Foreword by Magnus Magnusson, KBE

It’s the Giles family that gets me. They are so family. They are so gloriously, anarchically his that there could be no other family like them anywhere, and yet they somehow manage to be everybody’s family.

Nobody’s granny could be as awful as Grandma Giles, and yet there is something about her that is every indomitable granny who ever lived. The long-suffering mother, the self-absorbed teenagers, the hypochondriac Auntie Vera, the demonic children and their hapless pets — they are all hilariously over the top, yet with all the elements of family life so sharply sensed and so utterly recognisable that the heart warms while the stomach heaves into laughter.

Of course it’s the little details lurking round the edges of the main subject of the cartoon that betray the special Giles hallmark: the baby unobtrusively strangling the cat, poor old Mum trying to do a mountain of ironing with one foot in the dog’s dinner, Grandma tipping some gin into her bedtime cocoa. Giles crams the whole rich messy tapestry of life into one frame and makes us all laugh at ourselves, happy at knowing that we’re not alone.

It’s easy to forget, for those of us besotted with the Giles family, that Giles himself is at home anywhere in the world where human foibles and fashions could do with a bit of gentle mockery. Giles is as much at home at Ascot and Henley as he is among the lager louts at a football match or when he is taking an irreverent look at politicians and statesmen, despots and tycoons — and all the rest of us.

But why waste my breath? I cannot imagine anyone stopping to read this when they can plunge straight into these joyous pages to see what Giles has been getting up to this year. . . .