14/04/2025

I am Ragle Gumm.

This morning I woke up to find myself without a daily deadline for the first time in almost 40 years.

For the majority of my adult life, my days have been measured out according to a simple formula. There is an empty Alex-cartoon-shaped space in tomorrow’s newspaper and it is my job to fill it. If I think of an idea for a cartoon on a given day, it means I have managed to stay in the same place in my life. If I think of two joke ideas, then I have hauled myself ahead by one day. If I don’t think of any ideas, then I have fallen behind by a day. OK, there are weekends and holidays to be taken into account and the fact that Charles, who draws the cartoon strip, also contributes jokes, but all the same I find it hard to relax on a given day if I haven’t thought of something funny. My days are ranked red, amber or green according to my comedic output.

It brings to mind my favourite science fiction novel “Time Out Of Joint” by Philip K Dick. It’s a book I loved as a teenager, well before my life began to take on strange similarities with it. The novel is set in 1959 - the year before I was born. I once read that we are all fascinated by the historical period immediately preceding our birth. From our point of view the world had been trundling aimlessly for millennia up until that point, but now suddenly something huge and significant is about to enter it. “Time Out Of Joint” is set in a small Midwestern town, where very little happens. The hero is Ragle Gumm, which always struck me as a wonderfully exotic name that no one in West Berkshire, where I grew up, could possibly be called. Ragle Gumm is a loner and a loser. The one talent he has in life is to solve a puzzle in the local newspaper called “Where Will the Little Green Man be Next?”. In fact so good is he, that he wins the competition every single day. He himself has no idea how he solves the puzzle, it’s a combination of intuition and maths, but he always nails it. So his life is trapped in an endless loop. The movie “The Truman Show” is clearly based on this novel, though I don’t think it’s acknowledged in the credits. It turns out that Ragle’s daily preoccupation has a much larger significance than he supposes, but I’ll avoid any plot spoilers here.

My life (until now) has followed a similar pattern. Every day I have a set task to do. I complete it successfully and move onto the next day, where I have to do the same thing (hopefully in a slightly different way) all over again. I don’t really understand how I write jokes (any more than Ragle Gumm understands how he solves the Little Green Man puzzle). This is annoying as it means I can’t teach the skill to anyone else and generate some handy extra income in the sunset years of my career.

As a Cancerian I am attracted to routines, but this was also something that gave my life validation. Everyday I had to produce something, albeit just a silly cartoon about compliance or expenses claims, which would live on in a book in some investment banker’s downstairs loo forever. OK, it’s not the greatest contribution to humanity ever made. Not like discovering penicillin, but it’s something. But now that Alex has come to an end as a daily cartoon, I am like some animal living in a zoo who is used to having its food thrown to it each day by the zookeepers and has forgotten how to hunt. I will now have to learn to self-motivate to survive, to do bits of writing that I won’t automatically get paid for and that someone won’t obligingly publish in a national newspaper the next day. Like writing this blog piece for example. And unlike Ragle Gumm I might not win every time.

Having the opportunity to do some longer form writing has its attractions. A cartoon strip is like a Haiku. I know that sounds pretentious, but what I mean is that both are stripped down, minimalist art forms. In the Alex cartoon we had a (self-imposed) limit of 120 words in each strip and preferably we tried to keep the verbiage down to as little over 100 words as possible. Unnecessary adjectives, extraneous phrases and flowery figures of speech had to be crossed out, as they add to the word count without adding to the sense. Whereas in an article like this I can write as many of them as I like, I can employ a multitude of them, an abundance of them, a plethora, a plenitude, a cornucopia… And now that we’re living in the digital age where we are no longer restricted by the physical dimensions of the newspaper or magazine page we are writing for, we have free rein, perhaps dangerously, to ramble on forever and ever and ever and ever..

I was asked by an Australian journalist in an interview the other week whether I feel any bitterness or anger at the plug being pulled on Alex. Not really. Being found out is an occupational hazard that all creative people face. In fact just about everyone in the middle-class corporate world suffers from imposter syndrome, especially in this age of AI, where an algorithm could probably do most of our jobs anyway. For years I have been expecting the tap on the shoulder and a quiet voice to murmur in my ear: “I’m terribly sorry, there seems to have been a dreadful mistake, We’ve been paying you real money to publish your silly thoughts for the last forty years. The person responsible for appointing you has been relieved of their responsibilities.” The curtain coming down on this part of my career after all this time may be less end of an era, more end of an error.

It’s a marvellous feeling to think that as of today I can wake up, look at the news online and not feel obliged to try to think of some humorous angle on what I read. The world is a grim enough place at the moment without me adding more cynicism to it. Sod’s Law of course dictates that this is the week when Donald Trump decides to take an axe (or should that be ax?) to global financial markets and there are endless humorous opportunities for the jobbing financial cartoonist. Maybe this isn’t a liberation after all. Maybe I’m already starting to miss those daily deadlines. Maybe the last four decades have turned me into a stress junkie.

I was told recently by a couple of my City contacts who I was lunching with that whenever people discuss the Alex cartoon the inevitable comment is “How do they keep coming up with the jokes day after day?” (I’m blushing as I repeat this outrageous flattery). That was the easy bit, I’m now thinking. It may be that NOT having to come up with a joke every day could be tougher on me psychologically.

Well, that’s this piece finished. Can I have my money now? Er, Hello.. Hello?