AS IN THE LONG AGO

I was idly looking through some of the slides I've been scanning and I came across this! I guess it was 1996. Bonfire night was approaching and I had a sudden inspiration for the Guy. I know that many people can no longer remember John Major. Some are too young, some are beginning to lose their marbles, and some never really knew who he was in the first place. Well, folks, this is what a Conservative Prime Minister looks like - and I assure you, it is a very good likeness. You really don't want David Cameron to be Prime Minister, do you?

I've been intending to visit Orford Ness for years. Orford is one of my favourite places on the Suffolk coast. It has a fine castle and a planned Norman town with the original street plan, even though it is now only a village. And from the quay you can take a ferry to the Ness where secret experiments were carried out for years on radar and ballistics and on the atom bomb. Yet for some reason I never managed to visit the Ness until yesterday, when Kate and I took the National Trust ferry and spent the afternoon wandering around what must be one of the eeriest and most beautiful places in Britain. Various buildings dot the shingle banks, many of them having once been put to uses that remain unknown. Others have been restored to provide viewing platforms and information. The strangest place of all was Laboratory Number 1 where research was carried out on the bomb. The walls are coated in green mould and peeling paint and the rusting roof members creak in the wind. Half of t...

Chris Priestley raises issues in his blog about the new Independent Safeguarding Scheme and its application to children's authors visiting schools. As he says, we discussed it during a very enjoyable lunch, and I've been thinking about it since. Everyone else who works in schools has to be checked, so why should authors be immune? Are they different in some mysterious way from other humans? We all know that most abuse of children takes place in the home and that therefore all the vast apparatus of CRB checking which already goes on is only going to stop a small proportion of this abuse, but I think we've accepted that such procedures are really the only way of preventing a repeat of an event like the Soham murders. I know that writers are seldom alone with children on school visits. I know the chances of anything bad happening are small. But I think we should remember the case of William Mayne, one of the greatest children's writers of the twentieth century who ...

I noticed that the new Japanese edition of Green Fingers had attracted a five star review on Amazon,jp. (That's how sad authors are! Well, this one anyway.) So I translated it with Babelfish and out came this bizarre poetry. I think they understood what I was trying to do, and I was impressed that they noticed, as no other reviewer has done, that there are oblique references to 'The Secret Garden' of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Among 5.0 five stars the garden which revives it brings, the story “of miracle”, 2009/7/2 By The free person east - you look at the review entirely Being delicate, the cover of the color tone which settles. The cutting picture which is used in you taste and are deep is. Thing “of the person who are skillful “the green finger” of title, according to the postscript of the translator to raise the plant,” it seems. If you mention “the garden”, “Hanazono of Burnett secret” and so on is famous, but the contents that your this story are the same the childr...

I drove down to Wales last Thursday, left my car at my sister's house and biked off over the Black Mountains towards Hay-on-Wye. It was a lovely afternoon and I biked up narrow, tree-lined lanes by a river past Llantony Priory to the top of the Gospel Pass, where an elderly couple in a small white Romahome van offered me a hot drink. Then I set off down a glorious descent in the evening sunlight, thinking about camping and cooking supper. I was most of the way down when I came round a bend and hit the special bike-dumping substance which had been laid in my path. The usual slow-motion effect followed as I decided I'd have to go into the hedge. I bounced off the hedge and hit the road with the bike on top of me. Anmazingly, no damage had occurred to the bike. I had a nose-bleed and various bumps and cuts on my leg, but I could stand up, and even ride the bike. So I rode to a campsite and the following day I carried on cycling towards Builth Wells. At first I was feeling q...

I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm perpetually gloomy. And good things still happen in the world of education. Here's an animated movie made by a bunch of eight-year -olds. They love singing sea songs, so we sang them in the middle of Lowestoft last Saturday. We drew a big crowd and had a lot of fun.

