Mortal engines

I had an email from Merche Clark last Thursday. Merche is John Clark's sister and I will be staying with her when I go to Rio. In fact it was she who set that whole trip in motion. My attempts to email her always end with the message bounced straight back. I had to reply using John as a go-between.

I saw John and Judith on Saturday night. It was Judith's birthday the other day, close to mine, and she invited us over to celebratewith mutual friends. The conversation was very middle-class and middle aged, with much moaning about house prices, the economy, the state of education etc etc.

John thanked me for recommending Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books. He and his son had really enjoyed them. They are wonderful books and I heartily recommend them to anyone reading this blog. They are brilliantly realised fantasy books, packed full of great scenes and vividly drawn characters. I doubted that Reeve would be able to sustain the level of intensity over the course of the series, but he really does. He knows that world inside out and he really cares about his characters. John rightly said they deserved to be filmed.

What great movies they'd make in the right hands.

Like fish and chips. . .

I was once in newspapers.

I saw Chris Riddell today as he passed through Cambridge on his way from the Observer to Norfolk. We sat in an almost deserted bar and talked about all kinds of stuff. Chris is always so enthusiastic about everything and so encouraging.

I have known Chris for many years - he was best man at my wedding. Our paths first crossed when I stood in for him as an illustrator at The Economist in London when he was on holiday in 1990. When he came back, the art editor, Penny Garret (whom I'd worked with previously at The Listener and the Telegraph) decided the paper could do with another illustrator and so I was taken on, sitting between Chris and Dave Simonds every Wednesday for the next six years.

Chris and I also worked together at the Independent on Sunday where I wrote a strip he illustrated called Bestiary and I took over his political cartoon spot briefly (Chris also did the Monday cartoon while Michael Heath did the rest of the week), before following him to The Observer under Andrew Jaspen. I did another strip there - called Babel - and did a caricature for their profile spot, while Chris did the political cartoon. I did not last very long. Chris is still there.

Chris left the Economist some time after I did; Dave is still there, doing sterling work (as well as doing the New Statesman political cartoon and stuff for various British newspapers. I left to take a job on The Independent under Andrew Marr's editorship. I did illustrations throughout the paper, often on the front page, and eventually did a daily strip called 7.30 for 8.00 as well as the daily political cartoon spot. When Andrew Marr left, I was made an offer it was all too easy to refuse and left the heady world of daily newspapers for good.

It was Chris who suggested I should write a children's book, and Chris who took the manuscript to Annie Eaton at what was then Transworld. My (published) writing career took off from that point.

Chris drew this brilliant birthday card for me. . .

Life, freedom, peace

Most of the memorials in Westminster Abbey were as you would expect, but there were a couple of unusual ones. This one to Edmund Halley is rather nice, I think.

Here are a couple of battered bat-winged corbels

And I do love a bit of incised lettering. . .

Five O

So I'm fifty. I said farewell to my forties on Monday with a trip to the Tate Modern to see the Cy Twombly exhibition. I never ever saw myself getting to fifty. In fact I'm not sure I ever saw myself getting to forty. It feels strange.

We had tried to get away from dull old England but failed. In the end we went to London for a long weekend. We stayed at the Goodenough Club in Bloomsbury and treated ourselves to a suite. It was my first visit to the Goodenough, but it certainly won't be my last.

We crammed quite a lot into out trip. We went to the Hammershoi exhibition at the Royal Academy, which was lovely in a quiet and austere kind of way. You could almost hear the clocks ticking and the rattle of carriage wheels on the cobbles outside. Lots of women looking out of windows or reading unseen books. Interiors are already intimate, but the presence of someone viewed from behind seems to make them even more so. Lovely paintings, if a little sad.

Cy Twombly at Tate Modern was a different kettle of fish altogether. My son found the Hammershois difficult because they were so muted, but found Twombly even more so. He was like the little boy in the Emperor's New Suit of Clothes, saying 'More scribbles' every now and then.

And do you know sometimes he was right, I think. Sometimes there just isn't enough there. But when there is - as in the Four Seasons paintings, they are fantastic. Just like at the Doig show a while back, I came away very much inspired to get back to my own paintings.

We saw Prince Caspian, which was not nearly so bad as I thought it might be. I have mentioned some of my thoughts about C S Lewis elsewhere, but this was not a book I knew. Hellboy II was a lot better though. The imagination behind the look of the monsters was very inspiring. The winged Death figure was especially good, I thought. I made a mental note to push things a bit more. The only downside was one of the elements of the film is almost identical to an element in one of the stories in Tales from the Tunnel's Mouth. But there you go; it will look like I've copied Hellboy, but it was written ages before. Honest.

