The six-year period covered in my new book has witnessed wars, a global plague, more UK prime ministers than I can be arsed to google and the death of one head of the British royal family (at the time of writing). It has also been a tumultuous time for football. Guys, two different teams won the Premier League.
My job each Tuesday is to deliver a cartoon summary of the week’s football stories for the woke, anti-growth extremists at the Guardian, and I present here the choicest cuts of the strips I didn’t completely hate.
People often stop me in the street and breathlessly plead with me to reveal the secrets of The Artistic Process. Criminally, I’ve never been asked to share the details of my daily routine for a glossy Sunday supplement, thus providing conclusive evidence that I’m being silenced by the MAINSTREAM MEDIA (if you ignore the fact this volume is a compilation of cartoons for a national newspaper). You, however, have been good enough to receive this book from someone who vaguely knows you like football, so my reward is to let you peek inside the artist’s studio as you inevitably sit reading this on the toilet, perched above your own mess as you flick through my last six years of toil. You’re welcome. x
3am: I am awoken by my personal trainer, Claude, with a single crow’s egg and a conical flask of marrow juice. Claude then explains the latest internet memes to me as I complete five hundred finger press-ups to prepare my hand for the creative exertions ahead. He also reads the direct messages from people pretending not to understand my A-League cartoons, some feigning genuine anger and disappointment – a long-running in-joke I’ve enjoyed with My Public.
5am: A leap into the plunge pool. I can’t swim (Speedo allergy), so this really starts the day with a jolt of adrenalin. Once Claude has massaged my heart back into action, it’s ablutions time! A single, rigid sausage of waste is evacuated, retrieved, labelled and stored, lest it fall into the hands of my enemies (unlucky, the Telegraph’s ‘Matt’!).
7am: Eyelids pinned back, I sit in front of a vast wall of televisions and consume every football match that has occurred during my four hours of sleep. This is followed by the first of a halfhourly scroll of the various social media timelines: Lars von Trier critiquing Wotsits for LADbible on Facebook; some spicy takes, formerly known as white supremacist race hate, on X; and a gallery of artwork by beautiful people on Instagram who are better at drawing than me and have filtered their lifestyles in such a way as to make me feel like I live in a service station needle bin by comparison. Self-esteem crushed, I’m ready to attack the day!
9am: To my drawing board. The quill. The parchment. The ergonomic throne. An ambient mood is set with a deep-focus audio compilation of an incomprehensibly popular YouTuber screaming at a football awards ceremony, which is surprisingly soothing if you imagine he’s being violated by a polar bear. I attempt to decipher the notes I’ve compiled over the last week: ‘Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman crossbar challenge’; ‘Pochettino Rubik’s cube’; ‘Buy more crow eggs’. A rich bounty of satirical treasure. Neurological synapses sparkle, comedic equations dart across my vision, I squint at a waterfall of neon digits like on The Matrix, before inevitably deciding just to do another cartoon about Roy Hodgson.
12pm: Lunch in gaseous form. An infusion of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and a lungful of Wotsits (nice one, Lars von). Recharged, I plough through some more work, before my favourite chore of the day: family time (2.00–2.12pm). Once that’s out of the way, it’s back to the old LOL factory. (Please don’t tell anyone I call it the LOL factory.)
3pm: Pickleball session with Mark Wahlberg, Stormzy and Jake Humphrey.
5pm: Once my sketch is complete, it’s time to add some flesh to the bones of my latest masterpiece with the mechanical assistance of a rusty contraption of pipes, cogs and dials. It’s expensive to run and prone to frequent malfunction, but Adobe Photoshop remains the market leader for creatives who can’t be bothered to learn the basics of a new software program.
7pm: There follows the weekly sparring session with the lawyers, who crush the blossom of my creativity in their grey fists by arguing that my joke about Legally Redacted being a redacted is ‘definitely libellous’, blah, blah, blah. Eventually, I am forced to concede defeat when Claude advises that even I can’t afford a lengthy legal battle with Legally Redacted. Mercifully, the legal team at Faber aren’t scared of the truth.
11pm: The cartoon is uploaded to the internet. Exhausted from another day of bringing joy and dated cultural references to the world, I retire to my oxygen chamber. Claude dutifully redacts me to sleep as I soak in the glowing online feedback, which usually takes the form of a load of puns and some classic banter about not understanding at least three panels.
• Chaos in the Box, by David Squires, is available to buy now at a reduced price in the Guardian Bookshop
