AS IN THE LONG AGO

  Dear Nobody  is one of those Carnegie winners that has managed to remain in print since its original publication and which has had a life of its own. It has been extensively translated and much used in schools to prompt discussion about teenage pregnancy. Berlie Doherty says on her website: 'I knew that in  Dear Nobody  I was handling a difficult situation. It is about two young people who love each other, but it's also about the ways in which love can go wrong, and how sometimes it can make us do things that aren't sensible or that hurt people. In a broad sense, it's about family love and family relationships, how sometimes love turns to hate and drives people and families apart.' Well, yes, it is all that. But what struck me most about  Dear Nobody  was that it was about choices and how we make them. When I wrote on this blog about Berlie Doherty's first Carnegie winner,  Granny Was a Buffer Girl  I said that any of the stories in it could have been expanded

 1990 seems like yesterday to me. I mean, it sounds quite recent until I remember that it was the year my son was born and  so, obviously, it was 33 years ago.  I just watched an excellent documentary about Judy Blume -  Judy Blume Forever  - (it's on Amazon Prime) and I could hardly believe that  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret  was published in 1970, a full 20 years before this month's 1990 Carnegie winner,  Wolf , by Gillian Cross. And in 1990 it was books by Judy Blume that my 12 year old daughter was reading, and they were more frank, especially about sex, than any books published in this country for teenagers at that time. The young assistants in Waterstones, where I just bought a copy, were very excited about the upcoming film of the book, and they weren't even born when it was first published. It's interesting to compare  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret  with  Wolf . The aspects of  Margaret  that attracted most attention were the frank depicti

 Lately, I've been making shirts. It turns out that I make all the same mistakes when I'm sewing as I do when I'm writing a book. Luckily, when a shirt goes wrong you've only wasted a day or two of your life, rather than a year or two - or ten! This free, customisable shirt pattern can  be downloaded from the V&A website.  Actually, when a shirt goes wrong it's usually possible to fix the problem by undoing what you've done and re-doing it properly, so the shirt isn't really wasted - it's just provided you with a painful learning experience. It would be nice if a troublesome book could be fixed as easily.  At least with a shirt you do have a pattern to follow, and a set of instructions, although the pattern usually has to be altered to fit and the instructions seem to quite often miss out crucial bits of information. Or, just as likely, I haven't read those instructions properly.  It turns out that my way of making shirts is very similar to my wa

 Once again I've made the mistake of reading a Carnegie winner long before I come to write about it. I read  A Pack of Lies  by Geraldine McCaughrean a few months back but when I took it off the shelf again I couldn't remember a single thing about it! Of course, when I started reading it (again) it all came flooding back, but it's set me wondering about a few things, chiefly whether some books are more easy to forget than others. Or perhaps I should say, easier for  me  to forget. I do know that it has nothing to do with how enjoyable a book is. I enjoyed  A Pack of Lies  very much, both times! And I often pick up books by my favourite crime writers in charity shops and read a few pages, then buy the book, convinced that I haven't read it before, only to find, once I'm 50 pages in, that I actually do know what's going to happen. Looking back over the list of Carnegie winners I realised that the act of writing about them seems to have cemented them into my brain

 It's almost 20 years since my wife, Ellie, died of breast cancer, but before she died she contributed to a book edited by Tania Yelland called  All Woman: A Life after Breast Cancer.  Tania Yelland* also died several years ago, so there's a kind of grim irony about the book's title, but it's not in any way a grim book. Rather, it's a collection of pieces of writing by thirty quite different women about how they coped with their illness and its aftermath. One of the things the contributors were asked to do, in addition to having their photo taken by Arthur Edwards who at that time specialised in taking photos of royalty for The Sun newspaper, was to choose a helpful quote for the start of the piece. Ellie almost chose this, which we'd seen at the start of Kevin Crossley-Holland's  The Norse Myths. 'Fearlessness is better than faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors.'  (Anonymous lines from  For Scirnis ) Readers of Susan Price's 19