Matt: coming to the aid of the party

Tell Matt Pritchett you're writing a book that is bound to make a fortune, and offer to pay him for a few cartoons that would make that fortune bigger still, and he'll politely decline.

"If I started saying yes to all those things, I'd never see my children," he once explained.

But ask him to draw a cartoon for someone's leaving souvenir - a mock-up front page that newspaper people traditionally produce for a departing colleague - and the answer is invariably Yes.

As one responsible for a number of such pages when I worked in London, I never ceased to be amazed at the man's generosity with his time.

Often enough, he'd barely know the colleague in question; reading a draft of the main story for the page was enough for him to come up with an inspired image and/or gag.

On Friday, I found myself taking possession of my third personal Matt cartoon. He has given me permission to post it here, and I know he will not mind me adding the previous two once I get the hang** of it. All appear on the next Salut! posting - Matt's gloss on a career - but I have deleted the inferior reproduction of the latest cartoon that was originally here.

Matt could not make it to the Cheshire Cheese, the pub in Fleet Street (where else?) that I chose for my send-off, just as I had thrown parties there when I left the Press Association for the Telegraph and London for Paris.

But I am glad to say that his final cartoon for me came along to the party, safely inserted at the foot of my spoof page one. There was also, in keeping with another tradition, a framed original.

Needless to say, the cartoon injects a little dignity into a page otherwise devoted to impertinent jibes about my tastes in music and football, an alleged obsession with curries, seafood and foie gras of which I was naturally unaware and my dubious origins (brought up from infancy in County Durham but born, unpardonably, in Hove).

That Matt is a genius is beyond serious debate. No one needs to inspect or even know about the fistful of awards to see how gifted he is. It shines from each work that is published and, since he submits six contenders daily for one or at most two slots, from many that are not.

Perhaps most people would settle for being a genius at whatever it is they do. To be a great bloke as well as a genius lifts rarity to a new level.


** And apologies for the amateurish and uneven first attempt to post the cartoon. Almost any child of 10 could have done it properly in a fraction of the time it took me to do it badly.