Y is for yay!

Unsolicited books get shorter shrift than the ones I ask for. But there can be real gems, that I didn’t even know I wanted. This is one such occasion. There is a pop-up book out to celebrate that Sesame Street is forty years old.

Generally I am more of a C is for cookie kind of person. Offspring and I watched Sesame Street with our lunch for years, and then out of necessity we had to stop. I wouldn’t mind watching it again, but I get the impression it’s no longer on in Britain. Why not?

A Walk Down Sesame Street is some consolation. Elmo walks round, meeting some of the regulars, and doing a little educating as he meets and greets. Good Elmo! There are even pull-thingies to make Grover fly and Cookie stir his cookie mixture. Big Bird is really an awfully big Big Bird.

Ernie has put down his duckie, believe it or not, and Oscar and his trashcan are very much in-your-face, popping out. If only they knew of the agony suffered at witch headquarters over the elephants Oscar keeps. I thought we were heading for a major bin phobia at one point.

As Daughter walked in through the door after college, she jumped on this book. Maybe 17 isn’t too old for pop-ups after all? She made Elmo dance, which was something I had missed.

Oh, now I want to get out all my Sesame Street videos again and watch…

Foreigners – who wants them?

A little over ten years ago I was called for an interview at what I understand is often called Heroin House locally. To be honest, I forget what the government department is called these days, but it’s where you get your benefits, if you’ve been good. The only benefits I’ve ever been after is child benefit, which I always felt fairly entitled to, having produced the two Offspring. What I didn’t have at the time was a National Insurance number, which was hardly my fault. After all, it’s handed out by the authorities, not grabbed by the recipients.

So, an interview was required, to ascertain that I was really me and that Offspring really existed. I was treated to a very condescending ‘chat’ by someone half my age, whose educational background I don’t want to speculate on, but I doubt she outranked me, so to speak. Even though I’m a mere foreigner.

It was quite clear that any foreigner is considered to be roughly on a level with monkeys. What’s more, they were fairly certain I’d want to flood this country with other foreign family members. It was the thought that my lovely, but ancient, aunts, who spoke no English, and who had wonderful flats and their own holiday homes, would be desperate to enter Britain and be a burden on the UK benefits system, that really upset me.

In some ways, it’s to their credit that they love their country so much, these benefits people, that they feel the whole world will want to come and live here, too. But that’s what my aunts would have said about their country, and why they were so worried about my safety and happiness when I left for Britain.

Anyway, the reason I’m moaning about this right now, is that I was sent an email from one of my regular publishers, about an illustrator who isn’t allowed back into Britain because his educational status is too modest. Nikhil Singh has lived in Hampstead for three years, but after briefly returning to South Africa, has to reapply for a visa, for which he needs to be university educated.

So he missed his own book launch for the comic book Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers. Without a degree Nikhil can’t have a visa, and he has had to take an English test, which seems a little superfluous for someone who has worked as a journalist here. He has also lost his London home, and has not seen his long term girlfriend for months.

I don’t know Nikhil’s work, but I can sympathise with his situation. There is a petition you can sign, which isn’t about Nikhil in particular, but about this whole idea that this country can’t let in just anyone.

I fully expect to be kicked out after this. Or maybe they can’t do that? I have a degree. Doesn’t make me a better person, though. In fact, they wanted me to sign a piece of paper that ‘guesstimated’ my date of birth, because without a proper British birth certificate you can’t be too sure.

Michelle Magorian in Manchester

Well, that could make me cry. Almost, anyway. Happy tears, you understand.

As the witch started negotiations with the Manchester Literature Festival people about an interview slot with Michelle Magorian, it felt like a good idea to say that Michelle might remember me from last year’s launch of Just Henry. I was told she did, but people can be polite, you know.

So, when we met in the Imperial War Museum’s café for our chat on Sunday afternoon, the first thing Michelle does is rummage in her bag, saying she’s got something for me. Nice, but what? I’ll tell you what. Only a lovingly signed copy of Just Henry in Swedish, which is just out. We did talk of translations last year. We did. But it was in a room full of people at a busy launch, and I was a complete stranger. What a memory!

Anyway, once we had been supplied with cups of tea, we got going with the interview. Not that Michelle felt there was anything interesting that she could tell me. The Resident IT Consultant attended, armed with a camera, since Daughter had taken herself and her camera off for half term. As a matter of fact, he didn’t do too badly at his first interview.

