Give this story of greening and transformation to children who need it most
Something wonderful has happened. It’s a long way from here, where I stand at my desk looking out over the heads of green fennel, the last sweetie blossoms, to the field, the sheep and the hill top crowned with russet bracken. Far to the west of all that, the book that Laura Carlin and […]
I’ve been a writer for a long time now, more than 20 years. I pootle along OK, though nobody knows who I am and movies have not been made of my books. There is no merchandise. I have a mortgage, no time to dust away the cobwebs and my car is mostly held together by mud. […]
I’ve just been listening to lovely John Simpson, the emperor of foreign correspondents, saying that in spite of what current news may tell us, the world is a better place than 20 years ago. There are fewer wars and dictatorships, more democracies, more negotiations than armed conflicts. So, although 2016 has been a year whose […]
I’m fresh back from a week in Mexico attending the World Land Trust Symposium and meeting the partner organisations with which it works. What a fabulous week. What a wonderful country and what incredible people (only a very special group of people react to the cry ‘rattlesnake’ by trying to elbow each other out of […]
This time of year is always crazily busy. It’s literary festival season and the start of the new school year so children’s authors are dashing about the countryside. At least I had had a bit of a calm before the storm, as I had most of August at home writing two novels for Walker Books, […]
When I was 17 I bought an album that wasn’t anything like the LPs that my friends talked about on the bus to school. Rather than moody, unsmiling, adolescent boys, its cover featured an artwork of a breaching whale. I played it for the first time on my father’s radiogram, at night, lying flat on […]
This isn’t really a sensible post of any kind. It’s just playing. Almost all of the writing I do now is Goal Orientated Behaviour, writing to a deadline, writing with a definite purpose, usually to fit an idea I may have sold to a publisher months, or even year ago. Because I’ve always written for […]
Outside there’s a brief hole in the rain, but by this evening South Wales will be lashed again with the kind of downpour you only used to see in tropical monsoons, although here of course the deluge comes at an angle and at a lower temperature! On the other side of the Atlantic, Eastern […]
When I get asked about what I do, which isn’t very often, the conversation usually has a section in it that goes like this me: I write quite a lot of picture books other person: ( ready to be very impressed) Oh do you do the pictures? me: (a bit dejected here) No, no. Only […]