When I started teaching back in 1986 the world of the English primary school was on the point of huge changes. I had qualified as a teacher in 1977 as a member of one of the first groups to be able to take a Postgraduate Certificate in Education for primary teaching. This had previously been reserved for secondary teachers and was introduced as part of a drive to get more graduates into primary schools and raise the status of the profession and the quality of teaching.  I trained with an interesting and talented bunch, and the course had its interesting aspects, too. We discussed child development and theories of education. We read Rousseau's 'Emile For Today' and John Holt's 'Why Children Fail' and Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society'. We read Piaget and his disciples and critics. We even learned to teach. But by the time I qualified there were almost no jobs, as we were informed by someone who came to the college to tell us about getting a ...

The desire to look like a reader or a person of culture without having to read or think is not a new one. Flann O'Brien had a novel take on it in the column that he wrote for the Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen. This book, The Best of Myles , must be one of the funniest ever written. Anyway, Myles invented the Irish Writers, Actors, Artists, Musicians Association (WAAMA) which offered a Book Handling Service. If you want an impressive library that doesn't look brand-new and unread, the service provides for dog-earing and marginal annotations at various levels of sophistication. WAAMA also offered a ventriloquists' escort service: 'A lot of the letters we receive are from well-off people who have no books. Nevertheless, they want to be thought educated. Can we help them, they ask? Of course. Let nobody think only book-owners can be smart. The Myles na gCopaleen Escort Service is the answer. Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the ro...

I always enjoy planting leeks. Mysteriously, one buys leek plants by the score, although Bartrums of Beccles seemed to lack confidence that the modern gardener would understand the word. They advertised their plants as coming 'about 20 in a bundle'. When I first started growing vegetables in a garden in Yorkshire a long time ago I had a great book called The Vegetable Garden Displayed which was full of photographs of men in hats digging enormous trenches and growing enormous crops of vegetables in black and white gardens. I followed all the instructions meticulously and grew plenty of enormous vegetables. My other favourite vegetable gardening book is Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables by Lawrence D Hills. How come I have mysteriously lost both these books? At least I can still plant leeks because I can still remember how to make a hole, drop the leek in and fill the hole carefully with water. Very satisfying!

I went for a bike ride yesterday and took a look at the new outer harbour which they're building in Great Yarmouth. Yarmouth has a long spit of land which runs south from the tourist area to the harbour mouth, squeezed between the river and the sea, covered with warehouses and storage yards, many of them run-down or apparently derelict. There was once a caravan site here; a place where it was hard to imagine anyone would have ever wanted to stay. Between the road and the sea was a narrow strip of wasteland and a beach that few people walked on, but now it's all changed.    It is strange to see the coastline extending into the sea on a shore that elswhere is being eaten rapidly by the waves. These cranes are supposed to start unloading containers later in the summer, although a male Cassandra with a face burnt almost black by the sun and a couple of diamond earrings told me, as we stood on the Haven bridge watching young men fishing the river for sea bass as the tide swirl...

This is a nice thing to see in the email on a Monday morning!

Almost by accident I found this little gem about Alison Uttley online. When I was a child I don't think it ever occurred to me that it was possible to actually meet the authors of the books about the Famous Five or the Swallows and Amazons or William Brown. Anyway, as far as I was concerned the authors of those books had merely set down accounts of events that had actually happened. I didn't even want my friends to read the same books as me. I was a jealous, possessive reader. If someone else shared my experience it would be diluted. I lived with the characters, imagined myself somehow there beside them. How could there possibly be room in the books for another reader?  I don't know how common an experience this is, but I do know that children often ask me when I've finished telling a story if it's true. I simply tell them that I heard it from someone so that they can carry on believing, if they want to. And then when I have to be an author in front of ...

My favourite collective noun has always been a 'charm' of goldfinches, so it's very nice to have a charm in the field outside my window. There seem to be about a dozen of them, flitting to and fro all day long, and occasionally resting for a moment on the topmost leaves of the winter-flowering viburnum. The list of collective nouns in the back of my primary school English textbook used to fascinate me, and I tried to become expert at remembering them. I loved all those lists - homonyms and synonyms and the rest of them, though I could never quite remember which was which!

