Looking at the paintings I felt as if I’d been punched in the eyes. Maybe that is a bit olden days, and no it’s not good to mythologise a certain type of artist and it’s certainly not fashionable at all. He is simply a painter, and an exceptional one – it’s all he does. Because Kit is the real deal – he doesn’t care about adulation or any of the ego stuff that we get bombarded with every day. I’ve always been a bit of a groupie, but this was something else.

After parking up and following yellow ribbon after yellow ribbon through the countryside we were suddenly outside Kit Williams’ studio and oh my gosh there was Kit himself. We drove about a bit more and finally came across it. He told us to ‘find the yellow flag’ which felt in keeping with the strangeness of the situation. Our host Caroline offered to drive us to Kit’s cottage the next day, which was very nice of her as it is far far away.Īfter driving around for some time with Nero reclining on Flo, we asked someone where we were and what was going on. We arrived at the B&B which had a green man knocker, a door that mysteriously opened on its own and a Cocker Poodle called Nero. Flo also loves Masquerade, looking for the hares on every page, the weird jelly hare, the hill that turns into a hare. So my daughter Flo and I set off on a treasure hunt to Gloucestershire. But would you like to come to a private view at our cottage? With this in mind I recently wrote to Kit, asking if he ever illustrates poems, thinking that there might be a small chance he would offer to illustrate a whole book of mine for free, seeing as he was my greatest influence and that some symbiosis would therefore exist which would magically take care of boring stuff like money and the fact that I am not as good a poet as I think I am. Masquerade has become a very real memory – like a place I’ve been to. At points I existed inside that book, the same way I would sit in the garage by the tumble dryer listening to the birds sing.

So it was for me as a child when I read my favourite book Masquerade by Kit Williams. In those books, what we are actually talking about is a) windows and b) escape.

In certain books it’s hard to even call those things ‘pictures’ because that sort of suggests something flat and two dimensional that you can rest your cup of tea on. Anyone who loves reading knows that there’s only one thing better than words.

Masquerade golden hare