“Disturbingly, out of all my artworks, this is the one most suppressed by Twitter. They really hate it. Likes and retweets are regularly removed. It can’t seem to get over 10,000 likes – even though it’s had more than 1.5 million impressions. The fact that they clearly view it as dangerous disturbs me every day. But it also gives me hope. It reminds us that we have something they not only lack, but which they fear. Genuine, meaningful love. Something worth fighting for. Right to the very end.”

“This black and white ink drawing was done some time in 2017 I think. I just doodled it on a postcard to raise money for an epilepsy charity. Someone, somewhere owns the original. I just liked the idea of this elderly couple. Perhaps this is where they first met. Perhaps it’s where he asked her to marry him. That might be their house down in the valley, where they’ve raised a family. At the time, I was living in a town in Hampshire but I was about to move back to the Somerset countryside where I grew up. I was probably thinking about returning home and staying there. I nearly put their intials carved into the tree trunk but decided it would be a bit much. You can imagine them on the other side.

When all of this nonsense reached a certain point: When stories were coming out of married couples being kept apart, parents being forced to die without their children by their side, grandparents kept from their grandchildren for months on end as the children were told they might kill them if they saw them – I just couldn’t believe that people were agreeing to it. This image came back to me and I decided to recreate it in colour. I thought it conveyed the power and significance of life-long love quite well. But also, had a sense of freedom and embracing life with all it could throw at us.

Finally, I thought perhaps the tree could remind people of the fleeting nature of our lives. It’s probably been there since before these two were born. And it will be there after they’ve gone. Our lives are short and we have to live them. Not just survive and exist. This, of course, was when I was still very much in ‘optimistic cuddly Bob’ mode. I still felt that it could all be stopped if enough people remembered some vital truths about the human experience.

Once it was finished I tweeted it and wrote, ‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’ I hesitated because I felt that it was a statement of the obvious. But that was the whole point. People had forgotten the obvious. I realised that this had, in the space of a few months, gone from being a universal moral truth to a highly controversial statement. It certainly struck a chord with people. It’s the most popular image I have ever produced.

As I expected, it angered a lot of idiots on the other side. “Unless being with the people you love might kill them.” They replied, clearly feeling like they had absolutely destroyed me. This total abandoning of logic and ethics really astonished me. I realised that these people could not see the difference between deciding, as a family, not to see each other because you are genuinely scared of a novel cold virus, and being ordered to stay apart by the government. What’s more, they clearly believed that this was the first time in human history when seeing your loved ones put them at some risk of a potentially fatal viral infection. What world did they think they had been living in?

My message was deliberately absolutist and unconditional because that is how I have felt about all of this from the beginning. No circumstances, no level of threat, no risk of death can ever justify somebody in authority banning families from being with each other. Once we cross that line, all sorts of unethical misery ensues. As it has. The Christian sacrament of marriage states, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder!” – there is no small print that reads, “Unless there’s a nasty bug going round, in which case forget it.”

Once I could see the impact of my words combined with the image, I added the words to the original artwork (now sold). I received many lovely messages from people all over the world, who told me this piece had given them hope. Or brought them back from the brink of despair. Some people even said it had convinced them to see their loved ones again. Or to never stop seeing them again. I still find it comforting, even now. I think it has a power bestowed on it from somewhere outside of myself. Either by the circumstances in which it was created or by something beyond comprehension.”