![]() Tom dreams of a giant doughnut in Random Acts of Fun. Tom, who is around 10, strides on to the page fully formed, informing the reader of his love of chatting and caramel wafers, his best friend Derek, his annoying sister Delia, his teacher Mr Fullerman, filling the pages with his doodles. She wrote and drew the first Tom Gates into a notebook – she still has it, and waves it at me – putting in all her childhood passions: music, making things, drawing, doodling, fun and silliness. “I didn’t actually get to write my own stories until I was in my mid-40s.” “I loved funny books, and I was being offered funny books to illustrate, but I thought if I wanted to illustrate one I’d better write it myself,” she says. “It doesn’t seem quite so jolly now,” Pichon says of the title, but it won her the Smarties prize, and got her properly thinking about the kind of book she would have loved to read herself as a child. Square-Eyed Pat, about a telly addict dog, was published in 2003, followed by My Big Brother Boris, in which Little Croc and his brother live in a swamp. ![]() She started out with other people’s, but then had a go at writing her own picture books. ![]() She worked designing album covers before starting to illustrate greeting cards and T-shirts, “and then because I did lots of greeting cards, publishers started to contact me about doing books”. She trained, she says, as a graphic designer, “but not a very good one, because I just used to do all my graphics projects with illustration”. Pichon, who Zooms in from a Tom Gates-plastered background, wearing Tom Gates earrings, is as upbeat and jolly as all true veterans of events with children are. So I’ve never officially been diagnosed, but my family have always thought it.” “We discovered that he had various different things like hearing problems, speech problems, and as we were going through the process with him, they always talked to the parents, and everything they were saying was like, well, you’re probably dyslexic. It was only when she and her husband were investigating issues for their son as a child – he’s now 30 – that she realised about her own dyslexia. Liz Pichon drew the first Tom gates book in a notebook.
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