Stories
The stories in this section grew out of incidents that caught Victor’s imagination in everyday life. Some are based on personal experiences, others on overheard conversations or curious observations, but all unfold through a sequence of drawings rather than a single image. Together they show how an ordinary event can become the starting point for a visual narrative, with humour, surprise and the occasional unexpected twist.
Click the first image to expand the sequence, then use the arrows to scroll through the story.
The Lazy Pigeon
A chance encounter on the District line inspired this story. After hopping onto the train at Hammersmith, a pigeon settled in for the ride to Stamford Brook before calmly stepping off again a couple of stations down the line —as if commuting by Tube was the most natural thing in the world. The video was the first in a series of videos about the adventures of the Lazy Pigeon.
Dental Tales
The inspiration for this series came from Victor’s dentist, who was asked to write down the most common reasons patients give for neglecting their teeth. Their answers range from practical inconveniences to improbable excuses, revealing that imagination often flourishes where oral hygiene does not.
Why you need to clean your teeth
Dental Crown Incident
Bayadère Dominos
The entrance of the Shades in La Bayadère is one of ballet’s most celebrated moments, demanding extraordinary precision, control and balance. Watching this scene can be an anxious experience: every slight wobble seems as though it might trigger disaster, and there is always a sense of relief when the shades complete their entrance. This sequence imagines what might happen if that last Shade were to lose her footing.
Unfrozen Shoulder
Stephen Sachs, a wonderful Oesteopath, fixed Victor’s Frozen Shoulder.
Triple Bypass
Victor underwent a triple bypass heart operation in 2017. This is his account of his experience.
Pilates
Victor’s first Pilates lesson felt less like gentle exercise and more like an elaborate medieval torture session. Yet, despite being stretched, twisted, pressed and whisked into shape, he emerged feeling surprisingly relaxed—and somehow convinced it had done him good.
Happy Zappy
Knotting Problem
The Rhaetian Railway between Bergün and Preda in Switzerland is one of the great feats of late nineteenth-century railway engineering, climbing the mountains through a series of snaking bends and twisting tunnels including one that loops 360 degress. This cartoon imagines the line carrying on just a little too far—tieing itself into an impossible knot from which even the Swiss reputation for clockwork efficiency is going to find difficult to extricate itself.
The Optimist
On a visit to a friend’s house for lunch, Stephen, forever the optimist, decided we were going to eat outside ….
Buteyko’s Discovery
This is an extract from a draft book about the scientific background to the Buteyko breathing method. The chapter is a self contained account of Professor’s Buteyko discovery that breathing too much will make you ill and how to reverse this process by breathing less.
