plague central

Yup. We got it here first. Scotland is now officially a pariah nation, second only to Mexico. If I listen very carefully I can hear the sound of walls to rival Hadrian's original being erected down there in them thar Border country. Sigh. Tomorrow I have two events at an independent bookshop down in the Scottish Borders, and next week, I'm supposed to travel down to Brighton to do an event for which a whole class of children, their teacher and I have been preparing for the past two months.

At least, that was the plan before Media-Flu broke out all over the planet.
Media-Flu Symptoms : 

Weakness of the normal critical faculties - we appear to be rushing like Gadarene swine (ooops, perhaps not the best analogy) I mean rushing like lemmings towards a Panic Pandemic.

Vomiting: Acres of newsprint are even now being ejected from the vast factory sheds of the Fourth Estate.
Diarrhoea: (or perhaps logorrhoea )This unstoppable eruption of tides of foul-smelling discharge is  flowing from the fevered minds of journalists trying to file copy before rushing out to buy their personal stockpiles of Tamiflu.
Temperature: Rising by the minute towards a complete global meltdown of common sense.
Pains in the joints: and in most bars and other places where people gather to spout nonsense.

Maybe it's not nonsense, maybe a pestilence of biblical proportions is headed our way, but the way that the printed media have seized upon this topic to the exclusion of all else is wearisome. Our eerily deserted local supermarket had a whole raft of DOOM, DEATH and OINKERCHOO tabloid titles in evidence, and try as I might, my eye had scanned them before my brain could censor what I was looking at. And I most emphatically didn't want to look at those.

Marvellous. More interesting things to wake up and ponder in the wee small hours. O, the thinks you can think...

a feathery hug

Sometimes we all need an owl mummy. This one is from Stormy Weather - publishing in October 09.

But much more importantly -Welcome to the world baby Findlay Langlands - the first new baby in our wider family for eleven years. Can't wait to meet you. Ahhhhhhhhh.

101 today

I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to numbers - except when the come suffixed with a DR which in these benighted latitudes means you've got to get on the phone quiick to the bank before they close you down. Post codes, phone numbers, car registration numbers, tax codes, pin numbers, birthdays, national insurance numbers....you know what? I don't retain any of them. So, when I logged on tonight, I noticed that my last post was the Fiddle and Pins centenary edition.

Aw heck. If I'd noticed, I would have baked a cake, but since the dawn of spring has also brought the dawning realisation that my jeans and assorted trousers are growing decidedly tight round my rear, cakes are temporarily verboten.

Which means I'll have to ignore the siren song coming from the big glass-topped cake tin that holds our 2009 Simnel cake, which I swear is trying to attract my attention as I type this. If I listen hard I can hear it banging up and down and hurling home-made candied peel all about in a fit of the 'Notice me! Eat me! Eat all of me! We're talking quality adipose tissue here, not common-or-garden flubber! Come on, you know you want it!'

Attention-seeking little cake. Actually, not all that little - it's a bit of a monster with it's cape of marzipan and freight of speckledy chocolate eggs. And given the tightness of my jeans, to eat anything more than a slice about a micron thick is to call down the wrath of my Inner Personal Trainer, and trust me, I don't want to do that. Shhhhh. Whatever you do - don't rouse her.

Having blithely said I don't pay much attention to numbers, I've just worked out what a complete lie that statement is. I pay a lot of attention to the numbers on the dial of my bathroom scales. And I'm gripped by the calorie count that my heartrate monitor watch thing tots up at the end of a session. And the number of minutes still to go in the self-imposed purgatory of running for half an hour non-stop...although since I wheezed my way through January's 5k, I haven't done any running longer than about 10 minutes. In fact, since January I have completely trashed what I laughingly call my fitness regime, and am currently at a high risk of jumping two sodding dress sizes in an upwards direction.

Which is why I'm going to get up at 5.25a.m. tomorrow just like I did yesterday, and will continue to do on a one-day-on, one-day-off basis until I'm back in the rut of early morning gym-bunnydom. And yes, I hate it every bit as much as you might imagine, but the prospect of facing down my Inner Personal Trainer is far, far, far worse. The only thing missing is a good playlist to fire me up and keep me at cruising altitude while I dree my weird.* All suggestions welcome.

