A MERMAID'S TALE

A little girl I know is going to school on World Book Day dressed as a mermaid.

'How are you going to get there?' I asked.
'I'll swim' she replied.

Her chosen book for the day is The Singing Mermaid by Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks which she'll carry  with her.  Every child in her school will be dressed as their favourite book character  as they swim, walk, run or saunter into the classroom on Thursday morning.

And this little girl had a difficult decision to make as the bookcase in her bedroom is crammed full of her favourite stories - and  some of her mother's favourite childhood books too.

'Join our Festival of Imagination' says the World Book Day website 'turning millions of kids into millions of readers.'

 Now I'm a fan of e-books - my debut novel Baggy Pants and Bootees reached  7,000 in the Amazon kindle charts  - but the physical book is a joy that will never go out of fashion.

For many of you a love of books began in childhood, but do you remember the one that held you spellbound more than all the rest? And what are the children in your family doing on World Book Day?  I'd love to hear from you.

World Book Day is on Thursday March 3 2016

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You can find out more about World Book Day here

WHY IT'S NEVER TOO LATE

A real-life 'Forever Young' story crept into the pages of The Times newspaper this weekend.  Tucked away in the Marriages and Engagements register at the back of the paper was a photograph of 75-year-old Penelope Roy and John Fryer, 77 who married in Surrey, England, earlier this month.

Nothing unusual about that, you may say, except that they first fell in love more than 50 years ago  when  students at the London School of Economics.  John was in a long-term relationship back then, and though they enjoyed each other's company as friends, they split up without ever admitting their feelings for each other.

Penelope was 73 when she typed  John's name into an online search engine. A newspaper story about a high-profile court case in Canada where John was the  expert witness, enabled her to track him down.  John was then a scholar-in-residence at the University of Victoria Law School in British Columbia.

'It all came flooding back,' he told the paper. 'It was a feeling that 50 plus years had just disappeared.'
After talking on the telephone long FaceTime sessions, described by Penelope as 'very intense,' soon followed.

In June 2014 John met Penny at St Pancras Railway Station and they  lunched at the National Portrait Gallery. 'People don't realise the strength of shared experience in your youth,' she explains. The following month she visited John in Canada.

Reminiscent of the 1992 film Forever Young with Isobel Glasser and Mel Gibson this, says Penny, is 'a bittersweet story with regrets over missed opportunities taken over by the joy of being together.'

Adds John :'I feel very privileged. Most of us don't get a second chance.'


NB If you would like to be featured in the Times, you can email weddingspage@thetimes.co.uk

John and Penelope on their wedding day and in the early 1960s

LOVE AT FIRST WRITE

Helene's first novel, written in 1970. 

It has never been out of print since.

The first Valentine's card I ever sent was to a boy in my class at junior school when I was seven. It had a drawing of a can of tomatoes on the front with the words I want to be your tomato - can I? 

A few years later I read  84 Charing Cross Road, the celebrated novel by American writer  Helene Hanff, a collection of letters that span 20 years. Yesterday I watched the film version on television, billed as a  romance between two people who had never met.  And that's when I realised it wasn't a romance at all - just  two very different people's love affair with words.

The  novel charts the extraordinary  letters  written by Helene when she was a young would-be playwright living in New York,  to Frank Doel, chief buyer at the long established antiquarian book shop Marks & Co in London's Charing Cross Road.   The correspondence began in 1949 when the writer was searching  for the out of print Oxford book of poetry, and  very soon their mutual hunger for words grew into an unprecedented 'meeting of minds.'  Both looked forward to their letters like lovelorn pen friends.

The couple never met - she was single and he was married with two children - and never exchanged more than affectionate words  of friendship and a mutual love of fine books.  Yet these two very different people - she extrovert and he introvert -  found a kindred spirit.

Anyone who has browsed an antiquarian bookshop with its unmistakable aroma of  leather and ancient dust will understand what a love of old books is all about. Helene soon became a friend to  the staff of the bookshop, sending them food in the post war years, when ham and fresh eggs were almost impossible to find in Britain. They, in turn, sent her gifts including a hand embroidered linen tablecloth and books of rare poems. 

Struggling to earn a living - her plays were never produced - Helene never made it to England until after Frank died but she did get to see the empty bookshop not long after it had closed.  A circular brass plaque acknowledging the store, can be seen  outside the original building, which is now a coffee shop.

First published in 1970, 84 Charing Cross Road has never been out of print.

