Proof

I’ll say this; there was an awful lot of list left at the end of Friday. At the end of the whole week, in actual fact. Things on my to-do-list kept getting carried over to the next day. And the next.

I did things for other people, which I suppose was nice of me. Other people being Offspring. They both had need of proof reading, and luckily for them, I had finished one by the time the other came along with his request. Only by half an hour or so, but at least it wasn’t simultaneous proofing.

And what they had really needed proof reading. Not saying it was bad, what they had produced. On the contrary. It was pretty good, which is why you definitely need that last bit of making it’s into its and segregating the affects from the effects. Making sure the year is 2015, or people will have turned up last year.

One was easier to read than the other, but I persevered with the difficult one as well. The words were mostly normal, but put together in such a way that it wasn’t completely obvious – to me – what they were saying. There were wobbles. And jitters. Those were the folksiest of the descriptions.

The easier one was read by both me and the Resident IT Consultant. We compared notes at the end of it, and interestingly enough, except for one overlap, each had found different mistakes.

If I can let Friday count as the end of my – working – week, I finished off by assisting with an application. The old-fashioned kind; not an app (which I still have trouble getting my head round). I almost fell asleep in the middle of it. I find my eyes are more comfortable when they are closed, but it does make accidental snoozes more likely.

Never Odd or Even

Eliot in Never Odd or Even probably has Asperger Syndrome. And I reckon this book will appeal to children with similar fondness for prime numbers and palindromes and stuff like that. It even appealed to me, although I had feared it might not, what with all the numbers and things to begin with.

As with other aspie books, it’s about being bullied at school and about solving a crime. The two are obviously connected.

We never learn all that much about the main character, who has to be called Eliot or his name wouldn’t fit in with the palindromes and all the rest. I’m thinking John Townsend likes stuff like that too.

I didn’t set out to learn all those prime numbers, nor to decipher the anagrams, but was happy to let Eliot guide me. But I have to mention that it’s difficult to have Friday the 12th of July any time soon after a Friday the 13th. I couldn’t help checking this. And if the word for fear of Friday the 13th really is Paraskevidekatriaphobia, it will never be able to score you 44 or more in Scrabble, because the word is too long. (I might also have some doubts about the length of Summer term at Eliot’s school…)

Sorry.

It’s a short and entertaining book about a boy with special interests and his interactions with the villain of the piece, Victor. Victor is vile. Evil.

I was a little surprised by the crime, as well as its solution. I won’t say more.

Walk the Walk

To begin with I have to admit to a few thoughts I had when I learned that between them Scottish Book Trust and the Scottish Government have put money into a scheme to try and teach people about the trouble with sectarianism.

My mind immediately went to Islam versus some other religious group (whereas the book in question – Walk the Walk – is about Catholics and Protestants). And then I thought that I don’t believe in artificial stories or fiction that is brought to us to teach us how to behave. To top it all, when I began reading Walk the Walk (downloadable as a pdf here), I was unable to tell the Catholics from the Protestants. My first guess was – probably – the wrong one, so I turned the situation on its head.

That in itself should prove that either I’m exceptionally dim, or that it’s not actually terribly obvious. Take away skin colour and religious uniform and we tend to look surprisingly similar. Set in Glasgow, the only black character is from Edinburgh. And with my Swedish hat on, I have to admit that this kind of official attempt to make life better and to have people love one another, sometimes might work, a little. So I’m pleased to live in a country where they at least try.

Launched yesterday by Scottish Book Trust and Paul Wheelhouse MSP, Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs, the book will be distributed to literacy tutors across Scotland. It was written in dramatised form by Gowan Calder and illustrated in comic book style by Jill Calder.

And for a story born in this way, it’s pretty good. At least the first half which I’ve had time to read. I think we should all give it a go. It might make us feel that those others aren’t so strange, after all. Whoever ‘those others’ are, which will vary depending on who you are and where.

Numbers, or is it art?

One, three, forty, eighty, one hundred. This Numbers book by artist Paul Thurlby might be ‘simply’ a children’s picture book to teach them numbers.

But I don’t think so. It’s art. The adult in me could – almost – be willing to tear the pages out and frame them. Luckily I have no wall space left.

Most books that teach young children numbers go to ten. This one goes to one hundred, by doing one to ten and then the tens up to a hundred. (So you get more for your money…)

There is nothing average about these pictures. Take four, for instance. You get the Beatles, the Fab Four, no less. (I just have to tear that one out!)

I know nothing about retro-modern Paul, but it seems he’s also responsible for Alphabet, and I bet that’s wonderful to look at, too.

You don’t need a child for this book.

War Girls

Another irresistible collection of short stories for you. This time to mark the anniversary of WWI, and it’s all about girls. In War Girls nine of our best authors get together to tell the stories of the young females left behind. And there are so many ways to do that.

I loved Theresa Breslin’s tale of the young artist who took her crayons with her as she went to France as a nurse. Matt Whyman looks at the war from the point of view of ‘the enemy’ in the form of a female sniper in Turkey. Very powerful story.

