unrelated, yesterday I went to the City Centre (or 'town' if you're Brummie) to get a birthday gift for my old friend Pete, who was 33 this week. Walking along New Street, I heard a distinct jingling behind me. I was thinking that it might be Santa, on his sleigh, and his schedule was all confused, or maybe it was a band of medieval lepers, or it might even be a game of blind football. I was wrong on all counts. It was a troupe of Morris dancers. Town was full of them. There were Morris dancers in the Bullring (all one word, these days) they were in Victoria Square, there were hundreds of them on New Street, all different colours and shapes. There were Morris dancers dressed up in yellow, black and red strips, being cheered on by a gang of pissed up Watford supporters (who were up in Brum for the semi-final at Villa Park) because they were wearing their team's colours. There were the traditional looking ones with the straw hats on, and there appeared to be a troupe of blacked-up Morris dancers, which I don't think you should be able to do these days, tradition or not. What the black people who saw them thought I can't imagine. What I was wondering is why April 14th? Isn't May Day the official time to put this shit on? Why the middle of Birmingham? Was it a countryside alliance demo?
I think they should bring back full-contact Morris Dancing. Either that or ban it altogether, like smoking. If I can't smoke then they shouldn't be able to pollute my atmosphere with that shite.