YouSaid · the spoken record

Posy Simmonds

lines on the record: 47
first: 2008-06-29
most recent: 2008-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because it's for people, and I can sit there inventing stories about them and cross referencing. M to R is always a very interesting bit of the telephone directory.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could I have the London telephone directory, but the old kind, I'm afraid it comes in four volumes, because I want the suburbs as well.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so partly because I talked to myself and I play music and I sing in a rather distressing way so we were in our rooms and then we always meet at lunchtime and have a proper lunch.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working. Well, it was when I'd done forty episodes of Gemma Bovary, and it was due to start, and so I had to ring the Guardian up and say I'm afraid I can't because I'm lying on my back.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I cracked to vertebrae, yes, I was one of those part of the statistics of people who fall downstairs wearing silly slippers. I was carrying a tray with a coffee pot on it and coming down the stairs at quite a lick, and I just saw my feet come up in front of me. And I landed on my back. But in fact, I was quite lucky because I didn't have to have an operation. It just mended itself. It's partly where I broke them.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's as though the beauty and the nature will kind of rub off on their own lives and make it very healthy and wholesome.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is to remind me of Cornwall, which I've known ever since I was a child, but also over twenty years when we had a house there where we used to spend an awful lot of time, and I love being there in the winter. And it seems odd because on my desert island I'll have a lot of sea round me. But this is going to remind me of Cornish sea and spum.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends what's going on in the episode, obviously if it's an episode which has got a big landscape or a big room full of details, I would draw the room. But if it's a conversation or anything with a lot of narrative in, I would always write it out first because then I would know exactly how much room I had for the pictures.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, all the time, not when I'm writing, I can't do that at all, but the drawing in a way is the nice bit, so I have lots of music, I'm afraid I sing dreadfully too.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember when I began Gemma, I did it in the third person for about six episodes, and because I'd never written much proper writing I'd been used to doing balloons and things, it was completely leaden, and then I made the baker actually talk, and I immediately recognised his voice, and so from then on the writing got very easy because I would talk it to myself in a slightly French accent what he was saying in English. It was much easier, yes.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes it was. I didn't really know what I was taking on. I'd always wanted to do something with a beginning and an end. I didn't realise how difficult it was chopping it up into little bits and every day had a slight cliff hanger to make you want to read on really drawing a serial like that. It's in any way like drawing a film.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, from chickens to something completely sublime, this is from the marriage of Figaro. It's the Contessa hoping to regain the love of her husband.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might make a tiny little thumbnail, sketch, or I might write very shiny lipstick as an aid memoir. Usually when I get back I've got a good memory. I would then draw the person up in a sketchbook.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I use myself as a model for expressions I work opposite a big mirror so I can check what hands look like or how eyes go when they're angry and things but I do look at people a great deal I like to get things right”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been working as a kind of dog's body at the Guardian doing illustrations wherever they were needed. I remember I met the editor in the lift, and he said Have you ever thought of doing a strip? And I came up with this rather half baked idea based on a strip that had once run in a girl's magazine called The Silent Three, and I kind of updated it to them being guardian women who were now going to know. I'd invented a lot of characters I didn't know who they were I had the wrong wife in bed with the wrong husband from David Humboldt Yes it happens. The first two months were incredibly difficult and it was a bit of a mess.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is from Bach's Christmas oratorio. Bach is one of my favourite composers and I particularly like choral music and this chorus is a sort of airy, wonderful light construction with layers of voices, but underneath there's a lovelier sort of turbo engine pulsing it along.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a watch, I want to get things the look of things absolutely right. Sometimes people say gosh it must be an eavesdropper too. I'd like to say I'm not I've never actually eavesdropped people are kind enough to talk very loudly now on telephones if they want to share their lives with the whole of the bus I mean I'm there to lack it up”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's more from observing other people or imagining or invention, I must say my stepsons were extremely, and they're extremely nice.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was delighted to be a stepmother, I found it wonderful, but of course it's difficult because there's no kind of manual unlike the manuals there are for being a parent. I think it requires tact and sort of realizing that you aren't actually a parent obviously you've got an important role but you're not their parent.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was most wonderfully funny and slightly eccentric on our first date he made me geranium ice cream, and he lived in a tiny little flat in Clarkenwell, completely furnished from Gamage's gardening department, Gamage's was a very old fashioned department store, so it was heated with greenhouse heaters and it had wonderful garden furniture in it.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“from the big wheel, and there's a barker from the wrestling tent going He's wild, he's an animal, he's grappling tonight and then over by the tennis courts there's some seats where there are some couples which I told myself must be engaged couples and they're also wrestling and so it's hot and steamy and noisy and over it all there's Elvis.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music reminds me of the summer holidays that we used to have as a child. My father used to rent a small boy's school in a resort in Devon, and it was one of those tall Victorian buildings with lots of floors, and for us children it was completely wonderful because we can invite friends, and the highlight was the third week of our holiday when a fair came and camped opposite on the green. During the day we'd be given our sixpences to go on the rides which was great, but for me it was at night that I found it so exciting. The din was terrible so you couldn't sleep. So I'm thinking of very torid August night with wail of dynamos and shrieks coming.