They wound me and they bless me  with strange gifts The salt of absence The honey of memory Norman McCaig  I wonder how many people these days feel the resonance of the words wound and bless that occur at the climax of this deceptively simple poem? (the full text is a couple of posts back) There was a time when almost everyone would have recognized that the words, used in conjunction, have a religious significance. I cannot hear them without thinking of the images of Jesus that haunted my Catholic childhood, one hand raised in blessing, the other indicating a chest apparently split by a gaping wound which reveals a beating heart within, and which echoes that other wound, the one in Jesus's side which Thomas felt obliged to test by inserting his fingers.  Strangely though, I stopped believing in God when I was seven years old, about the time when I made my first confession and God took no punitive action when I failed to admit all my sins. I then proceeded to take m...

Well, I was going to fit these photographs tastefully into the post about Norman MacCaig, but I couldn't make them go where I wanted them, so here they are in a new place. The first picture was taken in April. I stumbled into this ruined village by accident - it wasn't marked on the map. The other two were on a misty August afternoon. It was a very rainy week and I was lucky to be able to see anything at all. I don't suppose you'll ever see a crowd on the top of this hill, like the one we met on top of Snowdon this Easter, as you have to walk several miles before you can start climbing.

I've been meaning to write about Norman MacCaig for a while, and as the BBC is having a poetry season this seems like a good moment. MacCaig is second from the left on the book cover. Worlds was edited by Geoffrey Summerfield who also produced the excellent Voices series, of which more in another post. The book contains interviews with seven poets: Charles Causley, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Norman MacCaig, Adrian Mitchell and Edwin Morgan. It also has photo essays on each poet by Fay Godwin, Larry Herman and Peter Abramowitsch. I first came across Norman MacCaig in the late 1980s when I heard him being interviewed on the radio. He also read some poems about frogs. I went out and bought his Collected Poems and read it from beginning to end - not a thing I usually do with poetry books. For the last twenty years I've had a poem of his pinned to my wall: Between mountain and sea  Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell,  as in the long ago, as in forever....

I looked out of my window today and saw a poem in action.     The Trees   The trees are coming into leaf  Like something almost being said;  The recent buds relax and spread,  Their greenness is a kind of grief.  Is it that they are born again  And we grow old? No, they die too.  Their yearly trick of looking new  Is written down in rings of grain.  Yet still the unresting castles thresh  In fullgrown thickness every May.  Last year is dead, they seem to say,  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.   Philip Larkin I don't know whether it's just because leaf rhymes with grief , but this isn't the only poem which connects trees and mortality. There's Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and New Hampshire by T S Eliot . Feel free to let me know of others!

This group of ash trees stands beyond the meadow at the end of my garden. The earliest photograph was taken in the mid-1980s when there were six trees. I think the gales of 1987 took the tree on the right away, and in the last few years another tree has been steadily leaning into its neighbour. In the snowy picture you can just make out the roof of a barn between the two trees on the left. That, too, was damaged in 1987 and subsequently demolished.  The ash trees make my garden what it is because of the way they frame the northern landscape with those arches between their trunks. Everyone who walks through the hedge into the back garden exclaims at the view, but it's the trees that turn a straight horizon into a series of windows and draw your eye to the narrow band below the horizon where you can see distant marshes, windmills, churches and villages. You can even see wind turbines flashing in the sunlight a dozen miles away on the coast.  I like to think that I liv...

As it's Red Nose Day here's a banjo joke. A band has arrived early for a gig so they lock up the cars and go in search of a drink, but on the way to the pub the banjo player suddenly stops. 'Hell!' he says, 'I left my banjo in the back of the car where anyone can see it. I'll have to go back and cover it up.' The rest of the band sigh, but they walk back to the car with him. When they turn the corner they see that the rear window has been smashed. The banjoist breaks into a run. When the others catch up they find him staring into the car in astonishment. There is now an extra banjo lying on the back seat!   There are similar jokes about other instruments, especially bagpipes. I like this one. Q: Why do bagpipers walk when they play? A: To get away from the noise.   But back to banjos. All those jokes are really very unfair. A friend of mine once pointed out to me that a banjo player can always draw a crowd, and most of the banjoists I've m...