Mary Hooper has spies in a teashop, and you can never be too careful who you speak to or who you help. I found Rowena House’s story about geese in France both touching, and also quite chilling. I’d never heard about the theories for the outbreak of the Spanish flu before.

Melvin Burgess tells us about a strong heroine, who can’t abide cowardice, even in those close to her. Berlie Doherty’s young lady can sing, and that’s what she does to help the war effort. And singing isn’t necessarily safer or easier than being in the trenches.

Anne Fine deals with hope, and whether it’s all right to lie to make someone’s suffering less heavy. Adèle Geras has updated her story The Green Behind the Glass, which I’ve read several times before. It’s still one of my favourites and can easily be read again and again.

Sally Nicholls may be young, but she can still imagine what it was like to be old and to have survived as one of the spare women of the war; one of those who could never hope to marry. I don’t believe there is enough written about them, and Going Spare is a fantastic offering on the subject.

Montmorency on the Rocks

The second of Eleanor Updale’s novels about Montmorency begins five years later, which means there are definitely no young people in it, apart from a few incidental babies. Much more of a 39 Steps setting, this book appears to be about drug use, and how to get off the drugs if you’ve been stupid enough to start.

And it’s our hero, Montmorency, who is the addict, and it is horrible to behold. Perhaps that’s the idea. His aristocratic pal George does his best to help, even when he doesn’t want to be helped. They go to Scotland to recover, narrowly missing a bomb at King’s Cross. (This is the late 19th century, but it feels much like today in some ways.)

In Scotland another mystery introduces itself, which seems to be totally separate from the bomb. Both mysteries only get tackled by our heroes after some time, but it certainly gets exciting.

The drug problem, the poverty and the violence could be part of life anywhere, but maybe not the seemingly charmed existence led by the titled and the rich. It’s very wrong, but so charming and thrilling at the same time.

I’ll be interested to see where Montmorency will go from here. He’s not all nice, and he is clearly not getting younger. Or more law-abiding.

We hear you, Gloria

This week I found a rather lovely video by Debi Gliori on her blog, Fiddle and Pins. I clicked on it, expecting a few minutes of something, but what I got was 25 minutes of Debi-history.

She begins with her birth, which Debi draws with surprising accuracy (I assume she really remembers this being born stuff), and then she continues to draw her childhood and school years.

There are drawings of her pet dragon (I just knew that’s what Debi would have had) and the nuns at school, and her own first baby.

It’s all very Debi, and just as she was grateful for the library which supplied her with a lifeline in the shape of books to disappear into, there are some of us who are pretty grateful for all of Debi’s books, and those ‘doodles.’

And unlike that silly nun, I do know Debi isn’t Gloria (although it is quite a nice name).

(My own, now quite ancient, interview with Debi isn’t a patch on this video. I should have asked about her dishwasher-like birth…)

Hi!

What to say when you meet someone for the first time? When they are an author, for instance.

The best thing is obviously to say ‘I loved your book’ and if you are not feeling too senile, it’s always possible to mention the title. If you can remember it. At worst I say, ‘I loved your book about the girl who swam the Channel.’ With a bit of luck they will then mention both the title and perhaps the girl’s name, which you had also forgotten, even though you loved the book.

Most of the time, however, I seem to wander up to authors to tell them I haven’t read anything they’ve written. They wince, and say that’s OK.

But my unappealing habit of telling them on a second meeting that I still haven’t read their book(s) is really something I must give up. (I just run out of things to say, though…)

On Wednesday I was at least able to introduce myself to one of the authors by mentioning who I am and to qualify that statement by saying I’d reviewed his book a while back.

Except, thinking it over, I realised this might come across as ‘I recently reviewed your book, and very favourably too. So be nice to me and appreciate what I did for you…’

In short, I don’t know what to say next time.

A Guide to Sisters

Quite frankly, I expected A Guide to Sisters to be a bit cute and a bit ordinary, the way so many picturebooks for little girls are. Cute is fine, but sometimes you want more.

And you know what? Paula Metcalf has written a very amusing and unusual book, which is nicely – but not too cutely – illustrated by Suzanne Barton.

There is a guide to tickling, which includes the tickliest body parts of your little sister (did I mention this guide is for the older sister?), as well as showing the reader how to be comfortable while having a good grip on that little sister as you tickle.

Little sisters are like a loaf of bread to begin with, but not one you are allowed to butter. Occasionally there are BOGOF sisters (=twins). They cry and poo and give you lovely kisses. And then they bite. Apparently you are not supposed to give them away, either.

You will always be better than your little sister. You can cheat her out of almost anything if you do things right; ‘one for you, two for me…’ And if you play your cards right, she will tidy your room for you.

But when all is said and done, they are not too bad, those little sisters.

RED in Falkirk

Yesterday the Bookwitchy feet touched Falkirk soil for the first time since that fateful day in 1973. She (I mean I) saw red even on the train (a woman wearing a lovely red coat, but who wasn’t actually going where I was going). My mind was on red things, as there was a sort of dress code for attending the RED Book Award in Falkirk, and I’d dug out the few red garments I own.

