Nostalgia Bulletin

Mid-life crisis ahoy: I've been thinking about The Perishers lately, and how much I used to love them. The background to this is that Didi, my youngest, when asked what she wanted in her packed lunch sandwiches, requested "Ketchup" which of course reminded me of Marlon and his regular drenching of people.

It never occurred to me that they were at all related to Peanuts and those characters, though of course they were. Maisie is Lucy, and Wellington was as prone as Charlie Brown to lying on his back thinking about stuff. Marlon was - for a time - such a great fashion victim, too, weating his Sgt Pepper style jacket in the 60s before switching to his mechanic's overalls.

My favourite of all the cartoons was one in which Wellington spotted a falling leaf and waxed lyrical about the coming of autumn - then fell flat on his back when the leaf landed on his head, as if it had been made of lead. I wanted to be Wellington. He had no parents. At first he lived in a concrete pipe, later moving to a disused railway station that had been administered "Beeching's Powders."

I think my favourite covers of the collection shown (see first link above) are Numbers 10 and 18 - the bonfire night cover and the summer sunset cover. Both covers evoke a complex set of childhood emotions, memories of brief moments of happiness, otherwised smothered by more desperate stuff.