Michelle’s son George wandered off to look at the museum, while our twenty minutes somehow ended up being 45 (sorry, Alistair!). So we obviously must have found something to talk about.

Afterwards it was time for Michelle’s event, as the crowning glory of this year’s Literature Festival. They closed the museum, and us fans settled down in the main exhibition hall. As an author talk it rates as one of the best. Well delivered, as you’d expect from an actress, and very well chosen selection of readings from several of her books, with anecdotes in-between.

Michelle provided an interesting thread between all her stories, and the readings benefitted from a variety of accents. Good questions from the audience, with interesting answers. And I love a woman who can admit to waiting with her career, because she wants to spend time with her sons, even when they are as old as Michelle’s two. But with some luck, we’ll have a new Magorian novel some time next year. Yay!

(Photos by A Giles and D Giles)

Tables

Right children! We’re doing ageism and sexism today, along with any other -isms I may have forgotten to mention. If I could, this would be where I put my foot somewhere in the vicinity of my mouth, but my legs don’t bend well.

Logarithms have long been a little hard for me to understand. Not how to use them, you know; just understanding what they are, is enough to bring me out in a rash. The Resident IT Consultant despaired from almost Day 1 over his bad choice of wife, but there you are.

So, as Daughter and I were in Scotland for the Edinburgh Book Festival, we stayed with Grandmother. On our one free day we relaxed by having Aunt Scarborough over for a cup of tea. We always love to see her. I was just a little taken aback by Grandmother’s conversation starter which went like this: ‘Scarborough, do you happen to have any logarithm tables? There was someone at Oxfam who was looking for one, and we didn’t have any, so I said I’d look at home. I don’t seem to have any left, so wondered if you do?’

Grandmother’s age is, as I’ve mentioned before, a nice round figure, and Aunt Scarborough is five years older. I don’t think of them as old, honestly! I just don’t expect logarithms to pop up among the cups of tea and the biscuits. I should be ashamed of myself. Girls can do anything, and we are all still girls on the inside. Anyway, no logarithm tables anywhere. Grandmother works in the Oxfam bookshop, and generally likes recycling things.

That will be why she swiftly moved on to slide rules. I know what they are. Could never quite use mine, because it seemed a little complicated. Daughter, on the other hand, didn’t know. So age can be useful occasionally. Grandmother brought out her two, and offered them to Daughter. We needed to know why she had more than one, and also got an explanation as to how she had worn another one out. It’s obvious, really. Grandmother used hers in the kitchen, to adapt recipes and things. As you do. At least if you are a physics graduate with an inquiring mind and like experimenting with things.

This week is science week in Manchester. Me, I think it’s a clever guise to get children to go and look at sciencey things, in order to get hooked, and then sign up for science at university when they’re older. Daughter wants to go, and I know just the person to go with her. (And for the record, the witch got top grades for both Maths and Science at school. She just knew when to give it up. In time.)

What language do you read?

And I don’t mean whether you can manage Harry Potter in Chinese. Charlie Butler blogged about English versus English the other day. Very interesting. As a non-native reader I used to be foolish enough to believe that English was English. Yes, I know the British have something that differs from what the Americans swear by, but people can get by, can’t they?

Seems not. I remember the little witch looking at the Mrs something-or-other in Blyton’s Castle of Adventure. I went to Mother-of-witch and asked what Mmmrrsss meant. (I tried to pronounce those three letters.) It’s the same as Fru, in Swedish. Once I knew this, I knew this, and I had learnt a new word, and also how it’s meant to be pronounced. I felt cosmopolitan and clever. (I was about eight.) I can still remember what it means.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’m currently living in Britain because of that Mrs. Not because I turned into a Mrs myself. There was something so satisfyingly exotic about all things British. I coped admirably with shillings, and didn’t require them to be turned into öre. Miles can be confusing, but only because you have six British miles to a Swedish one.

Some years ago I read a book by Beverly Naidoo, set in South Africa. It would have been useful knowing how much a Rand is worth, but not essential. Could have looked it up, I daresay. But ‘translating’ it into pounds and pennies wouldn’t have helped. After all, how much is a knut?

You could have footnotes, but they can get a little tedious. A glossary is one solution, but not for too many words, or it’s tempting to skip looking at it.

Reading Agatha Christie can be tricky, because she sometimes uses French, which I don’t speak, and I think the reader is meant to. On the other hand, when I read Adrian McKinty’s Fifty Grand recently, I didn’t object to the Spanish he used. So it’s all relative.

