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 ...