When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.

Well, a blog’s not a poem, and quite simply,  I find it hard to be bothered with mine when I’m busy. Still, now and then I find that something triggers off a bit of verse – which is not necessarily the same as a poem. When that happens, Twitter a handy outlet, being so restrictive. And thinking about inspiration, colliding as that does at this time of year with roses, sets one considering how bona fide poets get cracking. With a head full of rhymes for roses – Moses, supposes, toeses, noses, closes … etc –your poet is armed and ready to fire.

Now, did Shakespeare ever discover the curious efficacy of peeing on his roses? Suppose he did. In which case, perhaps he was struck by an idea that suited – not a love lyric, but something more philosophical:

So there he was in 1660 with Hamlet on his mind, say – and he popped out to the midden for a wee and redirected himself towards a just-blossoming rose.

Eureka. There’s the killer line to explain the ghost to Horatio.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When people (including yours truly) quote that from memory today, they often say ‘twixt, rather than in.  So that set me to thinking that this might be how the germ of the idea began to sprout.

Passing Strange: circa 1600.

“More things twixt heavn & earth than one supposes,”

Thought WS while peeing on his roses.

Once Norman danced a pas-de-deux with Mrs Mac who was twice his size but sportingly squeezed herself into a pink frilly tutu.  Sooooo charming.

Still, a very good turn-out from parents while I talked to Reception and Years 1 and 2; they and the children all very sporting and interactive. Good to see so many keen readers.

I’d pretty well done the second session when the Head turned up with a large pair of scissors and asked me to launch the new minibus. There was a ribbon, she explained; I was not required to winkle my way in with the scissors. So it was an unexpected pleasure for me and the Monitors to be posing for the Harrow Observer in this splendidly plastic-smelling vehicle and joining in a little improvised multi-faith prayer for all who ride in her. “May all their journeys be safe and pleasant. Amen,” said my neighbour. Good one. I think he’s Sri Lankhan.

Made me think of the Harry Bus that Adrian and I once launched for Swindon Library services. It had Harry sitting in an armchair, reading, with the dinosaurs looking over his shoulder.  I wonder if that’s still on the road … and what I did with the pics of it.

Tall Stories.

In the world of Parker-Rees

Giraffes will sometime dance.

But to have them rhyme from time to time

Requires a VAST advance.

Where Heathfield sprang from, I don’t know either. But it took only a photo of a lit-up phone booth down a dark country lane to resurrect him from the shadows.

Phantom Phonebox

By the dark Malthouse

Where strangling ivy crawls,

Heathcliff is waiting

In case Cathy calls.

There’s been a desperate amount of cuckooing early and late these last few days, with an occasional stutter or hiccup that seems to lend credence to the old saying:

The cuckoo comes in April

Starts to sing in May

He changes his tune in the middle of June

And then he flies away.

While packing away stuff in preparation for a splashy visit from Bob (Bowen) the Builder, I came across some jokes that Fifi had kindly written out for me during her last sojourn in the country with us. A weevil was crawling across the paper like the answer one of her riddling question.

Question. My brother is smarter than I am. What does that make me?

Answer: The lesser of two weevils.

Or, put it another way:

The Lesser of 2 Weevils Speaks

After a family upheaval

I chewed wood; he made professor.

He’s the academic weevil

I’m the lesser.

These are almost as much fun as my new incinerator. Once he gets going, you can feed him with goosegrass, briony, great green spurges –he swallows the lot and turns it to ash like puffing billio. I miss being able to barrow my uncompostable rubbish down to the corner of Di’s field, but she’s moved now and the new neighbour want to tidy that area up.

So there we are: I’ve taken up smoking again.

I really should get back to work.

Dull start to the day and one on which I feel slightly bluh. I blame it on what Texans swear by as the secret of longevity: frahhhed fewd. So easy, though, isn’t it, to pop those leftover spuds into the pan with the tuna steaks…?