AUSTERITY AND DECADENCE - YORK DOES VINTAGE

York Does Vintage at Merchant Adventurers' Hall, Fossgate, York

   York Does Vintage at the fourteenth century Merchant Adventurers' Hall in York this weekend encapsulated both  the austerity and decadence of the last 100 years.
Glance at the photos and travel back in time.

The hall is also a museum

Racks of colourful dresses

The impressive entrance

The gardens are beautiful - even in February

And coffee too....

Flash fiction in the fish and chip shop

I wonder if they sell Baggy Pants?

If you've ever waited in a long queue willing the time to pass you're sure to like an idea  French bureaucrats  have introduced for their customers -  free short stories. The Alpine city of Grenoble have, it seems, installed vending machines with printed stories for anyone visiting their municipal offices. What a very good idea.

So how does it work? After  taking a number in the queue at the town hall, customers push a button to receive up to three minutes fiction on scrolled paper  similar to supermarket receipts.

According to The Times newspaper this week the initial 600 stories were drawn from the best on Short-Edition, a Grenoble-based publishing application with 10,000 writers and 141,000 subscribers.

Short-Edition  came up with the idea after watching people enjoy the 'feel-good' factor of buying chocolate from a vending machine.  A short story, they reckoned, could have the same effect.

The machine, which has no screen and just three buttons, has gone down well with French writers who welcome their new (if fleeting)  readership. Nicholas Juliam, a civil servant who contributes to the site says. 'As an author, it's very gratifying to be read, whatever the place.' And who an I to disagree?

Imagine the possibilities - children's books for bored families on airports, flash fiction in the fish and chip shop, horror in the hairdressers and Victorian drama at the dentist's, not to mention that very long queue in the supermarket... Picture the scene when you get to the front of the queue. 'Hold on a sec, will you? I'm on the last page.'

I've just one suggestion. Add a free bar of chocolate too.

Looking forward to living in the past.

Not a smartphone in sight

I'm often accused of living in the past but reading through today's newspapers it's clear I'm not on my own. The Times runs a heart-warming story of  wartime romance rekindled after seventy years, while  the Guardian takes a look at  Jimmy Hendrix' lifestyle -  'art nouveau,  Ena Sharples and John Lewis curtains.'

Even the Daily Mail is feeling nostalgic: 1970s - The Best Year of our Lives, shouts a headline.The full-page piece previews Back In Time for the Weekend, a six part series  beginning on BBC2 next month. The  programme makers asked one family to try living in five different decades, starting in 1950. And which did they like best? The 1970s.

The Ashby-Hawkins family - child minder Rob, IT consultant Steph and children  Daisy, 16 and Seth, 12, agreed: 'It gave us a real insight. We've done things we never thought we'd do.We've done things as a  family together which has been brilliant. The Seventies,  they added 'had the perfect balance of convenience and family values before households were splintered by technology.'

The Mail gives us some fun facts about each decade. Did 1950s women  really do housework for eleven hours a day, seven days a week?  Not my mum, that's for sure.

By the 1960s, teenagers had arrived  and bingo became popular with housewives. The TV had made its mark and one in three households had a vehicle 'making day trips possible.'

Home brewing became popular in the 1970s  and by the mid 1980s around three million British households had a home computer.Ten years later Sunday trading was legalised and ten times more people shopped on a Sunday than went to church.

Which brings me back to today. According to the Mail the average adult spends more than eight hours a day on media devices. In fact  people can now sit in the same room but not interact because they are using games consoles, smartphones or tablets.

In last weeks Times Magazine food critic Giles Coren  spent two thirds of his column discussing social media. Dining at the upmarket Sartoria in London's Savile Row he  counted 40 diners, 33 of whom were tapping away on their phones.  'I was so angry,' he wrote 'I got up to glare.'

The party of a dozen Italians, who didn't speak to each other, upset him the most. They were, he says,  'presumably forking out for this £1,000 meal nobody was paying any attention to.'

So what's the answer? Maybe we should all try a week without our smart phones and laptops and  try a spot of talking for a change. Let me know what you think.

The 1960s scandal that still lives on....

Photo courtesy of thalidomide uk

Kim Fenton

Campaigner Kim Fenton was born with no legs and deformed hands  - none of which has prevented her from living a successful  life. But this weekend Kim was one of the first to congratulate The BBC for highlighting possibly the worst medical scandal in history through it's popular series Call the Midwife.
Though not based on Kim's life, the programme spoke for all the  children  maimed by thalidomide  - an innocuous-looking pill their mothers took in pregnancy to cure morning sickness in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties.

