It’s amazing how much of art is in our lives. That freedom to express ourselves has been nurtured from birth and possibly even before then. There are some parents play classical music through their bellies, in the hope that they could make their unborn child the next Mozart via osmosis. I’m bit dubious myself, they aren’t even in your stomach Dave, you’re just serenading a chicken biryani.

Art is what makes us human, what lifts us from the monotony of daily life. It can make us laugh, cry and everything else in between. It has the power to unify, to divide, to change the world. You can’t stir emotion like that with a spreadsheet in Excel.

As I write this piece, I am looking across the kitchen at some of my daughters art work, held to the fridge door with magnets. We’ve been collecting this emotional landfill for years now. There are loads of these efforts up in my loft, just gathering there like kindling. I’ve got handmade creations, with the worlds smallest calendar glued to the bottom. If I want to see when my birthday is, I just need to grab a telescope first. Then they are the pasta pictures, I hope we get another one soon, because we are down to our last couple of hundred. It’s no wonder there’s a meals crisis in these schools every year, stop sticking it on paper and cook it you morons.  

Before screens it was the best way to keep our children occupied. Even now when you go out for a meal, the staff will always bring over a colouring sheet and some crayons. They do that before they take your drink order, it’s like having your dinner in Rymans. It’s not like a screen, doing something like drawing is pure mindfulness, it’s a release, it’s like a massage for the brain, and it’s totally free.

From an early age I loved art. I would spend hours sitting at the kitchen table. My mum would arrange objects in a still life and I would draw it. She would iron. I got used to the rhythmic hissing of the steam, the creak of the ironing board as I focused on recreating the perfect bunch of grapes, with my HB pencil. I realise that this makes me sound posh, we weren’t. In fact, I often couldn’t finish my picture because my Dad would eat the fruit bowl. You can’t just sit and watch it go off; you might think you’re Leonardo Davinci but people are starving. Both my parents loved drawing. My Dad actually went to art college, but didn’t pursue it. He could really draw, but he was from a working-class family and colouring in isn’t a proper job. His Dad was a miner, the nearest he got to charcoal was the dusting he had on his pit helmet.

When my friends came round, my Mum would instigate drawing sessions. I still remember this, my mates turning up with a football and a Nintendo and looking so confused when two hours later they were basically having extra school. I still think one of my mates is traumatised by the moment he bit too hard on a metallic pen, whilst doing a firework picture and filled his mouth with liquid gold, he ran up to the bathroom, screaming, with his chin gleaming like C3PO’s nut sack.

I had good art teachers at school, they were inspiring. One just let us have free reign, she went off piste with the curriculum. I was doing sculpture at the age of 11. I say sculpture, I use the term loosely, this was a comprehensive in the North that was in special measures. Essentially, I was just retrieving bits of wood and landfill, sticking on barbwire, daubing them with paint and calling it, “reflections of the front line”

Sounds like nonsense, but I got an A for that. I should have entered the Turner prize; I would have probably won.

That’s another thing, I actually enjoy the pretentiousness of the Art world. The audacity of someone cutting a shark in half, covering it with formaldehyde, sticking it in a cabinet and then getting paid millions, it doesn’t happen in any other world. Tracy Emin and her unmade bed, where the art is the concept. Some would argue that there is no skill in arranging objects in a certain way. I think that’s a valid point. I have a teenage daughter; she’s been doing an “Emin” for about three years. One of her passions at the moment is collecting cups from downstairs and then storing them under her bed. It looks like an archaeological dig under there. She’s about a month away from creating a new variant.

This is the passion I’m talking about. People would say, Scott, how can you compare the work and skill of the great impressionists, the masters, who would spend months hunched over canvas creating photo realistic representations of moments in history. Done with such incredible control and vision that you can’t believe that it isn’t a photograph. How can you put that on the same level as someone who didn’t tidy their room. Because that’s what’s amazing about art, it’s interpretive, it can be more about the meaning than the result. The formaldehyde shark is iconic, the unmade bed is iconic, and the political statements Banksy makes have resonated worldwide.

There is a lot of emperor’s new clothes about art. Posh folk with triple barrelled surnames, blowing their trust fund on stuff they think is clever. It’s a movement that has its own ego, it’s a circle jerk of people desperately trying to discover something new, and then convincing themselves that they had something to do with it. They are like Magpies, just going after the shiny prize, and then just blindly following each other. Just look at what happened with Banksy. When he started, he would have been arrested, now if he happens to stencil the side of your Kebab shop, you can retire at 40 and buy yourself a villa in the Seychelles. I’m sure Banksy secretly detests the privileged millionaires that ringfence his art, when it should be out in public, for the people.

My college years where all about art. I had a cool art teacher. He smoked roll ups, he looked hungover, he didn’t care if you showed up. You were given responsibility, as long as you turned in the work on time, he didn’t care. I loved it, I felt like an artist. Those few hours a week were bliss. I got a black and white camera and ventured out, taking pictures of nature, of scrapyards, machines, people (with consent) and then developing the images myself in a darkroom. I loved that, even now thinking of that smell of the developer, listening to Primal Scream on a discman whilst I did it, it makes me relax, it was the greatest time.

That creativity has never diminished. I now earn my living writing jokes, the most immediate and arguably unregulated medium that there is. There is a lot of talk about cancel culture at the moment. I’m a big fan of it. I never knew anything about the history of those slave traders until their statues were pulled down. It’s a pity Pythagoras wasn’t rumbled as a wrong un’, I might have not needed to re-sit my maths twice. All good art is about connection and shared experiences and comedy is one of the most exciting forms.

I still love to build Lego, that is my love language, it’s how I bond with my children. Although when they go to bed, I do reapply the stickers. My OCD can’t let that slide, they have no dexterity. There are kids their age in China, soldering resistors to PCB’s and they can’t accurately put a sticker on a Disney castle, it’s pathetic.

My darling wife Jemma has even indulged my love of Lego. She currently falls asleep next to a lit cabinet of all my creations. Above the bedhead, we don’t have family photos, because that place is reserved for my Batwing. A lot of couples introduce toys into the bedroom, but probably not a Millenium Falcon.

We can’t underestimate the importance of the arts. Although governments often do. They cut the funding; they diminish the value of the subject in the curriculum. They don’t see a tangible benefit to the economy. They’d rather produce a nation of number crunchers. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s shortsighted. We are the home of Shakespeare, of Constable, our theatre industry is worth billions. The arts bring in revenue constantly. You only have to visit a gallery to see that. Hundreds of families dragging their miserable children through the Tate Modern, to hopefully ignite a spark of creativity and joy within their offspring. It’s something that shouldn’t be quantified, it shouldn’t be scrutinised, it’s part of being human. And it all started with that first picture on the fridge.