At nineteen, I saved up for the fare to Southport to interview Bill Tidy for a student rag, after falling in love with his gag about a polar bear turning up at the White Star shipping office after the Titanic, anxious to know what happened to the iceberg.

The Tidys took pity and let me stay the night, and Bill drew a picture of me in a trilby as "Bill Spurve, ace reporter". It has gone on. Marriage, children, news jobs, writing novels – cartoons have been a life-support mechanism.

How can a middle-class household get by without Posy Simmonds to puncture its pretensions?

How could I have survived my daughter's pony-crazed years without Thelwell, or the alarums and humiliations of a sailing life without Peyton?

Does not a Matt cartoon make the news less tragically toxic?

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Read more about cartooning at the Telegraph UK... and by the way, I try to make the news as toxic as it should be...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5178448/Cartoons-make-my-life-one-long-laugh.html