Number four all over

It is 1979 and I am so desperate to look cool that I am smoking. I don't smoke anymore, I should hasten to add. It is, of course, a disgusting habit and, as this photograph clearly shows, does not so much make you look cool, as makes you look worried.

Or a little bit like an unconvincing undercover member of the vice squad.

I am modelling a borrowed leather jacket and suede shoes. The haircut is a 'number 4 all over'.

Leather tie and big badge

Here I am in about 1977. The photograph was taken one morning as we set off to college by my old friend Alan Adler. I don't look too thrilled at either the prospect of study or of being photographed. I seem to be going for a young Bob Dylan/John Cooper-Clarke look here. I notice that I am wearing my old school blazer and what - if memory serves - was a leather tie. I can't remember what the enormous badge said, but I'm sure it was pithy.

School tie and purple shirt

So here I am in Manchester in what I'm guessing to be about 1978. I look quite cross about something. I may have been trying to look cool. Or it may have been something to do with the itchy purple nylon shirt I was wearing (a shirt that was a favourite because it was vile). I may be wearing my old school tie.

I wanna destroy passers by. . .

We went to a party at Joad Raymond's house yesterday. I have never really got the knack of parties. I always mean to mingle, but I rarely do. I seem to end up with someone I already know and talk to them over the surrounding noise until I am hoarse. So it was, pretty much, this time.

I had a long chat to my friend Paul Grunfeld who at one point told me how he used to be a punk, the image of which I have struggled to get out of my head ever since. Paul must have been the most charming, well-spoken and polite punk in the land! But it did get me thinking about my time at college in the late seventies. . .

I was at Manchester between 1976 and 1980. Punk took off as I arrived, but I struggle to think of many 'punks' at the art college apart from maybe the artist and musician Linder who was a couple of years ahead of me doing Graphic Design and going out with Howard Devoto of the Buzzocks and then Magazine (a favourite band of mine).

I suppose the problem is that punk has come to mean something different. If you say 'punk' to someone now, they see one of those sad King's Road types with their spiked crest and piercings, but punk was never that clear a style. Being a punk was not like being a skinhead or a teddy boy: there was no dress code. It was supposed to anarchic for goodness sake. If you look at a photograph of a punk gig from the time, you will struggle to find anyone who looks like a 'punk'. Punk was as much an attitude as anything else.

Punk was also, to my mind, a very young and suburban kind of a thing. I already felt too old at 19/20. In any case I remember finding the music faintly ridiculous on first hearing, though that changed quite quickly. But I think I was always more interested in American bands like Television and Patti Smith and Richard Hell than I was with The Vibrators or The Adverts (though I saw the Clash and the Buzzcocks and many, many others, many, many times). I still get a buzz out of hearing the odd blast from that era but I hate nostalgia. It's lazy and dishonest.

Punk was too visceral and raw to ever be widely popular and even those who took part got tired of its limitations. I can remember watching Magazine walk off twice because people were spitting at them - a shower of spittle being the equivalent to a standing ovation in 1978). As far as they were concerned punk was over and they wanted to move on. And so did we all, really. Spitting is not a very accurate form of applause and I liked to be near the front.

The punks I knew that used to hang out at the Student's Union bar in Manchester and come to the gigs there and at the other small venues like Rafters or the Russell Club, were not art students at all. Most art students I knew were very, very straight and conservative, whatever the caricature of them being wild and crazy might be. Soul and disco, reggae and funk music were a much bigger deal to most art students I knew in the late seventies and you were much more likely to hear Bob Marley or Funkadelic on someone's record player (you may need to Google this term if you are under 40) than the Clash.

So cold

I went to the studio yesterday for the first time in ages. It was so cold, I just put my coat back on and left after about ten minutes.

I went again today, but it was just as cold. I did stick it out a bit longer this time, but I had lost contact with my feet by the time I left. There is a romantic idea of artists and writers freezing away in garrets, so I suppose I'm embracing the cliche.

But not with any enthusiasm.

Hitchin Boys

I went to Hitchin Boys School yesterday to give a talk about my illustration work for a change. Tom Pitchford, the librarian there, had invited me back after I visited the school last year to talk about my writing. It was a pleasure to be back.

I decided that I would use the visit to experiment with PowerPoint and so made a little slide show of my work in advance and put it on a memory stick. Of course it didn't work.

To be fair, it was not the fault of PowerPoint. But because I was relying so heavily on technology, the glitches we had with the projector in the hall were pretty distracting. The IT people did get the thing working eventually and it worked fine for the second session. As frustrating as it was, I still came away thinking that this was definitely the way to go. Next time, though I would take my laptop instead of using a memory stick and thereby have that little bit more control over things.

Jail-breaker Jack

Many years ago - when I had just begun to write for children - I did an illustration job for Anne Clark when she was at Hodder (she is now at the Piccadilly Press). It was for a book by John and Mary Gribben called What's the Big Idea - Chaos and Uncertainty.

I got on very well with Anne - and it occurs to me now that I have not spoken to her in over two years - and when I dropped the illustrations off, we went for lunch. During our conversation she asked me if I had ever considered writing non-fiction for children. I said I had.

Anne is one of the very best editors I have worked with. She was very patient with me given that I had barely written anything before meeting her, and she taught me a lot. We went on to work together on two of my favourite and least successful books (in sales terms) to date (neither are in print). One was Witch Hunt, about the Salem witch trials; the other was Jail-breaker Jack about the notorious 18th Century thief and prison breaker, Jack Sheppard. Sheppard was arguably the most famous man in the world at one point - albeit postumously. He was like some bizarre cross between Ronnie Biggs and David Beckham.

Jail-breaker Jack was stuffed full of illustrations. Here are a few of them. Oh - and I did the curly lettering as well. . .

There was also a strip picture section when he makes his most famous escape from Newgate. This was not my idea - there was a print available shortly after the escape that uses a kind of strip form, and George Cruikshank used it as well when he illustrated William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Jack Sheppard