Conrad, Hard At Work

This Is A Bold Statement
And it does require an elastic definition of what constitutes "work".  Whatever it was, I was hard at it last night and into the small hours of this morning.
     For Lo! we are back to the disreputable midden that is my memory, and an image of the final panel in a comic strip with a very downbeat ending: the sole survivor of an expedition to the Arctic (or it could have been the Antarctic.  Cold and icy, anyway), who had experienced all sorts of horrid adventures yet has nobody else left alive to corroborate his fantastic tale.  I seem to recall that there were pteranodons, so there may have been other dinosaurs as well.  Art?

An artist's impression.  Obviously.

     Your Humble Scribe remembered the black and white style of the artist, which was quite distinctive, yet I could not recall his name, not for anything.
    However, I did recall that he'd done a strip for 2000AD in it's early days.  Trouble was, I couldn't remember what that was called, either, so I had to go through a 21 page database listing stories -
     "Colony Earth" rang a bell, and quite a strident one, at that.  Art?



     In case your optics aren't up to the task, the artist here is one Jim Watson.
     Yesssss!  Definitely the same artist.
     Now, I cannot remember what comic I read the original mystery strip in, only that the time-frame is between 1970 and 1972.  I would guess "The Victor", this being one of the major titles in boy's comics at the time.  Great!  Now I have an alphabetical database of Victor strips to work my way through, although if none of those strike a chord I shall have to move on to others like "The Hotspur" or "Wizard".
     Of course, I could be overthinking this ...

     I should remark that Conrad dug up a fair amount of information from comics blog "Down The Tubes", which is recommended reading if you have any interest in British comic history.

Operation EXPORTER
Ah yes, I think a bit of background is due here.  After the French armistice of June 1940, the various French colonies abroad either declared for the Vichy regime set up by Petain, or the Free French under De Gaulle.  Syria, under the repellent General Dentz, declared for Vichy, and then some.  Dentz's unspoken aim seemed to be getting awarded an Iron Cross from very talons of Herr Schickelgruber himself -

Justice caught up with him in the end, however.

     Which is getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  I cannot do better than copy Alan Moorehead's excellent and incisive description of the situation there, before the British & Commonwealth entered uninvited: "The Arabs wanted independence, the Turks wanted Aleppo, Vichy wanted to maintain it's mandate, the British wanted an ally, the Germans wanted a springboard in the Middle East and the polyglot, restless, mercurial people of Syria itself wanted fifty different things and set about intriguing for them with a vigour remarkable even for a country that has bred intrigue since Alexander the Great."

Aleppo, 1941

     Thus, things were remarkably messy before the first shots were fired, and Field Marshal Wavell, GOC Middle East, would have been quite happy to leave the mess alone and not bother invading; he was, however, politically outflanked and blatantly lied to by the Free French officers who assured him Syria would be a doddle -
    Of which more anon.

Back To Basil!
Basil Rathbone.  I did mention him yesteryon, didn't I?  Your Humble Scribe first encountered his wartime service in the First Unpleasantness very much in passing, when a photograph of the Liverpool Scottish had a note underneath pointing him out. Art!

Laugh at your peril!

     Ol' Bazza won the Military Cross for reconnaissance work he did in September of 1918, when the war was moving cross country at a rate of knots, and where he took conspicuously large risks gathering intelligence of what the Teutons were up to and what they were not.
     The other thing about Bazza is that he was an outstanding swordsman for real, getting to be on the Army Fencing Team.  So, when you see him playing the villain in a Hollywood swashbuckler, wielding an epee and attempting to turn Errol Flynn into a kebab, that's all being played for real.  In fact, he tutored Errol in fencing.

Again, any laughing and it's your funeral, matey.

     All this was before his most famous role, that of <adopts tones of hushed awe> Sherlock Holmes, which is a whole other game of cricket.  We may come back to this one, there's life in it yet.

I May Have Miscalculated
If you've been paying any attention whatsoever, then you'll have noticed that BOOJUM! has been doing some Polish cooking of late.  We tried Polish Potato Pancakes, which took a bit of preparation but which kept surprisingly well in the fridge afterwards, and the Student's Favourite, a.k.a. Zapiekanka, a type of French-bread pizza, and now - Bigos!  Art?

Hunter's Stew

     What you can't see here is the sheer size of what's been cooked; there's enough to make eight generous portions.  Conrad filled a bowl with bigos and barely made a dent in the panful sitting on the stove.  It's not bad, I gloastingly state, which is a good thing, since it seems I'm going to be eating a lot of it.  Myself*.  

Finally -
Time to go get some sunshine and generate a bit of Vitamin D - by sitting out in the back yard, not by going to rub shoulders with folks in the park, as it will be heaving today, the weather being good and it being a Bank Holiday.  Doubtless an expression of what Your Humble Scribe calls "The Kricknud Spirit"and I shall leave it to you to work that one out.

     Lamtumire**!

*  Wonder Wifey is off cabbage at the moment, before you ask.  And I added a smidgeon of Devil Hot Sauce, which will probably put off other parties. O  well.
**  Which as you all know is Albanian for "Goodbye"