Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

It’s always nice when themes from the cartoon resonate beyond the financial world. Reader Lawrence Slade emailed to say how much he enjoyed our jacket on the back of the chair jokes and noted that it was a concept “familiar across multiple industries”. This cartoon from 2022 is an example of one of the twenty-plus instances of the jacket-on-chair trope in our cartoon over the years (and there are probably more which we’ve forgotten about).

For the benefit of those of you who are self-employed or who work in offices with scrupulously honest, diligent people, we should explain that the jacket-on-chair ruse consists of having a spare jacket, which, when you are departing for a long lunch, you leave on the back of your office chair to suggest to your colleagues and boss that you have merely popped away from your desk for a minute or two.

This was an idea that we pressed into service in relation to changing trends in the corporate world, such as dress-down codes, hot-desking and electronic tags that pinpoint office workers’ location. When Alex’s tailor came into the bank on one occasion he measured Alex’s chair to get the right fit for his spare jacket. American bond trader Ruth went into labour in 1993 and made sure to leave her jacket on her office chair, so that her colleagues would believe her assurances that she would be coming back to work after the birth. And there was a reference to the jacket-on-chair ruse in a cartoon about gay bankers and the importance of not staying “in the closet”. Outside the office we used the concept in relation to putting old jackets on scarecrows (“birds must be stupid” to fall for that old trick), on Guy Fawkes bonfire effigies and with allusion to the environmental installation artist Christo, whose trademark was draping buildings in fabric. There were also references to strait jackets, corporate gilets and fire warden’s jackets being employed in connection with this decoy strategy.

Whenever we did a fantasy story there was invariably a jacket-on-chair joke. When Alex was an Allied PoW in a World War Two prison camp he ran up a fake RAF jacket to make the Germans think that he was still in the building when he had in fact escaped; in 2012 he believed that the world was about to end (according to the Mayan calendar) so went out to a long lunch, but left his jacket on his chair just in case the Mayans were wrong (they were); and, lastly, he draped his jacket on the back of his chair before being taken away by a mysterious man in black in our final storyline. It was almost a duty for us to include a jacket-on-chair joke in this farewell episode, as a sort of homage to this leitmotif of the cartoon (and to keep open the possibility that Alex might return). The final image on our website was of Alex’s empty desk in a Matrix-style simulation with his jacket hanging rather forlornly on the back of his chair.

Just to prove that Lawrence Slade was correct in identifying the ubiquity of the jacket ruse, Russell noticed on his summer holidays in Tuscany that there was always a jacket on the back of the chair at the (frequently unoccupied) reception desk of the hotel where he was staying, especially at the weekend. Suspiciously it was always the same jacket - which was something of a giveaway, as the Italians are a stylish people and a receptionist would surely not wear the same outfit all week.

Is there a jacket-on-chair joke in our new retrospective book “The Best of Alex 1987 - 89"? You’ll have to buy it to find out..

Click on the cartoon above to see it in its original 2020s 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.