This photograph shows the great Scottish storyteller, Duncan Williamson on a visit to the small Norfolk school where I was teaching in 1992. Here's a quote from Hugh Lupton about him: It was Duncan who told me that when you tell a story, or sing a song, the person you heard it from is standing behind you. When that person spoke, he, in turn, had a teller behind him, and so on, back and back and back. I love this idea, the story has to speak to its own time, but the teller has also to be true to the chain of voices that inform him or her. You can read more from Hugh Lupton about storytelling here .  I was lucky enough to spend a whole day with Duncan , listening to him telling the children story after story, interspersed with songs and tunes on the harmonica , and I often tell stories that he told that day, hearing his voice in my head. He had a very special way of beginning a story so that you were aware that it was part of that chain of voices. Here's an example from Th...

I'm posting a small corner of one of my bookshelves in honour of World Book Day. Most of the children at the school where I teach dressed up last Friday. They were supposed to be characters from books, but usually these days they're characters from the book of the film, or maybe from the book of the film of the book. It's all very confusing. I did notice that Harry Potter seems to have faded from the scene. The big favourites were Ben10, (looks like the book hasn't appeared yet for that one!), Snow White, Batman, Spiderman , Captain Hook (along with various pirates from the Caribbean), and police officers - which is fair enough when you think how much crime fiction we consume. So: my bookshelf. It's almost a little history of my childhood reading. I loved the Sam Pig stories for a long time. They evoke a vanished rural England which was still just about alive when I was a child. When I read them now I can still recapture the vividness of the experience of ...

Mike died on 22 nd of February. For ten years between 1980 and 1990 I played with him in a band called The Moles , along with Derek Guy and Henry Holzer . It started out as a ceilidh band. We met on Friday evenings at Henry's house to rehearse and chat, and played gigs maybe once a month, but more frequently in the summertime.  In the early years I didn't have a car and Mike would pick me up every Friday in his Morris Traveller. Ellie and Emily always looked forward to his arrival and it usually took at least half an hour's conversation before we were ready to leave.  Mike was a terrific guitarist. He grew up listening to his dad playing all the standards on the guitar, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of those old songs. Sweet Lorraine was a favourite of his dad's. He was brilliant at working out the chords, too, and also at faking it when he wasn't too sure. We called that improvising until Mike came up with a better word - impoverishing!  Sitting on ...

The main part of my teaching job these days is teaching music, and the most important part of that job is teaching singing. I've always sung songs with children, ever since the time when I was a playgroup supervisor in Emily's playgroup, and when I was a class teacher I'd always have my guitar with me so that every day was punctuated by songs.  However, I've never been that confident about my singing voice, and until recently I'd never had any training either in singing, or in teaching it. So, after a couple of years of encouraging singing in my school I had children who loved singing, had a great sense of rhythm and were really musical, and I realized I needed to know how to take them to another level. I also figured out that while I was sitting playing the guitar I couldn't help them to sing. I needed to conduct them.  The result of all that is that when I saw a conducting course advertised in Great Yarmouth with James Davey I thought it was just the thin...

Professor Kay Davies was on Desert Island Discs last week and she was asked about teachers who inspired her. She described a chemistry teacher who loved golf and would help her students set up their experiments and then pop off for a couple of hours to play a round. This gave the students plenty of time to talk and work things out for themselves. It's hard to imagine a teacher getting away with that kind of thing today. I'm always interested to hear stories like this. The teachers who change people's lives very often seem to be the eccentrics. I had a French teacher for two years who taught me more French than I learnt in the rest of my school career and let us use the French cupboard to listen to albums by Love and Captain Beefheart. I also had a teacher at primary school, Sister Marion, who let me and my friend spend three days designing and painting a very large imaginary bird. I can still picture the bird, fifty years later!  And thinking about this I'm remin...