Helen Grant’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a nice proper British English book, except it’s set in Germany and Helen has put German phrases in her story. Words, and whole sentences! I think it adds a very nice flavour. The same goes for Caroline Lawrence using Latin all over her Roman Mysteries. ‘Euge!’ say I.

I think we need some foreign-ness in books. Not just random Chinese, obviously, but anything that belongs to the story. We often talk of dumbing down these days. Translating 50p to one dollar is dumbing down. That’s how people end up not knowing it’s different in the other place.

Just not too different, because we’re mostly he same. Except when we’re not.

Ladybird books

It would appear that foreigners can sometimes get things right.

I know that as one of them I can never lay claim to the kind of past many of my readers have with Ladybird books. You sort of imbibed them with the first milk, and a person can only have one past. At least most of us. Lucy Mangan has been spot on again, writing about her Ladybird collection, and being generous enough to concede that her otherwise hopeless husband also has an excellent Ladybird past. Wow.

On my first visit to these shores I bought one book. Aged ten, and with one year of school English behind me, I wasn’t well placed to read much at all. But Mother-of-witch let me buy one book, which we then laboured over together. There were many tempting ones in the shop, but I settled on something solid about two children on a farm. It personified my early image of English children, with their sweet sensible shoes, boys in shorts, with mothers who bake cakes and fatherly fathers.

So I tried to learn English with Ladybird, although by the time I really could read the book, it was far too childish for me and I had moved on to Agatha Christie.

Midweek trek 1a

Having adhered to an almost normal timetable for several weeks, it’s time for some gallivanting. Daughter’s services in the blogosphere have been requested by me, and her college said that it sounded like a very good idea (yes, really), so she isn’t skiving off. It just feels like it. Must learn not to be so incredibly law abiding.

A witch should learn to go places without a photographer occasionally, but it’s hard when you know how much better it is with illustrated travels. So today we head south to meet up with Meg Rosoff. This is long overdue. I know why I haven’t made this trip earlier. I’m scared. Maybe that’s why having a little witchlet along seems good. OK, so she is taller than me, but still little.

I hope we won’t cause too much interruption to the writing of There Is No Dog. (There will be two, I imagine, if we’re to be literal.) I’ve been so much of a pain that Meg simply had to say she was free. Last time I did this, Meg came up with this really weird idea that I should start a blog. So what might happen today I can’t even begin to speculate on. (Virgin Trains running late is a good bet.)

Once we have ruined the Rosoff routines, we’re off to another literary event, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what. The eagle eyed among you will be able to make an intelligent guess.

Hetty Feather

I had my doubts. Would it work when Jacqueline Wilson tackles a ’serious’ historical topic? Hetty Feather is very clearly a Jacqueline Wilson story. If I’d read it with my eyes shut (OK, that would have been a little difficult but, setting that slight problem aside, you know what I mean) I’d have known whose book it was.

And to be perfectly honest, for a page or two Hetty felt too much like a modern girl. But then you sink into the story and all is as it should be. Hetty is feisty, and we need feisty in this Foundling Hospital. What Hetty Feather isn’t, is another Coram Boy, which, all things considered, would not have been wise. This way the history of the Foundling Hospital will become known to just about every girl of a certain age.

It’s quite clever, in fact, because bad as the Foundling Hospital seems to Hetty, and will seem to any modern girl reader, there are things that are much worse. Much worse. Jacqueline has put together an interesting series of events, which in the end will work out for Hetty. It’s not a fairy tale end. That would have been unnatural. It’s at the same time logical, and very sweet.

Alice in love & war

How I needed this book! Ann Turnbull’s Alice in love & war is a good old-fashioned historical novel. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s not trying to be clever, or that it’s not got a message, but it’s an uncomplicated and enjoyable book.

It’s the time of the Civil War, which I personally seem to know best through The Three Musketeers, so no doubt I’ve got a somewhat strange idea of who were good or bad. On the other hand, it’s war, and you rarely have very good versus very bad. Both sides are both.

Unreliable charmers are always the same, however. Alice is only sixteen and very unhappy living with an abusive uncle, so it’s hardly surprising that she jumps straight into the arms of the charmer, who happens to be one of the King’s soldiers, passing by with the army. She decides to leave her uncle’s farm, and follow the army. This is a hard life, but she makes friends, and she belatedly learns about men.

