An Old Friend

I caught a train to Bath for the day. Needed to go somewhere out of town, and there are gorgeous bookshops all over Bath. I wasn’t feeling quite right – underlying anxiety – as I wandered the streets, peering into windows, going in and browsing comics, old volumes of science books.

I called a friend, and we talked for an hour as I hopped between varying pockets of mobile phone reception.

In a cafe, I fed off the ephemeral clinks and chatter to finalise a story I’ve helped a client write. Their story – part of the new coaching offer to hand people a compass and a set of values through narrative alignment.

Eventually, I felt a little calmer, and right before I made my way back to the station, I stumbled across another second-hand bookshop I hadn’t seen before, and in the window was an old friend. The black ink handprint and the eye painted in a thick brush, bridged by a stencilled ‘TO’.

This is a collection of contemporary illustration from 2002, edited by Angus Hyland and Roanne Bell, and it sat on the tables in our illustration degree course for three years between 2003 and 2006. I never owned it back then because my housemate had it, but it got thumbed into submission as we fawned over the beautiful work of people we saw as gods. These were those. Them. That lot – the people who had what we wanted more than anything else.

So I stepped inside, reached into the window display, snatched it up, and after two debit card rejections and a cash machine dash, handed over £6.50.

In the street, I bumped into people, holding not a smartphone but a big book, because, like my childhood self, who had to put the new Leeds United shirt on the moment it fell into my possession, I couldn’t wait. I thumbed it in public. I thumbed it on the station platform. I didn’t even have the dignity to go to the bathroom to do it. The magic returned. My earlier malaise, already in retreat, ran for the hills as Olivier Kugler, Lucinda Rogers, Tom Gauld, David Foldvari, Isabel Bostwick, and more swung their big, inky light sabers and wizard staffs inside my soul.

What was beautiful about this to me was the certainty I felt of my love for art, for illustration, for storytelling, for play, and for something bigger than us, which we all serve. When fear grips, as it loves to do in turbulent times, it’s so easy to forget how much this means, how fundamental it is for the human condition, how we all need to be connected to something that leads us forward, illuminated in the dark.