Ian Whybrow

I’m delighted to hear that one of my books – “Harry and the Dinosaurs Go to School” – has been selected by the charity Booktrust to be distributed to every child in the UK (except in Wales, where Harry has a presence in classrooms already, only under the Welsh name of Owain in Welsh-language editions.) Even as I write pantechnicons* are rolling down the highways and byeways, piled high with blue bookbags and teacher-packs ready for delivery. (*Nice to have an excuse to employ pantechnicon. Hope I’ve got the spelling right.)

The publication of the best part of a million books for this initiative, and their distribution, are sponsored by Pearson (who own Puffin, among other distinguished cultural properties) and by government grant, as well as by Booktrust, under a scheme called Booktime. The idea is to make sure that every child starting school in Britain actually owns at least one book and that teachers will give it a kick-start by introducing it in class along with all sorts of related games and fun activities before it goes home in a bookbag – along with a smashing little book of verse. The hope is to encourage parents to read more with their children.

Not surprisingly, and depressingly, what with the break-up of the traditional family, the habit of placing tvs and computers in children’s bedrooms, and increasing demands on parents to get out and make a living , etc, fewer parents are making reading with their kids a priority.

That strikes me as a shame bordering on criminal neglect. I heard Robert Winston telling a “Child of Our Time” audience recently that as many as 80 per cent of parents NEVER have a conversation with their kids. Sure, they tell them what to do and ask them a few functional questions about where they’ve been, etc – but they never actually discuss things on an intimate level. When you settle down together with a book, you can’t avoid conversation. It just happens naturally. Read with him or her and the youngster gets at least three invaluable gifts- all for free; contact, conversation and confidence. And we all know that children who are confident readers do better not just in school, but in adult life than those who don’t have a reading habit.

So I thought I’d celebrate Booktime and give the scheme a little plug and take the opportunity to get back into my still hopelessly inadequate website. It has languished untended for far too long.

Enjoyed the Dutch Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery today. A wonderfully inspirational mixture of characters – admirals, merchants, couples, babies, old people,families with ten children, burghers, regents, military men. Must find out what what Syndics and Jurists are, exactly. Amazing how many of the people represented are painted with affection. There are one or two posers wearing sugarloaf hats, expensive lace and ridiculously frilly tunics, pantaloons and boots who deserve a good kick up the backside, but only a handful.

Reworked an idea into something I’m pleased with. Be interesting to see whether I can sustain it. Two days of sunshine in a row; that’s certainly cheering.

Bergman dead yesterday and now Antonioni. Alan Jackson comes to mind:

A tulip fell deid ba ma doorstep the day,
Dark red, the colour o blud.
Twas the only wan come up this year.
I imagine it fell wi a thud.

Two thuds.

As the floodwaters of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire recede and there is at least temporary cause for general rejoicing, it seems trifling to mention that my creative juice is not exactly in spate today. Hence my fiddling about doing this when I should be doing something to earn a crust. Which reminds me that I should be thankful for making a living at all at this game. And at least Ive managed to put Hampstead Theatre in touch with Harper Collins about a Christmas production of a dramatised version of Little Wolf’s Book of Badness.

The layouts for the Harry after next are ready for Adrian Reynolds to contemplate. That’s something. And Macmillan sent US and Italian editions of Bella Gets her Skates On this morning (to add to the Finnish and Welsh translations) so that cheered me up. That little story was kick-started by a visit to the National Gallery in Edinbugh where I admired in the flesh that often-Christmas-carded and exhilarating painting of the skating vicar by Raeburn. Can’t think of the title – hang on – ah… it’s called The Skating Minister… according to the National Gallery site that I have this moment checked out. Rosie Reeve, the illustrator of Bella, has included a small rabitty homage to this in the charming spread where our heroine plucks up the courage to take to the ice. You are one of a minute number of people to know that.

But does anybody care? Sob.

Yesterday I stood up to my knees in cold water, leaves swirling round my gaping Crocs, feeling for the drain-cover in the courtyard behind our flats. My neighbour Sneha stood bravely beside me with a broom. The water cascading from the gutters above came down with a punch that made us gasp and swear. I scraped skin from my knuckles, felt my nails splintering and my rep as a calm, gentlemanly sort of cove being ripped to shreds. Finally I clawed the thing off and the lake tipped and curled its maelstrom way down a satisfyingly gaping square plughole. I screamed for joy. Sneha raised her broom like Boudicca and snarled. We ran. I haven’t spoken to her since but I feel we have peeped over the edge together and seen something new and primal in ourselves. Marlowe and The Heart of Darkness or what?