There are some extremely horrific details of the war, more effective than any school lesson. Alice is lucky in that she can read and write, and she has some knowledge of healing. This means her fate is more fortunate than those of her best friends among the army followers, but she still goes trough some very bad times.

The way Ann has plotted the story means the reader gets to see both sides of this war, and hopefully will learn both that war is worth avoiding, as well as seeing that warring sides are never black and white.

It’s a lovely romantic story, while avoiding the pitfalls of everything going smoothly all the time.

Do teachers read?

I know it’s an inappropriate thought to have, but thank goodness our school hall burned down! When the witch was a 12-year-old witchlet, the new assembly hall at her school burned down. Looking back, I can see how lucky we were. It decided to burst into flames on a sports day when we were all somewhere else. And because it was ‘just’ the hall, the rest of the school could continue operating and we weren’t messed about with.

What it meant was that we couldn’t have full school assemblies every morning, so instead we had class assemblies in the classroom we were in for the first period of the day, with our teacher for that lesson. So a whole host of teachers suddenly had to come up with worthy ways of ‘entertaining’ us every morning.

My all time favourite teacher, Mr Nyström, read to us. First he read The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. He was excellent at doing voices and must have been an actor at heart. He then went on to give us Three Men in a Boat, and I still can’t read it without hearing his voice.

I don’t remember how long the hall was out of circulation, so there may have been more books, or maybe Magister Nyström moved on to other entertainment. The point is that he gave us books that we would never have thought, or known, to read ourselves.

My Swedish teacher at the same school spent one lesson a week reading to us. Again, this bunch of 13-somethings would never have considered reading John Steinbeck, but we all enjoyed The Pearl. The trick here was that both teachers chose adult books, but easy ones. We had barely grown out of traditional children’s books, but were ready to discover other things, even if we didn’t know it.

So Alan Gibbons’ most recent newsletter for The Campaign for the Book which deals with all the teachers who don’t read, came as a timely reminder of what’s important. It shouldn’t be necessary to have something called ‘In defence of reading for pleasure’. He lists the results of a survey:

‘Teachers “never read a whole book”. One in eight teachers has never read a book to their class, research has revealed. Almost 600,000 children could be missing out on great stories and failing to develop a love of reading because of the use of book “extracts” in the classroom, it suggests.

The study, commissioned by educational published Heinemann to mark the launch of reading programme Literacy Evolve, highlights teachers and parents fears that a lack of whole book reading is affecting pupils academic performance. It found 12% of teachers say they have never read a whole book to their class, while the same proportion say they read just one book a year.

Almost eight in 10 teachers (78%) say the use of “bite-size” extracts reduces the thrill of reading, with half saying that they know of an occasion where a pupil lost the thread of a story because they were not read the full book. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, by CS Lewis, Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Good Night Mr Tom, by Michelle Magorian, and a number of Roald Dahl books were cited as novels in which children failed to grasp the story.

Former Children’s Laureate Michal Rosen said book extracts deny pupils “the meat of the story.” He said: “The idea that children can’t manage whole stories or whole books is a nonsense. No extract in the world has the power of books.” ‘

Alan goes on to comment  ’This report makes disturbing reading. Our education system has been moving ever more rapidly towards a functional approach. There is even an Orwellian strand called ‘functional English’ as if that has any meaning. Language is fundamental to human society. We do not interact in any sphere of life in a purely functional way. A good shop assistant swaps anecdotes with his or her customers. A good teacher engages his or her pupils with anecdotes. The best business people are as creative as a novelist, poet or journalist. To be successful in the modern world you have to be flexible, creative and literate. Interestingly a high proportion of truly original movers and shakers have got where they were without going to university or even having much of a formal education. Almost all of them developed a love of reading for pleasure. Schools don’t have to be test factories. They can become places of enquiry and broad cultural development. What better way to achieve this than by being immersed from a young age in great oral stories, poems and books?

Tragically, the world has been taken over by the latter day Bounderbys and Gradgrinds. Many children come into school with a significant literacy deficit. No amount of booster classes or remedial groups will address this without making the project of reading and writing fun. Every child should be read to at home and at school every single day. Anything less is a betrayal of a generation.’

There are teachers who manage to read, despite the dreaded National Curriculum hanging over their heads. So more teachers could do it.

The teacher at Daughter’s secondary school who started up a lunch break reading club quickly forgot it was extracurricular fun, unfortunately. So in the end it was more of a turn-off than enjoyable. I know there are many ‘horrible’ school children, but how about forgetting to tell pupils off some of the time?