Sir Quentin Blake is more than just an illustrator. He’s a national treasure

The Jubilee Honours list isn’t just filled with the predictable and the bland (Clare Balding… must we?); but also the richly deserved. And none more richly deserved than Sir Quentin Blake, who has been made a Companion of Honour. As he says, it’s “not just a medal that’s pinned on you”; this is a body of 65 individuals who have made a significant contribution to their field, in his case, illustration.

Though if there were a separate category of those who have contributed overwhelmingly to the sum of human happiness, he’d be right up there. His drawings have made us happier, and with his creative partnership with Roald Dahl, the pair of them have entered the realm of the immortals, along with Kenneth Graham and Ernest Shepherd (for The Wind in the Willows). He’ll go to heaven for that – although I’m less sure about Roald Dahl.

It’s funny to think that, until the 1960s, illustration wasn’t entirely respectable as an art form; it was very much in the second order of artwork, way behind the fine arts of sculpture and painting.

Yet Sir Quentin had an orthodox training at Chelsea Arts School, although his teachers were wise enough to let well alone when it came to his unorthodox style. The figure drawing classes stood by him, because you had to do the figures again from memory when you got home.

He’s especially interesting as an artist in that his first degree was in English, at Cambridge, where he sat at the feet of the great critics, FR Leavis and IA Richards.

The effect is that when he illustrates works of literature, it’s not just as an artist but also as a critic. He has drawn Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (complete filth) and Voltaire’s Candide as well as children’s books.

I once asked him why so few adult books are illustrated now, and he replied that so much of what goes on in them happens in people’s heads, rather than action that can be drawn.

In a nutshell: the problem with the modern novel.

Among the morals of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp case is that trials should never be televised, as they are in the United States. Here, you have to go to the trouble of getting a seat in the public gallery if you want a look, or else rely on reporting. It means even sensational trials are less likely to end up as popular entertainment.

Besides, the medium is cruel to the ugly and inarticulate – not that either was here. The famous trials of history – Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement et al

– would have been even more pitiless had they been televised.

One thing life is too short for is making the Lemon swiss roll and Amaretti trifle that won the competition for the Jubilee pudding. Its five layers – lemon curd, orange and lemon jelly, amaretti biscuits and chocolate bark – entail two hours of preparation, says the BBC website. The result is way more fussy and almost certainly less delicious than a simple sherry trifle.

What I may make is Coronation Chicken, from the original recipe by Rosemary Hume, as served at the actual coronation. It does take effort to make the sauce (with curry powder and apricot purée) for the mayonnaise but the result, as the Constance Spry cookbook says, is “distinguished by a delicate and nut-like flavour”.

And there is nothing easier than lemon posset served on the day: three ingredients and five minutes. Sublime.