The second instalment from cartoonist Dan Archer. For the full strip, visit here.

As promised a while back, and now I’ve been given permission to put it online, I’ve posted a copy of the article I wrote for this month’s The Resident magazine. It’s wry, it’s bolshy and its main point is to sell my book that a private education isn’t automatic proof of either good manners or a sense of social duty. I’ll leave you to guess which of the two I actually do have.

You can download a PDF copy of the article from this link, or if you prefer to have a browse through related pieces then this is the page to visit.

Introducing the brilliant new comic strip by Dan Archer, illustrator of Swinesend: Britain’s Greatest Public School. You can find out more about Dan and his work by visiting his website, his blog (on which he posts lots of recent work) and his MySpace profile.

If you’d like to view a larger version of Dan’s cartoon, please visit the CPSA site at www.crappublicschools.org/dan/

Unless I’ve very much got my wires crossed, there is an article of mine in this month’s Resident magazine, a glossy which is distributed to 50,000 homes in Belgravia, Chelsea, Fulham, Holland Park, Kensington, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill, Pimlico and South Kensington. Once again, I’m taking a pop at public schools and, I believe, my piece will be accompanied by an extract from Swinesend.

A copy is being sent to me, and I’ll ask whether I can reproduce it on this blog, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with a snippet from near the end, into which I worked one of my favourite gags (which I first read here):

As anyone who has seen drunken and well-heeled teenagers burning stolen fences on the North Cornwall coast knows, a public school education is not automatic proof of either good manners or a sense of social duty. And nor has it ever been. As the former brothel madam Janie Jones recalled after dealing with a client who mentioned his schooling to guarantee his behaviour: “We didn’t know what a Wykehamist was, so we looked it up in the dictionary. When we couldn’t find it, we assumed it meant pervert. So Franie went, and he was.”

Rowan Pelling, who is one of the finest people alive, gives Swinesend and the Crap Public Schools Association lavish praise in today’s Telegraph.

If these tragic tales ring bells, may I recommend the funniest website of all time: The Crap Public Schools Association. It is “…for those unfortunate people who attended a British public school and those who did not but, perversely, wished that they had. Or, like many Labour Cabinet ministers, those who did and wished they could say they hadn’t.”

There’s even Britain’s first online public school, Swinesend, where you can be ill educated for free. “New scum” can sign up for virtual bullying: “If you’ve got a moment, we’d love to strap your head to a boiling radiator pipe.” The site is worth perusing for vintage school songs alone. Take this Edwardian paean to Stamford School designed to be sung “with gusto” to the tune of The Vicar of Bray:

“In Father Time’s remoter days, By strange coincidences/Noah built the Ark and someone else/Schola Stamfordiensis.”

Trust me, after a couple of hours online you’ll start thinking they should loan state-sector teachers to public schools.

Bill has posted an entertaining article over at Harry’s Place arguing that the last thing the state education system needs is an injection of the public school spirit.

He might have mangled his Greek (thereby disregarding his university’s motto of AIEN ARISTEUEIN (sorry, I can’t get the Greek character set to work)) but it’s a good read nonetheless. And it seems to have shifted one or two copies of Swinesend.

After Bill Dornan and I wrote this piece in The Times last month, we had some very unusual follow-up from the media. None was more offbeat than the interest shown by a magazine called Membership Today, which has just published this article on us. Nice work Alex, but we were drinking those brandies and soda in the morning: nothing like fortifying yourself when you’re about to head towards Brixton tube station.

On a related note, I’ve just had an email from someone who is busy reading Swinesend:

Bought and am reading the book - frighteningly so very true in many many places. Were any of the authors educated at Haileybury, or are all these places the same?

They’re all the same James, they’re all the same.