Can’t have been that pint of Butty Bach, can it? He was delicious. I enjoyed him down at The Tram last night to chat with Ian Campbell, my neighbour here in Herefordshire where they don’t believe in the impersonal pronoun. Ian makes his living writing articles on the economy for Reuters – but is a novelist manque. Having lived in Mexico for years before he settled here, he knows the country well and has written fascinatingly about the experience of migrants who risk everything to cross the border into the States. He has an agent – and like my son-in-law – just needs to get his feet under the table at a decent publisher’s to be up and away.

It was Mark Blayney, by the way  – that Somerset Maugham award winner that Al and I met at Wychwood. Nice chap – and an inspiration. He got fed up with waiting to be published and took the DIY route via the internet with great success.

Yesterday Ann and I had lunch at The Courtyard Theatre in Hereford with Jenny Hulme, a talented journalist bursting with ideas, and a great supporter of charities that don’t often get much publicity. She was the organiser of the Blind Football World Cup that took place in Hereford a year or so back. Having cut her teeth on magazines, she writes now regularly articles for the Guardian and Telegraph and makes a decent living. But she’s yet another chum who’s keen to branch out in book form.

A lot of people talk vaguely about wanting to write a book but these folks are serious. You just know they’re going to do it however painfully slow and frustrating a business it is to break in to a nervous market.

Stitchwort, campion, cuckoo flower;

Summer has no finer hour.

Than here & here & here -

Deep

          In Herefordshire.

Tom Powell from down the cottages once told me that cuckoos go into reverse at the end of May. Oo-cuck, maybe? Or maybe they metamorphose into the flowers of their name, as barnacles are supposed to turn into barnacle geese.

We had a mole tump on the front lawn yesterday that got my dander up. Now that next door’s cats have laid him out behind the back gate I regret my own killer instincts. Hoonts, Tom calls them. That’s the Herefordshire name. I wonder if it’s hund, like the German dog.

Well, there he is, lying on his back. Makes me think of Andrew Young’s consoling, contemplative poem in which he thinks of the air as a natural place to bury a creature whose regular haunt is under the earth.

For you to raise a mound

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

My killer instincts have lately been applied to slugs, snails and weeds. I’m no better than cats.

And…

I smell of bonfire.

This came on the day after Sat 1st, when I abandoned the family at noon in order to be on time for my event at the Wychwood Fest at Cheltenham. My endlessly patient golfing guru, Alan, was curious enough about the idea to offer to come along as my Roadie.

On arrival at the solar-plexus-pounding tented village alongside the racecourse, we found the Waterstone marquee occupied, as it usually is at this time of the year, by the overgrown-Lear-like figure of Philip Ardagh. I’m talking Edward here, not blasted heaths. No, honestly, don’t, missus. Anyway, noticing me looking through the entrance to the adjacent book tent, he ordered his overheated young audience to give me a peremptory round of applause and instantly after they had begun, cut them off with an assurance that that was more than I deserved and the loudest clap I was likely to get all day. Tooth and claw, this business.

A book tent? I hear you gasp. At a music festival? It’s true that most of the other booths, stalls and marquees are dedicated to dispensing some sort of loud, percussive or electronic noise, getting you to sing along or wiggle to it; or refreshing it with drink, exotic noodles, organic burgers, tofu and tacos, pies etc. The festival on a sunny day like this is heaven for children, offering a hundred ways to get sticky: think of all the things you can do with clay, paint, bubbles, sweeties, fast food, coloured beverages – and the Wychwood crowd have thought of a few more. You can also talk to various chaps with an ecological message, like this one with a tray of mixed poo for you to identify:

Under these circs, you might surmise that books would be the last thing that the kids here would turn to – and you’d be right. Except that for some parents, popping their infants in front of an author offers a kind of alternative therapy.

This one was taking no chances, obviously, being only 10 weeks old:

So I did my stint followed by some signing, talked to a very nice reporter

and set off to explore.

I had promised Al a decent cup of coffee for his faithful service (remembering my jacket, lugging around my laptop, etc), Our testing lap of the campus together, took in the main stage, artworks, something called Not Quite the Shilling and, particularly riskily, a refreshment called Oxygen. No-one seemed to be patronising this booth and Al, being an enquiring, convivial sort of cove, went to ask what was on offer. Closer inspection revealed that stools were set in front of a counter where batches of coloured cylinders of drink, ostensibly bursting with re-vivifying extra oxygen, were waiting to be taken through a plastic tube, possibly intravenously. I didn’t stay to find out, though, because, as you stepped under the awning, you were accurately targeted by piercing techno-noise which drilled a painful channel through your skull from ear to ear .

