Portrait of a Times Editor and BBC Presenter at Work

On Sunday I drove from north London to Wiltshire. Just after Stonehenge I turned off to the north of the A303 and continued for a short distance until I came into a village.

There was scaffolding on the front of the first house on the left and a cattle grid at the gates. Slowly, I drove across, then along the driveway.

I had come to this house to start work on a new Poipito.

(Poipito? Portraits of Interesting People in their Offices.)

The Interesting Person in question is a woman, author of a terrific book, formerly a very senior editor on The Times and presenter of simply oodles of BBC radio programs, including flagships on Radio 4.

On the drive, I’d been listening to her talk about her book on a 90-minute podcast. I was full of questions and observations.

After getting a cup of coffee in the kitchen, we went into her office.

I stood by the garden door making drawings directly on the iPad. Rough sketches of the room, of the last cherry blossoms in the garden outside, and her book on her desk, beside a vase of daffodils:

While I sketched she worked at her desk. As you see, the laptop was piled on top of books, with a camera on a tripod behind it. I guessed that was the arrangement she used to record that podcast I listened to.

As I sketched, she read aloud occasionally from something new she had found, relating to the subject of her book.

The book has already been published, but she keeps on top of the research because occasionally she is challenged by someone (a man, typically) who will insist that evidence supporting the case the book makes is out of date.

“I’m able to tell them the very latest,” she said.

Then we went to the kitchen to join her husband for lunch: Greek-style stuffed chicken (lots of oregano).

I asked some of my questions, offered a few observations, and gave a bit of background about myself – how I ended up making pictures, and portraits, after years as a words-only chap.

And after lunch I drove home. As usual, traffic on the A303 was very slow near Stonehenge.

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As well as drawing, in that office in Wiltshire, I took photos to use as reference while I work on the portrait.

Yesterday, back home in London, I made a collage of some of those photos, squishing and stretching them to fit a 180-degree view of the room into a standard-sized A2 picture.

You can see it, and the woman herself, on my computer screen here, as I prepare to start drawing on my iPad:

And here’s a detail from the picture as it stands today (15 April 2025):

More soon.

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