We spent our last morning in Westminster Abbey which was a little exhausting. Too many tombs. It looks like a salvage yard sometimes, there are so many indifferent Victorian statues vying for attention. The tomb of the unknown soldier is easily the most moving, lying quietly, albeit garlanded in poppies. The anonymity seems particularly striking and poignant among all the me, me, me of all those names.

But the medieval parts are still fresh. The Chapter House is lovely, as are the royal tombs. There are some incredibly inventive miserichords. The ancient throne is great. It would have been good to see Edward the Confessor's tomb, but there is not general access to it. The famous Cosmati Pavement was being restored - although, to be honest after Venice and Rome, it did not seem quite so amazing as all that.

I came back to lots of emails. One from Francis Mosley giving me more reasons to be cheerful (after having sent him a list of reasons why I have been miserable). And there was some cheer to be had elsewhere. The British School in Rio was in touch with my timetable (which looks fun but exhausting). I am in Brazil from 27 September to 4 October and coincidentally, Rocco who are publishing Uncle Montague's tales of Terror in Brazil, also got in touch to see if I can do an event for them whilst I'm over. I have to admit that it is all very exciting.

The Welsh Johnny Depp

We went round to Joad's place this evening for dinner (or is it supper these days - I've lost track). He cooked us some very tasty food and we talked for a very long time. I may have droned on as I seem to do more and more these days. I am becoming such an old fart. I should stand in the middle of Cambridge with a 'The End of the World is Nigh' placard and be done with it. I've never been what you could call a 'people person', but I'm certainly becoming more misanthropic as I get older. Maybe everybody does.


Joad asked me if I'd noticed a comment posted on my blog by one of his ex-students. I hadn't and did a search when I got back. Having found it, I was pleased to see that she was about to go and buy some of my books. I was also very amused by her description of Joad as a 'Welsh Johnny Depp'. I suddenly had a picture of Joad's lecture's resembling the one given by Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, filled with adoring female students fluttering their eyelashes.

Soggy, grey and miserable

Another frustrating day. We seem destined not to get our last minute holiday booked. In desperation we even tried a travel agent today in the hope that he may have some secret deals we could not access, but he said that they had never been busier as the whole of the UK try to escape this soggy, grey, and miserable island for sunnier parts. There were no deals left to be had unless we were interested in going to the Costa del Sol. And we aren't.

Joad Raymond came round to collect his son from a sleepover and we had a long chat over a cup of coffee. He was telling us that he has booked himself in to run the Istanbul Marathon - an intercontinental marathon that crosses from Europe to Asia. He ran 22 miles on Sunday. I'm not sure I could run 2.

But I have been thinking of taking up running in a bid to get back to my fighting weight. I shall be picking Joad's brains if I do. He has already told me about a shop in Cambridge where they fit you with running shoes after examining your running technique. When they see my running technique they may simple refuse to serve me.

We will rock you

During my walk round Edinburgh yesterday, I visited the new (ish) National Museum of Scotland. I didn't have long to look round and I will certainly come back. Susan Harvey had recommended it to me and the early collection is really fantastic and beautifully displayed. I love objects - like the flint arrowheads here - where the beauty comes from the perfection of the design. They are functional objects but have an aesthetic integrity - a truth - a rightness - about them. The beauty isn't necessary (the maker wasn't making them for their beauty) but neither is it accidental.


I had a cup of coffee in the rather dull cafe and watched a troupe of girls doing Scottish dancing. They were a rather amusing range of shapes and sizes, dressed in tartan skirts, black tops and tights, all of which made them look remarkably like Ronald Searle's St Trinian's girls as they bounced about to the bray of bagpipes. And speaking of bagpipes, I hope I never again - as I did walking down Edinburgh's High Street - hear Queen's 'We Will Rock You' played on bagpipes.


I also walked around one of my favourite cemeteries (it suddenly strikes me as a little odd that I should have any favourite cemeteries). Greyfriars is wonderfully grim. The urge to clean the soot off buildings does not seem to have taken hold in Edinburgh the way it has in other British cities and some places benefit from grime. The Scott Monument is a jet black and all the more striking for it.


Greyfriars Cemetery always seems edgier than your average cemetery or graveyard. Drunks and addicts do seem to be strangely attracted to graveyards, and on my last visit here I was growled at by a particularly aggressive wino. This time there were a couple of youths with a dog, yelling and up for trouble.


Rather than the euphemistic or sentimental creations you often see in graveyards, Greyfriars, croaks 'Death!' at you at every turn. There are hundreds of skulls and skeletons; often crudely carved and eroded and encrusted with grime to add a layer of Gothic gloom. I drew a few of the skulls: