Chris Riddell

As we're talking, Kate, I'm just sort of having a look at the latest collection that I've done.

It's called Poems to Save the World With.

Again, I illustrated this during the coronavirus sort of pandemic.

And it's a sort of feeling, I think, of both wanting to sort of look at poetry as a way of escaping in some sense, but also...

You know, transporting us somewhere else in difficult times, but also looking at, I suppose, an idea that it can embody, you know, what we're all feeling.

It can be a wonderful sort of way of producing collective thought.

And so for me, poetry was a wonderful sort of balm, I think, in the sort of rather terrible times we've been living in.

Yes, yes, I am.

And I've been...

I've been doing something recently, just predates the pandemic by a couple of months.

But it was something to stop me shouting at the radio, you know, that terrible thing where you're listening to the morning news, which I do each morning.

And last November, we had a general election.

It didn't go well for some sections of the population, including myself.

We felt sort of that the wrong person had been elected.

It was a very sad moment for many people on the left in this country.

And I resorted to shouting at the radio as the results came in and

you know, completely pointlessly.

And I thought, I must stop this behaviour.

You know, I'm waking up my wife, I'm concerning my children, I must stop this.

So I reached for my sketchbook and each morning as I turned on the news, instead of shouting at, you know, the minister telling us something unlikely, I would do a little drawing to make myself sort of feel better as a sort of cathartic response.