BIRD BRAINS

 It’s their highly responsive MHV! Aurelia said, adopting that high-flown tone of hers. 

They were discussing the intelligence of birds. Aurelia had edged the conversation in that direction, maybe as a way of proving, if proof was needed, how very clever she was. Her PhD had been on avian cognition: Thinking Psittacinae-fashion. She had spent two years in close communication with a rather bright parrot, for a while student and ‘guinea pig’ becoming almost inseparable.

APPETITES

The strange thing about those first empty weeks without her was his ability to carry on as before: to sleep, to eat, most afternoons, to even spend time in his studio, though producing nothing of worth, the clay resistant to his touch, unable to be shaped to his will. And yet he could still go in there, could…

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Watching him had become a comforting pastime, a part of her life. Something she did when washing the dishes; she seldom used the dishwasher now. He was someone to look down on as she hand-washed her ‘delicates’ – previously tossed into the washing machine without a thought. These so-called delicates …

COLD SNAP

The removal van’s outside again. Six owners, now, in only twenty years. Folks don’t seem to stay around for long. Spend all their money doing the place up nice, then bugger off. Well . . . I say, nice. Too many fancy shades for my taste. That dining room’s been all the colours of the rainbow. Chocolate brown first off. Horrible it was. Not creamy Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Real dark Bourneville. Nigger brown we used to call it. But you can’t say that now, can you. Though I don’t see the harm. Like the frigging black hole of Calcutta it was…

DICK’S LIFE

My wife slips quietly from our bed, silencing the programmed alarm clock before time, so as not to disturb her sleeping husband. But her husband is awake; I have woken before her, and feign sleep as she moves about the darkened room.

She takes underwear from the chair (removed from the drawer with the jingling brass handles the night before) and pulls on the obligatory panty-girdle, of the kind she took to wearing after our daughter was born: almost thirty-six years ago. Believing the firm support offered by the...

THE INKING WOMAN

A celebration of the vibrancy and variety of woman’s cartoon and comic expression in the UK. The book of the 2017 Cartoon Museum exhibition, showcasing the work of 100 British women cartoonists and comic artists, reveals some of the challenges women artists have faced over the past 250 years.

Includes the cartoon Growing Apart, which, with Building up Hopes, was in The Inking Woman exhibition.

UK FEMINIST CARTOONS AND COMICS: A CRITICAL SURVEY

This book offers an original contribution to feminist and comics history by providing the first cultural history of feminist comics and cartooning in Britain.

Includes the cartoons Born Again (first published in the UK in The Independent newspaper) and The Last One (previously published in the US by Pig Iron Press in Environment: Essence and Issue).