IF I had to draw a picture of somebody then I’m afraid to say they would look like a stick person.

My artistic technique, in terms of realism, hasn’t improved since I was about seven years old.

To be frank, it looks like a babby’s done it. If I drew a self-portrait it wouldn’t look much like anybody, least of all me.

Maybe that’s why I like abstract art; I can admire the technique of a painting that looks like a bowl of apples, and indeed I can spend ages staring at a painting of a bowl of apples and I get plenty from it, but what really floats my artistic gravy boat is a few squiggly lines and a blob or maybe a few blobs and a squiggly line.

I know that this kind of art gets people grumpy; I once heard on a bloke on a bus say to his mate ‘And just don’t get me started on modern art. Just don’t get me started!’ Well, art that looks like itself is really my kind of thing.

I can trace my love of experimental art and artistic endeavour back, like so many things, to my time at Low Valley Junior School in Darfield.

Paint was freely available to us all the time so that we could just go and make some art if we wanted to, in response to whatever kind of topic we’d been doing that day.

Of course it should be like that in schools all the time, because how else are we going to develop creative and rigorous thinking?

How else are we going to make children who want to explore the world and take part in it and become active citizens?

Speaking of creative and rigorous thinking and becoming active citizens, I remember that in Mr Moody’s class I painted a picture that began as an image of a dump that we’d read about in that great classic Stig of the Dump, but as I added more and more layers of paint to the picture it became more and more, well, abstract, and the more layers I added the more I liked it.

Somehow, the freedom of making the picture was making me think harder about where to place the various shapeless shapes.

I felt, briefly, like an artist. Mr Moody was impressed with the picture too: he said it was fantastic and that I should go and show it to Mr Owen the head teacher in his office upstairs.

I was pleased and excited by that but, perhaps because my legs were under my desk, Mr Moody had forgotten that, a few weeks before, I’d broken my leg kicking a pile of snow that turned out to have a lump of concrete under it so my leg was in a pot and it took me ages to get anywhere.

Still, I was a good lad and I always did as I was told and so I stumped out of the classroom and across the hall and began the Everest-like ascent of the stairs to Mr Owen’s office with my abstract painting in my hand and the pot on my leg making a drumming sound as I pounded up each step.

Looking back now, I can see that the whole episode taught me that learning about art and life can be a painful journey uphill that is rewarded at the end (because Mr Owen said he liked my work very much and gave me a sticker) but at the time I just thought: my leg hurts.

Since then I’ve enjoyed the company of artists a lot, and as a writer I’ve collaborated with them many times on all kinds of projects and that leads me to my artist mate Iain Nicholls’ gloriously messy studio in an otherwise empty space in Barnsley provided by the wonderful organisation AxisWeb who, as part of their work supporting artists, make empty spaces available for artists to work in.

I’m here with Iain and my granddaughter Isla and we’re all making art. Iain is painting four canvases at once, moving between one and the other. Isla is making shapes and things that could almost be cartoons.

And I’m feeling free: free as that little lad I was. Free to make squiggles. Free to make something I can climb upstairs with to show the headteacher. I’ll just put this squiggle here. I’ll just put this blob here.

And I can’t stop grinning.