This morning we wake to the news that librarians in Birmingham organised a sleep-over party so that kids could read Harry Potter togther. I should feel happy about that. Another deluge dealt with. How come I feel its waters lapping around my neck?

It’s been a good day. My diary turned up. It was on the glass table in the living room. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there the other three million times I looked – but I don’t want to make a big thing about that. The main thing is – it found its way back to me. I simply applied my usual approach to losing things; I waited. Actually, that’s not quite true; I worried about it a lot, involved a great many people in the hunt for it and had a recurring dream about it slipping down the back of something forever. There’s something else at the dark backward and abysm of my mind. It occurs to me that my wife might be doing a Gaslight on me. I have annoyed her twice recently by allowing my dirty socks to remain in the area of but not exactly in the laundry basket. Hmmm.

The other good things today have been:
1. “Arcadia” on the Radio to celebrate Tom Stoppard’s 70th birthday and his 15-minute Hamlet. Makes yer proud to be British. (Or Czechoslovakian)
2. The loan by Chris (my neighbour-across-the-road) of a masonry bit of just the right callibre to prepare a place for the hook I found that was just the right size to hang up a decorative object that my darling one has wanted hanging from the kitchen wall for several years. He found it for me in spite of the fact that he had just been stuck for hours on the M4 on the journey back from Exeter with a carload of gear from his his son’s room at university. This was neighbourly.
3. I managed the hole with a skill that brings to mind the words “Flynn” and “in” and plugged it with two lovely taps of my hammer. Yesss.
4. On my way across the road to return the bit, I encountered two women I know reasonably well. One of them was trying to apply jump leads from her car to her friend’s. They thanked me for my encouragement and did not sneer at my shameful inability even to locate either battery. I went away. When I came back, both cars were running. “Brilliant!” I said. “How do you know these things?” “Bill, I suppose,” said Maggie. Bill died last year but there he was.

5. There have been three attempts to kill lots people for enjoying themselves or for living in Britain … that didn’t work. We’re waiting for worse news, but meanwhile, the bravery of the people who dealt directly with the danger of those three incidents is something to celebrate.

That’s neighbours for you.

I’ve lost my diary. I’m always losing things – keys, especially escape me, sometimes for years at a time – but this is the first time my diary has walked off and left me. It might have taken to the country air of Upton Scudamore or Warminster – or possibly of Suffolk – because I’ve been to those places in the last few days. My appointments, my obligations, my tentative arrangements are lying quietly out of reach, along with a few scribbled memories and ideas. I’ll describe it to you. It’s A5, claret red, slightly bruised at the corners. It bears the logo PFD on its breast. Come home, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop; I need you.

Much enjoyed my trip to Warminster in Wilts yesterday for the first Warmister Lit Fest. This was the initiative of a wonderfully enthusiastic and determined chap from the Army Education Corp called Captain Cooke (a rank to which he was destined, when he joined up as a boy soldier, as surely as Major Major) Attended a fascinating lecture on Human Potential and Parenting on Thurs evening and after all that food for thought, partook of a delicious supper at The Angel Inn, Upton Scudamore. Scallops and black pudding starter… ymmm.

The staff and students of The Avenue Primary School were very welcoming and appreciative. I think I met pretty well all of them in the course of the day. The really big surprise came when I was taken over to Warminster library to do some book signing at lunchtime. The children’s section had been turned into a dinosaur adventure park by a chap called Stephan who – entirely voluntarily – had laboured away since Christmas to make (out of chicken wire, polystyrene foam, papier mache, old kitchen cupboards and other recyclables) a massive tyrannosaurus head, crashing through the brickwork, a triceratops book-bin, a pteradactyl – and Harry looking down from a large bucket that was hanging from the rafters. “They haven’t got the funding,” Stephan explained, “so I put two or three hundred quid of my own into it…” The librarian declared him to be Warminster’s most public spirited man. Well, in the course of a conversation with Geoff Cooke earlier, it had emerged that he was prepared to subsidize the Literary festival to out of his own pocket – “just to give it a kick start”. Talk about resture your faith in human nature….!

