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Tonight I went to a swanky party at a publishers on a date with the esteemed
children’s author Catherine Wilkins (don’t tell my wife).
Nosy Crow are a relatively new, but highly successful publisher, but they are doing phenomenally well and had the good taste to spot how brilliant Catie is. I am very proud of the stuff she has achieved. I wish I could say I had anything to do with it, but I have to self-publish my books and hold no kind of sway at all and this is all off her own bat. Still hoping she will JK Rowling the shit out of all this and I can stay in bed all day.
I was quite excited early on to see
Axel Scheffler, a rock star style God in the world of children’s publishing. He illustrates the Gruffalo books, but more excitingly for me, is the creator of the
Pip and Posy series, which Phoebe adores and I love reading to her. There’s so much detail in the illustrations so there’s lots to talk about beyond the story, but also one of our first father daughter connections was made reading these stories. There was a bit in one of them where Pip cries and cries and cries and I would pretend to cry as I read this part. Phoebe looked over at me concerned and patted my arm, to let me know it was all OK. She does it every time now. It’s our little thing. I didn’t know if I should go up to Axel and tell him about this. In the end I was too shy. But I can recommend his books to any parents out there and I am not even sleeping with him (yet).
At the party I also bumped into Tim Knapman, a man I first met over 30 years ago and who I haven’t seen in the last 25 years. He was doing comedy in the Oxford Union Jazz Cellar back in 1987, were he was in a double act with a guy called Will Preston (who very sadly died shortly after graduating and who I think about often).
It’s a jolt to meet someone after such a long time and whilst I am physically almost the same as when I was 20, Tim looked like he’d aged approximately three decades. I don’t know why our brains have problems with understanding that we all grow older, especially if we’re not constantly checking up on someone, but they clearly do as the many internet memes of “you’ll never believe what x looks like now†prove. We foolishly (in everyone’s case but my own) believe that we haven’t changed and that everyone should look the same as when we last saw them. We don’t want to accept that decades of our own lives have been swallowed by the monster of time and so we’re surprised when this is presented to us so bluntly.
It sounds like I am saying Tim looked old, but he didn’t. He just didn’t look 19. And must have been cursing my good fortune that I still did.
Anyway it was good to see him again. He’s a very successful children’s author and writer now,
and has written 55 books since I last saw him. I’ve done maybe five, but then I didn’t fill those up with childish drawings (well apart from Talking Cock). He was fondly remembering my first performance of “My Penis Can Sing†back in 1987 (although my memory of that first outing was that the audience was as bemused as they were amused and Will and Tim sitting near the front raising their eyebrows). It was also at a party that Tim organised that Stew and I first properly talked and decided to work together. So it’s all Tim’s fault.
We chatted a little about the people we had known and which ones we still knew and the ones who had disappeared entirely from our radar and gawped at the passage of time and tried not to think of where we might be when we blinked again and another 30 years have gone.
It was a fun party though. People who work in children's books are unsurprsingly all rather lovely people and predominantly female (which is probably not unconnected).
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And I should have said yesterday