Ever since I knew we’d be moving to Scotland, I’d been thinking how much I wanted to attend the RED Book Award, and then it happened so fast I barely knew what I was doing (I had to ditch Daughter, and feed up the camera battery), but everything worked out in the end. I walked to fth (Falkirk Town Hall), which was teeming with people in red, and I found Falkirk librarian and organiser Yvonne Manning (a Geraldine McCaughrean look-alike if ever there was one), and she showed me to the front row, despite me mentioning how I’m a back row kind of witch. There was coffee, and there were authors. All four shortlisted authors were there; Cathy MacPhail, Alan Gibbons, Oisín McGann and Alex Woolf.

They were being interviewed by some of the participating schools’ pupils, and it was rather like speed dating. I chatted briefly to Cathy, who’d brought her daughter along, and who said how nice Alex Woolf had turned out to be. (She was right. He is.)

I found a very red lady, who turned out to be sponsor Barbara Davidson, who makes the RED award, and whose wardrobe apparently is extremely red. I like people who know what they like in the way of colour. There were even helpers wearing red boilersuits.

Back in the front row, we were treated to Yvonne Manning entering dancing, wearing a short red kilt, spotty tights and red ribbons in her hair, and she got the popstar reception treatment. Apparently ‘timing is everything’ and she managed to steer the whole day to a tight schedule.

There was a prize for anyone who found a red nose under their seat. Obviously. Another prize was offered for the school that left their seats the tidiest. After short introductions for the authors, the schools had prepared short dramatised sketches of the shortlisted books.

At this point the Mayor came and sat on my right. Sorry, I mean Provost. Mayors are Provosts up here. Same lovely necklaces, though. And Yvonne reappeared wearing an incredible red patchwork coat, well worthy of Joseph, and it earned her some appreciative whistling from the audience.

Then it was time for prizes for the best book reviews, and the winning one was read out (after the break, after Yvonne had apologised for forgetting this important thing). She’s sweet, but also hard. The authors were given four minutes each to talk about their books; ‘speak briefly!’ They spoke about where they get ideas from. Oisín stared at people until it got ‘creepy enough.’ Cathy had found out about a real vampire in Glasgow in the 1950s, and still regrets she couldn’t have ‘It Walks Among Us’ as the title for Mosi’s War…

Alex described how his Soul Shadows came about, which involved him writing one chapter a week, and then offering his readers several options on how to continue and they voted on which they preferred. Alan could well believe in Glaswegian vampires, and mentioned meeting Taggart once. Football is his passion. Alan’s. Not Taggart’s.

We had more dramatised books and then we listened to the woman who is the answer to my prayers. Anne Ngabia is the librarian at Grangemouth High School, and in the past she has set up little libraries in Kenya. The RED Book Award is even being shadowed by a school in Nairobi, and she showed us pictures from her libraries, as well as a short film based on Mosi’s War that they’d made.

After a very nice lunch, where I just might have offered to sue the Provost as I got him to test the veggieness of the food (if he got it wrong, I mean), the authors signed masses of books and many other things as well. The pupils thronged so much that it was hard to move for the sheer excitement of it.

Back to business again (the people of Falkirk don’t believe in half measures when they do their book awards), and we learned that the dramatised books we’d seen would tempt most people to read Alex’s book, Soul Shadows. They do believe in prizes too, so next to be rewarded were the red clothes, etc. I’d tried to bribe the judge over lunch, but it seems the prize wasn’t for old people. He turned out to be quite good at rap. Something along the lines of Red Hot. (If you want to win, I reckon wigs or pyjamas is the way to go.)

With ‘no time for fun’ the authors were then seated in two blue velvet sofas (they got the colour wrong there, didn’t they?) and the Q&A session kicked off. Good questions, and lots of them, so I won’t go into detail here. Halfway through Oisín was asked to do a drawing, and Yvonne magicked up a flipchart out of nowhere and while the others laboured over more answers, Oisín drew a fabulous picture of, well, of something.

Finally, the time came to announce the winner. Provost Reid – in his beautiful red gown – made everyone stamp their feet to sound like a drumroll, and I rather hoped the ‘terraces’ behind me wouldn’t collapse under all that vigour. He told us how much he likes books, and then it was over to a fez-wearing pupil from Denny to open the red envelope and tell us the winner was

Alan Gibbons. His thank you speech was on the topic of ‘ you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ and that could be libraries, or it could be your life. We complain too much in our comfortable lives, compared to those readers in Kenya we met earlier.

There were prizes, naturally, for the runners-up. And photos. Lots and lots of them. Cathy commandeered her handbag to be brought and she pondered taking a selfie, but in the end she went for a conventional picture of her and her pals.

Us old ones chatted over mugs of tea before going our separate ways. And some of the helpers and I have vowed to wear much warmer clothes next time (that is, if I’m ever allowed back).

A big thank you from me, to Yvonne for inviting me when I dropped a heavy hint, and to her helpers for helping so well, the schools for their magnificent work, and to Cathy, Alan, Oisín and Alex for writing the books that caused us all to be there, at fth.

And the prize for tidiest row of seats? The prize was Oisín’s picture. And I can assure you it won’t go to us on the front row. Cough.