Adam and Eve being cast out of Charles Hill Park, one of Flintoff's drawings (Image: John-Paul Flintoff) Anyway, so that’s how it can be. And one of the key insights of of improvisation is don’t be original. Just be obvious. Because your obvious is really original to someone else. I mean, those guys just now [playing flute with their nostrils] that was their obvious! He was downbeat. Said something about it being “hard to be an artist” – may have used those exact words, or something similar. I’m not sure. It’s a long time ago. But whatever the words he used, I remember the feeling: it felt as if he said: “You, Flintoff, cannot be an artist.” The editor who commissioned my next book, Elizabeth N., asked if I might record a short video about it, to share at an internal sales meeting. The intimate, approachable book provides a collection of day-to-day songs, or psalms, that fit our busy contemporary lives. Always thoughtful, often celebratory, sometimes painful: these rueful verses - and their gorgeous, witty illustrations - build up something both serious and delightful.' - Fiona Sampson, author of Common Prayer and Come Down

Best of all, I wrote a book – about finding peace in the places we call home – and I illustrated it too: 50 full-colour drawings, plus the cover – showing the view from my hospital window. Can you imagine how good that feels? I wanted to make art for a living. Forty years passed. And now I do. And we’re over here. This idea of a genius comes from the Enlightenment. If you think about so called primitive societies, where everyone’s really creative, it’s often because they believe that they’re doing the work on behalf of God – they’re sort of transmitting something. So there’s a lovely story, a true story, about people who live in Greenland and carve walrus tusks. And they don’t blame themselves if it comes out badly. They say “God put a not very interesting thing inside that tusk.” It’s not their fault. They’re relaxed, detached. They’re transmitting for God. Like the work of a modern-day Chaucer, John-Paul’s poetry in Psalms for The City, contains diverse and colourful vignettes of life in 2022. Inspired by the Luttrell Psalter, a book of illustrated psalms from the late Middle Ages, which includes marginal images showing everyday life from that period, Psalms for The City contains John Paul’s own marginal drawings of urban life in 2022 alongside his psalms, like a modern-day medieval manuscript.

A bit of context

This book is a delight. Keeping quirky and cheerful, it suggests serious things without taking itself too seriously. It could even make the most complacent sceptic laugh and think again.' - Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) Good ideas come from that sort of experience. When you’re free and relaxed, they come forward like nobody’s business. And I went, Yep, I’m sure I can do that. And I put it away. Then this morning I looked at it and it said, “Where did great ideas come from?” And I really haven’t the faintest idea. I got in a bit of a funk and a panic. I felt like, Oh, God. Oh yeah, huge pressure. I mean, this is being filmed, isn’t it?

It’s for a slot called “A Moment That Changed Me”. Here (below) is the copy I filed. Naturally, the piece as it eventually appears – if it eventually appears!– may be quite different. But I thought you might like to see the words just as I sent them.

I like the idea that the grotty area behind some bins on an unremarkable street might be the space where something cosmic is, was and ever shall be taking place”, says John-Paul.

But a series of traumatic events, followed by a loss of work, then lost confidence in myself resulted in a breakdown at the end of 2017. I admitted myself to psychiatric hospital, with depression and anxiety. For a short time I was put on what nobody officially calls suicide watch. I was convinced there was nothing in life to look forward to. Born out of John-Paul’s recovery from a metal breakdown, Psalms for The City is a love-song to our cities, to the relationship between poetry and prayer, and the fact that we are all beings with spiritual health that deserves tending to.

Summary of Psalms for the City

I would hate to do that job, and if by making a short video I can help the sales team feel motivated to mention this book – well, I’m delighted.