"You've got your work cut out here mate" - moving out

And so it was that, on Saturday November 17th, Hev and I finally cleared out of my office on Copse Road, leaving it in an amazingly good state. Hev's work on cleaning mould and insects from the windows and hoovering 16 years of muck from the carpets cannot be understated.

Having been given two months notice at the start of September, it's been a running joke between the two of us that, no matter how much we've cleared out, every time we come into the office we can imagine someone seeing it for the first time saying "Blimey, you've got your work cut out here mate". It was a Sisyphean task but by golly we did it.

Underneath the junk accumulated in my office since I moved in in 2002 were mountains of magazines which, now they've been put into storage, are going to find themselves new homes via eBay. Already the Venue magazines, Private Eyes and Comics Internationals have gone into the paper recycling. The nagging fear that some may have collectibility or, dare I think it, actual commercial value is the only reason I've saved so many into the storage unit. But next to go will be a collection of Doctor Who Adventures complete with toys (which it seems go for about 99p only, so a job lot looms there), Q and Empire magazines, NMEs, then the various 1000s of comics & random magazine that I have somehow amassed. Why the hell do I have a year's worth of Heat magazine? What was I thinking in the 1990s?

I remember what an achievement it was when, way back at the start of September, we found our storage unit and delivered the first car full of boxes. Well, all I can say is I hope there's nothing in that first layer that I need to get my hands on in a hurry. Because...

This is how it looks today. Somewhere under there is the kitchen table that used to live in Kibworth and has come with us from Leicester to Wrington to Clevedon to my office and now to supporting piles of boxes. There are also two black metal bookshelves that started life in the office I used to share with Mark, a pre-war wooden bookshelf that came from Auntie Kate's house at least 30 years ago, the white filing cabinet that used to be in my childhood bedroom, and a wooden leaf table that was in the office when I arrived. To the tip, or rather the re-use and re-cycle area, have gone five self-assembly six-foot-tall bookshelves that used to line the wall of Mark's and my office above the Midland Bank on Sixways, a Hygena QA Labrenza bookshelf which was in the office when I arrived and which had a bow in the top of it even when I arrived, and two metal strongbox files whose drawers were labelled, among other things, "Immunology". Where they'd come from originally is anyone's guess.

Hev's sculptures are a bulky, but surprisingly light, part of the load in the storage unit. But it's the magazines and paperwork that form by far the greatest load. How much we've spent on fold-up storage boxes from Argos I shudder to think. The reason it's taken so long to get out - a fortnight longer than my notice allowed - was simply how long it physically took to put everything into boxes and to perform triage on it all. What went to the tip, what went in a box, and what do I have to keep close to hand in order to try working from home. Having done the artwork for Joseph in a hotel room in Denmark, and coloured my last half dozen jobs on a laptop in various hotel rooms, I'm pretty sure I'll manage working from home for a while, but quite what I'll do about filming Socks videos, and indeed recording new songs, is a mystery. The keyboard, the green screen, and the physical space in which to stick up the green screen and film, are now in a storage unit in Bristol. The Socks even recorded a special farewell to the place in which they've filmed all their studio videos over the last dozen years.


So a new era begins, with a couple of Christmas cards to finish artworking, and more school visits (and a corporate video don'tcha know) taking me around the country (and to Dublin later today) so much I doubt I'll notice the lack of an office for a while yet. What will the future hold? Let us see.

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.