I’ve managed an interview with Stephan and the librarian – and I’m hoping they’ll send me some pictures. Let’s see if I can put them out there for you.

Up betimes and off to Berkshire – Bracknell to be precise – to talk to Sandy Lane Primary School and to celebrate the official opening of the county’s ( and the world’s) first Mobile Library to be entirely decorated with Harry and dinosaurs.

I leave home at 6.30 and head for the M25 – and blow me if I don’t arrive in Bracknell at 8.00 am. This is a world record. My reward for this early arrival is to be invited to talk to the nursery children. Three year olds at this time of the day are unpredicatable – but we get through it without anybody needing the loo , thanks to a few laughs about Wobble who can only say yellow, and some robot action – marching, saluting, blasting, etc – as a prelude to a reading of Harry and the Robots. Emerge unscathed.

Speak to most of the school (7-11 year olds) about what I do. Adrian arrives at 10.30 from Cambridge and we face the entire school – 4 to 6 year-olds included. We give them the lowdown about the way we work on books, read a couple of stories and have a conversation with the children various Harry matters. Then off to explore the bookbus, face the cameras, celebrate the launch of this magnificent vehicle (Loud cheers for Peter of Peter’s Booksellers and Penny Dimmack the Services Support Manager in these regions, who sweated blood to get this up and running and delivered on time from Arbroath) and sign for three quarters of an hour. I have a fumbling bash with my digital recording device. Must send the results to Mark Blevis to see whether he can make anything interesting out of a strange and rambling set of soundbites.

Not a particularly auspicious day to get cracking on a blog, except that I’m celebrating the day before yesterday.

The day before yesterday I came back to London from the Hay Festival, exhausted , over-stimulated, humbled by the range and intelligence of the writers I heard speak. I have to admit to a touch of jealousy, too at the respectful, attentive way in which these worthies are received by their audience. When I do Harry events at Literary Festivals, I have to face a circus-tentful of humanity, at least half of which can’t read and of which a sizeable and uncontrollable proportion are under the age of eighteen months. So there’s none of that gentle Q and A stuff; none of the “Are you ready to start, Sir John?” “Any chance of a glass of champagne?” “Of course, Sir John! I‘ll leave the bottle on the table…” Oh, no. You’re on your own, so get out there and tap-dance and don’t take it personally if the babies scream and the wigglers wiggle up and down the aisles. I’m getting used to it, but it’s much more fun having a conversation with and reading to audiences of children who can follow a narrative and who are keen to answer you questions. “What do they call the people who draw the pictures in books ?” (This to a bunch of five-year-olds in a rather posh prep school) “Australians!” comes the confident reply.

Anyway, I worked my way through my post, and got on with my chores – invoicing, sorting out the wires of all the electronic clutter that I drag up and down motorways – and as I was working through my emails, was reminded that the PLR (Public Lending Right) have updated their website, so now you can see online which books are registered in your name. I should explain that this blessed and marvellous institution works out how many times your books are borrowed from public libraries all over the UK and awards you a few pence every time your books are borrowed – up to a limit of £6,600 p.a. If you know any writers who are registered with them, they’ll all tell you what a treat it is, in cold and miserable February, to have a cheque plop on to your doormat, just when you’re wondering whether it’s safe to scrape the mould off the rindy scrap of Jaalrsberg cheese you found at the back of the fridge (sob) .

I knew I had a fair number of books registered; actually, it turned out to be 189. Now one of the questions people always ask me at public events is: “How many books have you written?” For years I’ve been saying “About 60 … maybe 70.” So yesterday I had a go at counting them up. This is hard since the PLR register every new ISBN code, so that their list includes different editions of the same book, compilations of published stories and re-issues. But the answer surprised me. There are (I think) 91 or 92 separate titles registered – which means that with the new books in the pipeline waiting to be published, I’ve written a hundred books. I know lots of them are short and ANYONE can write books for kiddies, but come on! A ton! Century up! (Pause to wave bat in air and adjust head-guard and jock-strap)

Champagne, darling!