We made our excuses and retreated, crying:

WHAT DO WE WANT? HEARING AIDS!

WHEN DO WE WANNEM? HEARING AIDS!

Eventually I sat him down next to a converted double-decker coffee-bus and got in the queue. There seemed to be some kind of industrial action going on in there – because, even when you got to the front of the line, it took ten minutes to dispense your caffeinated cup of choice. It followed that I was quite surprised to discover that Alan had not deserted and taken the train home. Instead he was seated happily at a sunny table, chatting to a proper author. Turns out this man of letters was doing a bit of stand-up poetry around ten – so that was some sort of explanation for his presence here. What’s more – get this – he was the winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize, not to mention the only self-published writer ever to have been so honoured. We were dead impressed and grateful, especially Yrs Trly, considering as I did ( until I realised you have to be under 35) that this might be the way forward for my literary son-in-law who is keen to get into print.

I’ve got his card somewhere; I must look him up.

Summer is ycomen in – but no loude sing cu-cu today. Probably wore himself out yesterday.

One of the hazards of doing a picture-book event at a Lit Fest as a children’s author is the uncertainty about where to pitch it. When there are lots of babies about – quite lidderally babies and smalls of between one and twenty-four months – you are in a minefield. The warning of my character, the plucky Little Wolf, applies to these as much as to wolf cubs.

Babies are kwite dangerous.

This is what they do.

Wah-wah, hic burp

Sick, puddle, poo.

If you give them piggy backs

Or 2 much rabbit stew –

Remember!

Wah-wah, hic  burp

Sick, puddle, poo.

Somehow, with tremendous fortitude and in heat that practically melted my shirt with the ducks on, we all survived the experience in the Starlight tent. Ella and Fifi helped afterwards with the signing which was mostly for those who were old enough to walk. They supplied kisses and helped me with the spelling of mumbled names.

Small: My name is Urxyjeesmijjj widdayuh.

Ella (bending close, motherly):  Can you spell that for us?

Small: MY NAME IS URXYJEESMIJJJWIDDAYUH.

Fifi ( to the mother): Pardon?

Mother ( a Scot): His name is … (Something I can’t hear in the general hubbub of the booktent)

Ella (translating): His name is Alexander James Smyth with a Y.

All this is invaluable.

One eight year old with a fine tiger face-paint job approached solemnly with a speech prepared by his papa: “I should just like to say how much pleasure your books used to give me. I read them constantly when younger.”

There is a pause. I hardly know what to say but Fifi has the answer.

Fifi (raising her right arm): High five, man.

Whack Whack Whack.   Job done.

After this, my son-in-law, Laurence takes the girls away. So their mum, Suzannah, and I have a cuppa in the green room while Ann – who with L has just enjoyed the event I most wanted to see, it having co-incided with my own – viz or to wit, an audience with John le Carre – goes to trawl through the books.

Suz and I are thrilled to be sharing a couch with Oliver James, journalist and child psychologist who forgives me for asking him if he has just delivered a talk on genetics. “No,” he says. “I’m saving that for next year. I’m still doing Love Bombing.”  Aha! So he is not Steve Jones. “Were you thinking I was Edward de Bono?” he enquires gently. “He’s probably about a hundred and thirty by now.” He introduces himself by name, enquires with genuine interest who Suz and I are and we’re away. While we discuss Love Bombing (something Suz and I are subsequently determined to have a go at) I notice that his  delightful 11 year-old daughter – who sweetly acknowledges that she once read Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs and commends the series to her dad – is absorbed by The Malificent Seven. She’s gone off books about boring stuff that happens every day, she explains. She likes shocks and a bit of killing.

Hmmm. Higson, Horowitz, Darren Shan … and now this. I feel uneasily that perhaps that I should heed these warnings that I need to get a bit more red in tooth and claw.

