I'm very happy to see Quentin Blake knighted today. His famous partnership with Roald Dahl produced the most memorable books of my childhood (George's Marvellous Medicine, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG) and my favourite- Revolting Rhymes.
I was given the book as a birthday present -my sixth birthday from memory- and every story I wrote for the next three years seemed to have flavours of Dahl's 'Cinderella' parody. Looking back over the very unpolitically-correct verses and illustrations (you can now watch them on Youtube as well) I can still see the attraction.
In those days, our school story books had a lined page on the right for the words and a blank page on the left for us to draw pictures. If we were good, we were allowed to type up our story on the one Apple IIe computer in the classroom. We'd then print it out on the daisy wheel printer (the best part was tearing off the dots on the side of the paper) and glue it into our story books next to the hand-drawn picture.
Twenty five years later I'm still writing silly stories and pasting little pictures next to them.
Thanks Sir Quentin.
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