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it was in nineteen sixty nine when the sun first started it was jokes like, you know, a bear sing to a dolly at a party Can I press you to a jelly? I mean really very old jokes”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, she didn't, but lodging with her, I used to collect her son from nursery school and things like that. It was when I didn't have any work at all, so that was part of my job and I was charring and walking dogs and doing all kinds of other things, but I was aware of her as a working journalist. She's working for the I think for the Sunday Telegraph at the time, but I was certainly aware of life on a paper was rather interesting.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a diploma show, and Mel, who at that time is drawing, I think, for the Times, said If you need any help or advice getting work, give me a ring. Of course I did, and he was incredibly kind, and told me exactly the right number of drawings to put in my portfolio and suggested people to go and see on magazines incredibly helpful. And”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very representational there were nudes I'd drawn in Paris, there were bits of buildings, but I'd also put in my comics'cause I still went on making comics and drawings of people in the street that I'd done, that sort of thing.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went into the central school to pick up my portfolio, and then I had a stroke of luck that I met in the corridor, one of the staff who said, Oh bad luck didn't you get in, and I said no, and he said Well, I'm head of the foundation course. Do you want to apply, present your portfolio there? So I said yes and so I showed my portfolio and I got into the foundation year.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I applied too late at the art school of my choice, the central school, so I got a letter saying you haven't got in so I was very cast down.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was entirely dressed in black, I had a black polo neck, black round my eyes, a black leather skirt I'd wought in the flea market, black tights, black belly shoes, and a huge fringe, and I remember my mother saying ye gods”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was completely wonderful, having been to a boarding school and having been at home, people knew what you were doing most of the time, then to have a whole day where you just read or sat in a cafe or just walked about. I loved walking, I mean the whole thing of being in a city which smelt of coffee and urinals and special French petrol. It was completely wonderful. It was a sort of wonderful freedom.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd got my hair off my face and it flicked up in the style. I might have even had a hairband. I was wearing a nice tweed coat and I had a matching patent leather handbag and pair of shoes.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I did. My parents were very encouraging. I can remember my father giving me a ream of paper when I was about eight. That's five hundred sheets of very big papers in imperial size, and I remember him just tapping the bottom of this chest and saying look in there and it was very, very heavy and inside I could see all this paper and it lasted most of my childhood.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look at them and think good heavens, one of them is called How to Make Love and Be Loved in four Easy Lessons and I did that when I was about nine. It's very innocent because I knew nothing much at all it's about dropping handkerchiefs.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the comics is called How to Turn Yourself Into an Up to Date Ted, i. e. a teddy boy. I used to see them on the bus in Maidenhead, so I was fascinated by them. They used to wear huge shoes with great big soles and things. So that was about them and their socks and the things they might carry, the poison, the bike chains. I suppose I didn't know much about it, but I vented things.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lopsided, I was good at English and languages, I like Latin and French, terribly bad at maths and science. It was at school which was very strong on sports too. I was pretty bad at that except for cricket because my brothers had taught me how to bowl. So I was a slow left arm bowler and I used to bowl tweakers.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it did. Obviously I was homesick to begin with, I mean like everybody and you got over it, everybody was in the same boat.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is really to remind me of where I grew up around Cookum, and it's a carol Dulce Ubelo sung by the Cookam Church Choir.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody else really drew very much, way back in my family my mother's family there was a very good water colourist, a woman in the nineteenth century called Mary Porter, who didn't do dainty lady watercolours. These were very big, very very confident, very professional sort of watercolours, so I don't know whether there's.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what about? Yes, as soon as I could hold a pencil I was off I loved drawing it. It was the thing I liked best, it was the thing that got me out of playing monopoly later on which I couldn't stand. It's the thing I did all the time.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I suppose for a long time because there was quite a gap between me and my younger, to my sister and my brother, so for a time I was the youngest with two older brothers, and then when they went away to boarding school in the term time, I became the oldest. So I've been a youngest and an oldest in some ways, which is quite salutary.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother my father was quite small my mother was quite tall and willowy, and she was very pretty, and she had the sort of mind that Bletchley Park would have probably found very useful in the war because she was just brilliant at codes and crosswords she could do the Times crossword in about ten minutes. She very well read. She used to write very good parodies of famous poems. She was a good dancer, and she looked after all of us.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was quite a short man, partly because he had quite bad curvature of the spine, but that didn't stop him being an immensely good rider. He liked outdoor things, he loved going racing, he loved his cows, he'd also at one time had an auction room, and he had a very good eye for things, whether it was a cow or a piece of furniture or a painting”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's the advantage of having words and images. You've got a choice that your images can reflect what people are saying, or they can contradict them. It's another kind of voice.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean exactly what you said I think it's the difference between having very good intentions and things not turning out quite right. Of course the strip was in the Guardian, so in a way my brief then I was on the woman's page was to create a family so they were at the time kind of a prototype guardian readers”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know my quarry I would say they were not entirely metropolitan I think it's anywhere where there's a university there's a shopping centre there are big off road prams around”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried to get things accurate. I hope people will recognise immediately who the people are that I'm drawing and what they're like just from maybe what they're wearing or the details that they have in their kitchen.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was on a census form, and quite a long time ago, and my husband also described himself as a visual engineer. We thought that in future when the census forms were looked at people would know what that was, that we engineered the visuals.”
2008-06-29 · Desert Island Discs · Posy Simmonds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source