Memory of the day 1st May 2025

Between 1987 and 1990 the "New Scientist" magazine used to run a cartoon strip called "Albert the Experimental Rat," a character created by the late cartoonist David Austin (1935-2005) which had previously appeared in a number of other publications.

(Albert actually has a Facebook page which you can find here.)

There were a lot of very funny Albert cartoon strips in that period. I think my favourite was probably one called "The Medium is the Mess" about IT problems which at some stage may be the subject of a memory post like this one.

My second favourite, which appeared on or about the first of May, was called "May Day." AS today is May Day, is seems appropriate to remember it.

Against a backdrop of Morris Dancers and other tradition English country festivities, Albert the Experimental rat was shown musing something like ...

"May Day - a time when we celebrate old traditions in homage to old, vanished and long discredited powers ...

The last panel of the cartoon showed an imaginary issue of "Ye Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," a reference to a publication written during the reign of Alfred the Great in the late 9th century, e.g. well over a thousand years before) presented as if that Chronicle had been an ancient tabloid newspaper, with a front page featuring a supposed woodcut of the former Labour prime minister Sir Harold Wilson, with the headline 

"Wilson declares May Day holiday." 

Albert finished his musing with "Such as Labour governments."

Which I suppose demonstrates all too clearly that ideas and parties which some people might think were finished can rise, fall, rise and fall again, and rise yet again.

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