They gradually acquired a following among a wider circle of family and friends and now readers of the Sheffield Telegraph can join the fun with a weekly cartoon strip based on the family missive.

"How this started was just over a year ago when I was off work ill and Carol, my partner, was writing a letter to our daughter at university," he explains, "I did an A4 cartoon of what we had been doing over the past week. I thought it was a one-off but I ended up doing it every week. It became a kind of diary."

They were an instant hit with the young student away from home – "she tells me she runs down to the porter's lodge to pick it up every Friday" – but the rest of the clan (ages 10 to 23, six girls, one boy) also enjoyed reading about themselves.

"The next thing my mother wanted one and then my sister," recalls Everard. "People said it it was funny but it's just because we know you. But then the kids' friends at college got into it and said they looked forward to it arriving.

"When I'd go and pick them up people would come and shake my hand. I thought it was all in-jokes but they found it funny, too."

He says it requires a certain discipline to keep up to a schedule. "I do them on Thursday afternoons, I draft it out before doing the final copy and there's a certain amount of cutting and pasting and afterwards I am to be found in Jackson's supermarket in Nether Edge at the photocopier.

"I look forward to those afternoons, though sometimes you worry there's not enough material. Often I will have made notes in my diary."

He admits there is something of the Mr Pooter from the great Victorian comic novel, Diary of a Nobody, in all this "inflating the absolute trivial" where a week may have passed when "not much has happened except we have forgotten to put out the wheelie bin or something".

Have the subjects of the cartoon ever lodged complaints? "You'll get the older one saying, 'my hair doesn't look like that' or someone else insisting 'I never really said that' or 'I look too much like my mother' but so far no serious objections," he reports. "Anyway, most of the jokes are on me."

Everard says he never had ambitions to be an artist or any illusions about it. "Over the years I have done odd little sketches inspired perhaps by a funny thing a child says or a mis-hearing," he says.

"But the fact is I cannot actually draw. What interests me is how little you can do to create a mood, something like the angle of a mouth perhaps. I suppose this is pretty obvious stuff to artists."

In the age of emails and text messages, the fact that the family are writing letters whether in text or picture form sounds almost quaint. "I guess it is a bit old-fashioned. But we are like that, we have family meals and for a long time we didn't have a television.

But of course we have had to become computerised, like anyone else."

Has he never given thought to emailing his missive? "There is a temptation because it would save on stamps but I don't think it would be as good."

Aged 52, Hull-born Everard Davy came to the city in 1987, working briefly at Radio Hallam before joining Radio Sheffield where he is the morning news presenter. "I get up at 4.20am to be at work by five o'clock and my shift ends at mid-day," he says. "I was offered the chance of moving to Drivetime in the afternoon but I have got too used to this routine. It means I am around when the kids come home from school and I can go off and cycle in the Peaks in the afternoons.

"I was interested to hear of a news anchor on WABC in America who is also a cartoonist. The two would seem to have little connection, reading the news which is all serious and very different from drawing funny cartoons. But I think they do overlap, it's telling a story.

"It's another way of telling the news. It's a different format and medium to tell news to the family."