Comic Cuts - 3 July 2015

With the next issue of Hotel Business at the printers, I'm free, free, free! for a whole three days, which I've spent slaving over a hot scanner trying to get through more of the accumulated paperwork of thirty years freelancing, researching and just generally finding myself incapable of throwing anything away.

Even when I'm desperately trying to shed myself of as much of this junk as I can, I'm still finding it hard to part with scraps that could—at least in my mind—contain vital details for some future project or article. Chances are, the vast majority of these scans won't ever be opened again and I'm wasting a lot of glorious sunshine on things of little importance or use. But there's that nagging doubt at the back of my brain that says "What if you do need it... how will you feel knowing that you had the details you're chasing and threw them away for the sake of saving a minute at the scanner?"

Curse you, doubt! I would be gorgeously tanned by now.

I hope you all coped with the heat. Some readers—and I'm really thinking of you, Roger—would probably find the idea of sweltering temperatures in the low thirties laughable. We did manage to get as high as 36 degrees in London and the papers went into meltdown. Anyone would think we'd never had a hot day before. Mel's little thermometer measured the temperature in one room at 28, although that room was never in direct sunlight. I reckon my office probably hit 30.

The windows were all cracked open in the utility room outside my office door. If I opened the back door any wider than the width of a wasp, a wasp would be droning around my head within five minutes, accompanied by a couple of flies, various midges and a mosquito or three. I spent half of Wednesday chasing insects out of the room—I don't have a phobia of them, but I do find it impossible to work when they're noisily buzzing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

What follows then is some kind of idiot dance: a grown man waving a stiff-backed A4 envelope and shouting at a tiny insect that doesn't understand directions. "That way, you little——!" But instead of flying out the open back door, the beasts circle back into the depths of the office.

Insects aside, I'm enjoying the sunshine and looking forward to the tomatoes that the nice weather is likely to bring. We have three tomato plants this year, plus a couple of others, including a cucumber plant. They all need watering, so we could do with some rain, not just to break the humidity but also to fill our two water butts.

Today's random scans... you may notice a theme!