Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. Martin Jackson has suggested this opportune strip about hosepipe bans from August 1990.

The heatwave of 1990 broke the record set almost 80 years previously for the hottest day ever in the UK, when temperates reached 37.1 degrees in Cheltenham on August 3rd 1990. That record has now slipped to 7th position in the all-time rankings and, with the third heatwave of 2026 underway, may have sunk even lower by the time you read this.

As Martin points out, Clive fits the role of the local busybody and snoop perfectly and one wonders what he much have been like as a child. No doubt he was the classroom snitch, always on the look-out for rule-breaking, tattling to the teachers and getting his classmates into trouble. Clearly a career in compliance beckoned for him in adult life. Maybe we missed a trick there.

Crazy paving was a symbol of late-twentieth-century suburban naffness. The word “crazy” suggesting the diametric opposite of the mindset of the sensible, sober, practical person who would choose to have their garden covered over with low-maintenance concrete slabs. It seems to sum up the sterile nature of Clive’s life. Garden gnomes (seen in the corner of frame one) were also very naff. Charles had to take a few liberties with the perspective in the last frame to manage to fit in the two neighbours, the crazy paving in the garden and Clive behind a twitching curtain talking on an old-fashioned landline.

The cartoon is on the standard Alex theme of hypocrisy and the unreliability of language. The two neighbours talk as if they were law-abiding and above-board, when in fact they are the ones who are trying to cheat the system.

The joke is based on a double pun. The English language - due to its lack of cases, genders and adjectival agreements - is one of the most malleable (and thus pun-friendly) in the world. Unlike more rule-based languages, like German, English is capable of all sorts of ambiguities, confusions and deceptions, which is perhaps why it has been adopted as the international language of business. The turnaround here is a little clunkier than we’d have liked, but we struggled for a long time to make it work as smoothly as possible. Back then we sat at a table together in a pokey little office in London’s Docklands (long before the area was fashionable) and passed versions of cartoons back and forwards to each other. It was the old-fangled and labour-intensive way that creative processes worked in those days before people got AI to write everything for them.

Alex and Clive had been fired by Rupert a few weeks earlier, which is why Clive was hanging around his house during the daytime (back in the days before WFH) and able to perform his self-appointed neighbourhood watch duties. This was the first of four occasions on which Clive was made redundant during the cartoon’s 38-year run, which is probably about par for an investment banking career. Each time he managed to get a new job he found himself sitting at a desk next to Alex: most recently in 2023 at Alex’s financial boutique. When Alex and Clive went to Hell in the story “It’s A Wonderful Crisis” they were doomed to spent the whole of eternity sitting next to each other in Hellbank, trading human souls. Perhaps for each of them this was their private Hell.

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 1990s context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.