Howard McWilliam – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Howard McWilliam is cover artist for The Week in the UK and US and has illustrated many children’s books, including John Cena’s Elbow Grease series and the bestselling I Need My Monster books. He left his career as a financial magazine editor and journalist in 2005 to concentrate on illustrating.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Snow 

As a lover of snow, I undoubtedly live in the wrong place. Climate change has pushed Southern England further above that magical threshold where rain becomes fluffy white flakes, and meteorologists are talking about snow being a thing of the past here within twenty years. A temperature of 2 degrees with rain is like a cruel slap in the face to me: so close and yet so far! I feel sad enough now for my own children that the fun of sledging and snowball fights is something that comes around so fleetingly every few years, but their own children may never experience it, at least not here. When it does snow, as it did last weekend, I can barely contain my excitement, and the need to be outside in it is urgent and compulsive. The mere sight of it falling gently from the sky I find otherworldly, and the way it muffles noises and turns familiar surroundings into a fresh clean canvas adds to its delight.

Trees (and seeing them grow)

Over the last decade, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with trees, and the efforts by organisations like the Woodland Trust to increase Britain’s pitifully poor canopy cover (one of the lowest percentages in Europe). Aside from their ecological benefit, aesthetically I love the way that trees can transform a landscape, creating green screens to obscure and soften some of the grey ugliness of the man-made environment. In 2019, I organised a tree planting at the park next to my children’s school. I bought 55 trees, liaised with the council, and put out word for volunteers among the school’s parents.  Buying those trees was some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Just as with trees I’ve planted in my own garden, the satisfaction of seeing them put on leaves and slowly grow — above a spot that was bare grass before — has been an unexpectedly intense pleasure, mixed with the imaginative anticipation of how they might look years from now.

Tap and Street Dancing

As a middle-aged Dad, I would appear to be the wrong demographic to be listing this as one of my favourite things. According to convention, I shouldn’t be doing it.  Yet I find such a marvellous freedom and loss of self in it that I couldn’t care less. It’s one of my regrets that I never really discovered the pleasure of dancing when I was a teenager, being too self-conscious about its outward manifestation rather than my inner feelings. But when I met my wife in my first job after university, we were drawn together by dance classes (salsa and jive), and I’ve been hooked on dancing ever since.

Footpaths down old railways or canals

I love an urban walking and cycling path completely separated from roads. Discovering one of these in a city is such a pleasure, rising or descending from the roar and fumes of the road to a peaceful retreat that seems a world away. Cutting a straight line across a town or city on one of these, free from the tyranny of traffic, is deeply satisfying. Even if teeming with people, such as Manhattan’s High Line or parts of London’s Regent’s Canal, they show us that tranquillity and the urban need not be mutually exclusive, while offering a glimpse of how towns could be if designed for people rather than cars.

Audiobooks

Having three young children, and a busy work schedule, my opportunities for reading books have shrunk dramatically. I, therefore, have virtually fanatical gratitude for my audiobook subscription, and the technology that allows you to carry a library around in your pocket. Now I can listen to books while I walk, cook or paint, and it’s transformed my consumption of literature. It’s not just the multitasking element that appeals. Walking in particular gives a kind of geographical overlay to the words which constitutes an extra tool of memory: a particular passage is so intertwined with a certain location or view that recalling one brings to mind the other. I love the way that a novel may plot a particular physical journey in my head because of my trajectory or the weather when they were read to me.