This unsettling urge lasts only until we pop along to enjoy the Blezard-McCall-Smith Show.  Their business is to reassure the adoring crowd that there will be no shocks or evil in his oeuvre. Nothing unpleasant. They are a brilliant act, operating with impeccable timing, giggling along down Memory Lane and simply enjoying what we all enjoy – tales of the Last Chance Beauty Salon, etc.

There were, as it happened, two shocks: one, that Sandy writes 1000 words an hour. (“Flaubert wrote 5 a day. But they were good. And they were in French. Which is much harder.”) And two, that he was quite happy to read the ending of his latest. (“It shouldn’t make any difference, really.”) He reads movingly of the revelation that Mma Ramotswe’s detective hero is a fraud, a self-published failure who never actually sold more than five of them (one of them to her) and of her assuring him that by following his precepts, as outlined in his work “The Principles of Successful Detective Work” or some such, she and her assistant Grace Makutsi have brought relief and happiness to hundreds of people.

We all melt.

Blood will have blood, see? But a bit of domestic comedy bringeth forth sweetness and delight.

Hey YOOOO! Wayne ROO – ney!

Are YOOOO Wayne ROO-NEY?

If YOOOOO Wayne Roo-ney -

Then CAAAALL me!

I’m doing a turn at the Hay Fest this afternoon in preparation for which I was fattened up by Puffin Publicity at The Three Tuns last night with several other writers and story-tellers. By far the most illustrious of our party was Charlie Higson, writer of the Young Bond series and now zombie-iste supreme; star of stage, screen, tv and … of particular delight to me at the moment, co-creator of the most consistently funny series on Radio 4 Down the Line or I’m Gary Bellamy. I made the poor bloke recount in detail how the show’s put together. Basically, they do it because he and Paul Whitehouse and various other chums have a good laugh without devoting the enormous amount of time required to do something more high-profile. What toil there is, goes mostly into the editing, apparently, because the phone-in interviews with sundry nutcases are improvised and need to be pruned and tweaked for continuity. So then I quizzed him mercilessly about how he came to be entrusted with the Young Bond franchise. (What a gift!) Anthony Horowizt was first choice of the Fleming estate, apparently – but Charlie was kitted up and on the bench. (Pause to mention that a spotted woodpecker is knocking six bells out of the peanut feeder but he has so far failed to faze a greenfinch and several house sparrows that are hanging in there like small boxing managers steadying the punchbag for their boy.)

We talked about the various attempts to extend the adult Bond franchise – Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd. As Charlie sees it, the most common mistake is to take on the job as a challenge to write literary pastiche – and worse, to treat Bond as a spy. I’d never thought about this before – but now I see that what Fleming has Bond do is simple. He doesn’t do any spying. He pops along to see M. He’s told about some unpleasant geezer who’s a threat to world peace, he’s tooled up by Q and he rubs the guy out. The thing is – he knows how to do things – what colour wine to drink, how to play roulette, what Greeks eat for breakfast, etc. Being confident among high-rollers and in awkward situations; that’s basically what we punters admire about Bond.

Fifi, my six year-old granddaughter has come downstairs. She’s the first up of the family that has come to stay for a few days and – among other things – to come along to my event. It’s too early to watch tv, I lie. She starts colouring-in. Then we hear the cuckoo. We dash outside in our dressing gowns – and there it is! Overhead and cuckooing like mad. He heads East, into the blinding sun and catches up with all the cuckooing he’s missed because of the rain. I take Fifi to the farm gate across the lane show her the elm where I once saw three cuckoos gather – and blow me down, our boy flies over again to greet us.

Hay rose & back gate

Then it’s back to the telly. I can’t get it going. She tells me to fiddle with the wires at the back. I try it. Bingo. The kid’s a genius.

Nearly June and I daren’t let the woodburner go out.

The sparrows are gathering chirpily. It’s obvious that they didn’t have to watch yesterday’s tedious England v Ireland match. I’d better put my wellies on and fill up the bird-feeders.

I shall probably skid on a slug and rick something.