For the seventh selection in A History of my Archive in 10 Objects here are some surviving sketchbooks from my 3 years on the Illustration course at Manchester Polytechnic. Okey, so this is cheating a bit – these are clearly more than one object! But the contents are pretty consistent and were all bundled together in my father’s loft, so I think I can safely lump them together as a single item. Actually, very little remains of my work from the years 1978-1981 while I was at M

There are a lot of anniversaries in the UK this year, most significant for me being the 30th year since my first professional illustration job. The commission for Fatbag in 1982 was an important threshold on a journey that had begun years before. Recent programmes on BBC TV and radio celebrating punk and it’s legacy have brought back a lot of memories of that time. First let me say I was never truely a punk, the revolution was arguably already over by the time I cottoned onto