'I'm delighted that this part of history has been remembered and that a younger generation will know our story,' Kim, a former mayor of Castlereagh  Borough  Council told BBC Radio Ulster's The Sunday News. She and other survivors want the German government to properly compensate survivors who are now suffering even greater  complications as they live through middle age.

Thalidomide  was  developed   by German pharmaceutical company Grunethal in the 1950s and withdrawn three years later after it was found to disrupt foetal development.

As a writer I've always believed in the power of tackling real-life problems through  fiction  but this drama was  more poignant - and more pointed - than anything I've  seen before.

In the well-researched storyline a baby girl is born, without arms or legs, to a happy working class family. Her father, however, rejects her as a monster.  Not even the medical profession at that time understood what had caused the tragedy.

Today I visited thalidomide uk's website to vote for the setting up of an enquiry into thalidomide, something that still, after all these years, has never taken place.

I hope you will too.

You can Find out more about thalidomide here

ONLY THE 'LONEY' - debut author hits the big time

Photo courtesy of Lancashire Writing Hub 2010

A modest and extremely likeable  librarian who writes in his spare time has won the Costa First Novel Award 2015 with a  book described by  Stephen King as 'an amazing piece of fiction.'

The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley had previously received praise from a host of national newspapers including this from the Sunday Times: Dankly atmospheric his eerie narrative is packed with the palpable and pungent..'  Meanwhile the Daily Mail called it 'an eerie disturbing read that doesn't let up until its surprise ending.'

Interviewed on BBC Television North West Today this former schoolteacher who has been writing for 'ten to fifteen years,' seemed as surprised by his success as anyone else.

'I can't quite believe that Stephen King has read my book, let alone given it such praise,' he said modestly  adding  'It's taken me a long time to get here. I'm anything but an overnight success.'

Andrew, who has lived in Manchester and London but is now based in Lancashire, has used a stretch of waste ground in Preston that runs, he says,  'from the back of the council estate to the River Ribble' as the background for his spooky novel. 'Locally the area is called The Loney and I realised straight away that this would be a great title for my novel.'

The Loney was first published by  Tarturus Press, a small independent publishing company in Yorkshire  who agreed a first print run of 300 hardback copies in October 2014. It was some time later that Mark Richards of John Murray realised the book's true potential. Little did the author know that this would take him on a journey leading straight into the arms of the Hachette Group, a name synonymous with global publishing.

Now part of the Hachette Group the John Murray publishing house, founded in 1768, prides itself,  on the 'ability to foster genius.'

So here's to the genius of Andrew Michael Hurley. In a world full of so called celebrities who constantly sing their own praises I can honestly say that this great accolade couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.


You can find out more about The Loney here


Perfect if you like the macabre, gothic and odd (Melissa Cox waterstones.com)

HERE'S TO WORLD PEACE

A very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one without any fear...

HAPPY CHRISTMAS, WAR IS OVER sang John Lennon whose lyrics echo down the years.  I wonder what the great singer/songwriter would have thought of the world as we head into 2016?

Celebrating the end of any war is a time of both sorrow and joy so I've chosen to repeat a popular poem from May 2015 for my final post of the year.  The poem was written by Gill Cullen, a Guernsey girl now living in Vancouver, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of the
Channel Island of Guernsey.  This, my favourite line, will stay with me always: So many of our loved ones gone, yet still present in the cry of the seagulls or the rise and fall of the tide...
Thanks again, Gill.

Dear Guernsey

How I wish I could be with you this year. This 70th celebration of the end of the Occupation.

How many years I have sat and listened to stories of your Occupation, from my father ... stories of trepidation and daring , Of victory signs , Of tea dances, of curfews (often missed - with bad recompense ) Of hunger .. Of seaweed bread ... Of cabbage soup , Of Crystal sets , Of prisoners of war .....

My childhood was during a time of recovery for you, dear Guernsey ... And I embraced your lovely beaches , your windswept shores , your crashing waves ...
Ferry rides ...watching every wave as it broke on the bow of the "Martha Gun " or the " Capstan" or the " Lady Dorothy. "
Other Liberation days when a trip to Herm was often in order to help celebrate ..and to walk through the fair on the way back ....
My life has taken me away from your beautiful shores , but my heart remains a Guernsey Girl, an islander through and through ...
I would love to stand with everyone this year, on this anniversary .. So many of our loved ones gone .. Yet I am sure still present .. In the cry of the seagulls or in the rise and fall of the tide ...
I miss you always more on days like this ..
Yet you always welcome me back with open arms and a warm hug
 Enjoy your day, dear Guernsey ........
You will always be my first love ...
My Sarnia Cherie ....

 

Peace in our World