I forgot to mention the lost glove incident! I was in a bit of a daze when I got on the train last Friday morning at Haddiscoe station, which must be one of the remotest stations in East Anglia. I was wearing the hand-knitted gloves that Kate gave me for Christmas. Obviously this was a bad idea, because when I got off the train in Norwich I left the gloves behind. I bought a paper on the platform, then realised what I'd done and ran back to the train, which had become a Yarmouth train and was about to leave. I jumped on and searched the seats. The gloves had gone, though there was a pair of thin black gloves on one of the seats. I asked the guard, but she hadn't seen them. It was a bad start to the trip. I pinned my hopes on Lost Property, but they didn't turn up there either. When I called in on Tuesday the custodian was outraged that they hadn't been handed in. I'm hoping to spot them on the streets of Lowestoft. What I do then will depend on who's w...

We didn't have enough snow here in Norfolk, so I thought I'd go and find some. Well, actually I planned the weekend some time ago because people kept telling me that if I loved the Scottish hills in summer I'd love them even more in winter. So I booked a course called Weekend Winter Skills at Glenmore Lodge near Aviemore. There were six of us in the group, and our excellent instructor, James Woodhouse.  It's always refreshing to escape from your comfort zone and great, if like me you're a teacher, to suddenly find yourself a not especially bright pupil for a while. The combination of pieces of hard-to-take-in technical information about navigation and avalanches with walking uphill though deep snow into a corrie was great.  It didn't take me long to realise that I am a fairly bad navigator, which should make me more careful in the future. We did plenty of rolling downhill in the snow and making hilarious and occasionally brilliant attempts to arrest our fa...

Every Christmas I feel as if I've struggled to the top of an unforgiving hill on my bike and I'm about to start freewheeling down the other side. I go to a website and I download sunrise and sunset tables for the year so that I can cheer myself up by seeing how much lighter it's going to be day by day.  It happens slowly at first - hardly any change until the beginning of January, but then an extra minute morning and evening, and by the middle of February five whole minutes every day!  No matter how grey and dismal the weather becomes in January and February I can reassure myself that Spring really is on the way. The landscape remains stubbornly monochrome, and even the green on the fields of winter wheat and barley is only a greenish tinge on the brown, but under the apple trees the spikes of daffodils and bluebells are poking through the grass.

I've always found my best ideas while walking or riding my bike, and yet I've never really felt comfortable about going for a long walk on a day when I'm meant to be writing. It just doesn't feel like work, even though I know I get more done in an hour sitting on my bike or tramping around the edges of ploughed fields than I do in five hours sitting in front of the computer screen. I'm experimenting this year, and it seems to be true that the more I walk the better I write. It may just be coincidence, but I'll keep my fingers crossed. Some years ago I was given this wonderful book by Morris Marples which introduced me to, among others, 'the Odcombian Leg-stretcher' Thomas Coryate who in 1608 walked from Somerset to Venice and back. And walking twenty miles and back to visit a friend meant nothing to Wordsworth and Coleridge! Get hold of the book if you can - it's a great read.

I heard last week that there's to be a Japanese edition of this book. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it, and curious to know if they'll make the setting Japanese. For the UK edition Sian Bailey made very beautiful black and white drawings of plants and of some places very close to where I live. The Winter picture shows a farmhouse in a place called Bulls Green. I see that OUP are producing a new reading scheme targeting boys. It's called Project X. Getting boys to read is the Holy Grail of children's publishing - or one of them, if you can have more than one. Just imagine all those boys rushing to bookshops to spend their pocket money on books. My first book was about football. Publishers believed that football stories would engage boys, but one perceptive reviewer pointed out that boys who played football were too busy playing to read about it, and boys who didn't play weren't interested. There are plenty of exceptions to this, but ...