There’s also a Gritterman soundtrack album, full of beautifully austere, melancholic songs and featuring narration by British comedy legend Paul Whitehouse. A narrow space at the top of the house he shares with his partner and their son, it has the feel of a particularly creative teenager’s bedroom: posters, books and trinkets line every wall, with pieces of clothing hanging on the door and a small desk providing a studious focal point. It brings a real sense of winter throughout, and the Gritterman himself is rendered with personality and warmth.

Paul’s humour comes from a similar place of understatedness - that made him perfect to do the narration. One of the things I like about making stamps or prints or books is that it’s very basic, very analogue. They showed Attenborough’s best ten clips or something from his career, with this huge screen and Melvyn Bragg and him just talking.Through the wind and the snow and the freezing cold, in the blue-black hours when time slips away, he grits the paths and the pavements and the roads. Orlando Weeks studied illustration at Brighton University before spending a decade in the band, The Maccabees. As the former Maccabees frontman releases his second solo album ‘Hop Up’, Orlando Weeks has spoken to NME about the making of the joyful new record. Weeks’ first major solo work since the demise of The Maccabees last year, The Gritterman is a wonderfully ambitious, multi-media affair. As he prepares for his final day of gritting icy roads he knows that his familiar routine is set to change.

Its choral, dream-like beauty makes focal points of aspects that might be swamped by a more boisterous production: the otherworldly vocal harmonies courtesy of Katy J Pearson, the heartening piano embellishments, how Ben Reed’s bass grows from a supporting texture to the forefront of the sound. It started with writing a song about a seasonal hero and thinking that I could spend more time with him,” Weeks explains. I wanted that kind of cloud nine feeling with every song – that’s the job I gave myself and Nathan [Jenkins, aka Bullion, the album’s producer],” he continued. Then, via six months in Lisbon (“If you’re in a touring band you stay in a place for a day or two days and think ‘it’d be nice to be here a bit longer’, and there was no reason why not to,” he explains), he wound his way back to the UK, there to construct a debut solo album on the theme of impending fatherhood.The plot follows the Gritterman on Christmas Eve, as he goes out alone to clear the snow one last time, before he must retire from the job he loves. I highly recommend the book and I am very much looking forward to more illustrated stories from the author.

For those Hop Up prints, I’ve been printing with lino onto cyanotype, and I think that’s how I’m going to do it. For a man who stood on the threshold of big-league glory, peeked inside and walked away, Orlando Weeks is remarkably zen. Really though I think Big Skies Silly Faces is about how I can be my own worst enemy - “No stopping that sky high as its wide .When I’ve been out in the day I feel like some kinda seasonal hero,” said Whitehouse, stood at the lectern. His old band The Maccabees split in 2017 at the height of their success, headlining Latitude Festival, selling out multiple nights at Alexandra Palace and hitting number one with their fourth album Marks to Prove It, but, Weeks says, there were no complaints of “but we’re next in line! I want to develop on that without being bound by any themes and just let it push and pull me around a bit. There was enough momentum for us to have enough freedom to be experimental and try and move ourselves along, and at the same time not being bound by one song or one record that defined us. The illustrations are quite gorgeous and - with broad, nearly impressionist crayon strokes - feel as out of time as the Gritterman himself.

And there’s something about the way the Gritterman looks… there’s a shadow of a bigger, stronger version of himself in the past. When you’ve been in each other’s company and worked on everything together for so long, it’s complicated. It’s a much happier place for me, because you feel that the whole day is the investment, and not just the hour-and-a-half on stage.Hop Up’, on the other hand, revels in the happiness, lightness and all-encompassing love after the baby’s birth. With lockdowns cutting short his live plans for the first album, these gigs will also mark his first chance to perform both records to an audience that is familiar with the music.