Chris Riddell

But I didn't.

I resisted that urge and just listened on my phone.

And he read me this wonderful story.

And as he read it, I just thought, yes, this is something I'm really going to enjoy doing.

And so after that call, the text duly arrived.

And then this extraordinary thing happened that has happened to all of us across the world.

our world sort of shut down.

And so this is a picture book that I actually worked on and illustrated during lockdown.

And I think some of the sort of intensity maybe in it, some of the colour, some of the compositional sort of chaos in it, rather reflects the way I was feeling, you know, quite sort of locked down and in my own little world.

And this was a response, I think, to a sort of feeling of

of sort of helplessness in a way.

And it was wonderful to be able to work on such a creative project while there was such huge uncertainty in the world, which, you know, as we know, continues.

A little girl came up to me at a book event that I was doing in Birmingham a few years ago.

This was a little while ago now.

She was Afro-Caribbean.

She came up to me and said, would you put me in one of your books?

And I smiled and said, oh, of course I would.

What a lovely idea, I said.

And it occurred to me that as a sort of

you know, a white middle-aged man and father of, you know, my own kids, all my characters tend to reflect my children.