Payne's Grey is no more

I went into the studio today. I hadn't been in for months. As always there had been a flurry of activity from my studio mate, John Clark, who has been busy painting some large canvases. I saw John last Saturday and he was so enthusiastic about what he had been doing. I rarely (who am I kidding - never) feel such unbridled enthusiasm for my own work and it is quite inspiring.

I sent my last Payne's Grey in to the New Statesman today. They are moving and redesigning and Payne's Grey has been given the bum's rush. David Gibbons, the designer there (who I have known for many years and worked with at the Independent), was very kind about the strip and I have to say it has been a pleasure to do over the years. I wish them luck with the redesign.

But it does mean that my last tenuous contact with newspapers has come to an end. I have contributed illustrations to magazines or newspapers or both for going on for thirty years, more or less continually. It gives me a slightly dizzy feeling to think I won't do that again.

Having had a sabbatical from editorial illustration - real illustration to a brief rather than a stand-alone spot - I find myself attracted to the idea of giving it another go. If anything occurs then I'll let you know. . .

Cough!

My son had a tooth out today. He is having a brace fitted and needs a tooth out to allow room for the required movement of his other teeth.

He had worked himself up about it rather having never had any dental work done. But the dentist was amazing and I don't think my son was really properly aware that the tooth was out until he was told.

I sat and watched the whole process and was not really sure what to expect from my son. Was he going to freak out? Was he going to scream? Burst into tears? In the end he did none of these things and simply lay there placidly and let the dentist go about his work. And it was fascinating to watch.

Every time the dentist was going to do anything potentially painful he made my son cough. Afterwards he explained that this overloads the brain long enough for it not to quite notice what is happening. Which makes the brain seem a bit dim. But it certainly worked.

I stopped myself from asking why he did not employ the same technique on me when he was yanking my tooth out last year.

The painting is of St Apollonia, patron saint of dentists owing to the fact that she knew all about having teeth pulled out. Come to think of it that really out to make her a patron saint of dental patients. She makes an appearance in a story in Tales from the Tunnel's Mouth.

Old man, big skies

It was my birthday today (and I am honoured to discover in the Guardian birthday list that I was born on the same day in the same year as Tim Burton) so we went to the Norfolk coast for the day and pottered about among the jolly sailors at Brancaster Staithe before going for a very nice lunch at the White Horse. Then we went off to Titchwell, an RSPB reserve we used to frequent when we lived in the area. Rising sea levels are going to force great changes on many places in East Anglia and Titchwell is one of them.

The reserve is made up of reed beds, marshes and open lakes sitting behind a wide beach and a wall of dunes that one day (and possibly quite soon) will succumb to a winter storm. There seems to be an acceptance that this change cannot be altogether prevented, but work is going on to try and manage it. The habitat will change, but a new one will be created.

It was nice that the marsh harriers put on a little display for us, but mainly it was a day for appreciating the big skies of Norfolk. Apocalyptic clouds moved in as we walked the beach but even the drizzle that fell as we returned to the car could not dampen our spirits. It gifted us a perfect rainbow as the sun burst through once more.

A good day.

Cormac and Oprah

Maybe someone from the Guardian reads my blog, because have been blogging about covers too. Or maybe its just coincidence. Sure. Coincidence. Take a look on the link on the left or click on 'Guardian' in this post.

And I know I have been raving about Cormac McCarthy a lot lately, but if you like his work or even if you don't, then listen to the man himself talk to Oprah. I would urge anyone who writes - or wants to write - to watch this clip. He is trying hard to look laid back and relaxed but is clearly as nervous as hell. I have to wonder how anyone persuaded him to do this.

But I'm glad they did.

You really can't judge a book by these covers

The horror, the horror. . .

During my conversation about book jackets with Helen Szirtes, she made the perfectly good point that a book jacket should not misrepresent a novel. I certainly think that a cover should always say something true about the novel.

These covers shamefully misrepresent the novels. In most cases they are trying to make them seem more accessible to the mass market paperback purchaser. Although the words - greatest adventure, greatest horror etc - sound exciting, the images are so weirdly ordinary (with the exception of the 1984 cover, which is superbly - and inexplicably - sleazy). Frankenstein's monster looks like a Midwestern farmhand. Treasure Island's cover seems to be showing a tiff between two 1950s beatniks. The depraved version of Dorian Gray has something of Tony Blair about him. Or maybe that's just me. And 'romance, terror and exotic adventure' are the very words we would all use to describe Heart of Darkness, I'm sure.

And what can one say about Nana? She certainly looks very naughty. But what's going on with those strange headless shirt fronts.

Odd.

Very, very odd.

Having said all that, I think a collection of pulp covers of classic novels might be a fine thing to own. And I am suddenly tempted to pulp my own covers, just for the hell of it.

Close encounters

I drove over to Norfolk to see Chris Riddell. Chris is married to a farmer's daughter, Jo Riddell ( a very talented artist in her own right) and they have a cottage near Jo's parents house. We used to live just down the road when we first moved out of London in 1993, renting a tied cottage on a nearby farm.

Chris and Jo have turned this place into a beautiful retreat and just to annoy me after I told them about the many problems with my own studio, they showed me round the studio they were building out of an old outbuilding. It was fantastically light and high and spacious and was nicer than anything I am ever likely to have in Cambridge whatever happens. Not that I begrudge Chris and Jo having such a lovely studio. No. No.

Noooooooo.

We had a wander round the local fields after a very good lunch on a beautiful day. Norfolk is a great county to get your lungs going again. It is a big breath of a place with the horizon always far off and hopeful. I miss those big skies and open spaces. I think I feel smaller in Cambridge. It is like hill walking: an open view is a heart-lifting thing. A city street is - well, it's pedestrian.

Chris and I have the capacity to talk and talk and talk. I need to do this and will bond with anyone who thinks it isn't weird. I can talk for hours and hours without ever needing to do anything else. Chris is the same. I'm not sure that our conversations aren't often parallel in a slightly autistic way, in that we are very different in our temperaments and outlooks. Chris has a much more unshakable belief in the decisions he makes than I do. He has a very uncluttered view of what he is doing. It is one of the many reasons he is so successful, I'm sure.

We sat so long in the low sunshine that when Chris got up he had been sun burnt on one side of his face like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters.

Cover to cover

I had a long telephone conversation with Helen Szirtes today about the amendments to The Dead of Winter. We were doing the last bit of tweaking before it goes off to be proofed. As I have said before - this is such an important stage in the life of a book. It is vital to have a good working relationship with your editor and vital also that you take this part seriously.

Inevitably we occasionally wandered off piste and during one such diversion I was pointing out that we seem to me to be in a real high point of paperback book jacket design in this country - which was certainly not the case a few years ago. I could chose lots of publishers to illustrate this, but I am going to pick on Vintage (part of the Random House empire).


Look at the wit and spark these covers have. Doesn't it make you want to buy the lot? More importantly, doesn't it make you want to read the lot? Go into a book shop and browse the fiction section and you will see jackets as good as these or better.

But you will need to be in the adult fiction section.

I know that these books would not work for children. They are too knowing of their subjects. They are almost in jokes, relying on the purchaser to have some prior knowledge of the book. They are books designed to be re-read. The Frankenstein cover for instance would be baffling to anyone who thinks they know the story but have not actually read the book.

But isn't the wit and the ingenuity of design transferable? Do children's books have to be quite so obvious?