* As good a phrase as any to describe the ungainly, wheezing, red-faced, sweaty and ultimately pointless procedures I put myself through in the pursuit of fitness, happiness and tighter buns than a desk-bound illustrator deserves to possess.

unsprung Spring

The blossom is out, the trees are at bud-break, the primroses carpet hills in Argyll but it's so damn cold that I can only think wintry soup thoughts and warm cashmere wrappy things and hot baths and electric blankets cranked up to max and every meal i make seems to have a dried red chilli or two snuck into it. Brrrrrrr.

Spent the Easter break over in Argyll, making up crummy doggerel for my youngest daughter's egg-treasure hunt, baking Simmnel cake and trying to feed beloved visiting friends on a budget of precisely zilch. We did have one spectacular dinner at sunset at the top of a newly-opened right-of-way at the top of a hill with an unexpected picnic table sat right up there at the end of a half-hour uphill slog. Needless to say in the same postal code of the smoking capital of Scotland, that particular picnic table is totally underused, if not certifiably virgin, but hey, not any longer. We had our wicked way and heated a chilli con carne, deflasked a pile of Basmati rice and necked two bottles of red from wealthier times.

And Michael even remembered to pack candles.

Ther's nothing quite like eating volcanically hot chilli with friends and drinking wine at the top of a hill looking out to a seaview of the island of Arran. There was a sufficient window in the weather to allow the candles to burn evenly, and I was left with the feeling that we will all remember that picnic for a long time to come. Not for the food, but for the place and the unlikeliness of eating outside in Scotland at night in April.

We're back at the coalface now, though. Work is beginning to eat me alive, my fiddle playing hasn't improved much but my flute playing has taken an exponential leap forward when I abandoned my godawful Tune-a-Day primer and went off-piste and played real music. Real music, breathily played ( in a previous life I was a smoker, so my playing and hill-walking will always be -gasp -breathy) on a beautiful silver flute. The beautiful flute was a 50th birthday present from Michael which initially felt like more work ( must practise NEW instrument, must get good at flute as well as being average at fiddle and drawing 145 line drawings for the new Witch Baby and bake our own organic bread and, and, and....) but now I'm loving it, loving the sound I make and occasionally really flying. In the way that you can only fly with music.

The other wonderful thing about the flute is that it won't go out of tune in the cold weather. I can sling it in its case in a rucksack and go play at the top of a hill with a view to Arran if that is what my heart desires. Once I've drawn the 145 line drawings and baked the bread, that is.

so far to go

Spent a large part of last night's session with the Fiddlers wishing I was a better fiddler than I am now. This has probably got everything to do with the fact that the wee reel I'd practised assiduously all week and thought - hey, I'm getting the hang of this - turned out to be one of those tunes that require playing with one's bow a blur and fingers flying. Like an old 33r.p.m L.P played at the speed of a 45 r.p.m.single. Or a treadmill at the gym speeded up from walk to sprint. Aaaaargh. Fingermangle. How the heck...? Donald says it's muscle memory (obviously my muscles have got dementia) and Pete says don't think about it - it's easier.Oh, how we laffed.

As with most things, it's practise. Or practice. Just do it.

But supply your family with ear-muffs and plugs before you begin.

There was a stunningly talented piper at the session last night. Small pipes, I hasten to add .The piper's effect on the resident black labrador ( Fergus) was marked. Fergus came round all the fiddlers, one by one, looking for reassurance that the Boy With The Waily-Waily Thing was actually Safe. Poor Fergus. not only having to put up with weekly infestations of fiddles, but now a plague of pipes?

But even if I do practise till my fingers bleed, I'll never catch up with the Fiddlers. I swear they've all been playing since they were tots, like me, but unlike me they didn't give up in their teen years, and carried on fiddling all the way through their twenties, thirties, forties and are now amazing. Really, truly amazingly talented people. It's a joy to occasionally have a tune with them.

At least ritual humiliation-by-fiddle took my mind off the terrors of packing for Bologna. I'm over that now. I've been to have my first hair-cut for a whole year, and...well...it's signally failed to have the desired morale-boosting effect. Perhaps I should have embraced my Inner-Harridan/ Unst Granny* with the long wild hair , but I had a yen for sleek shiny hair ironed flat. I know, it's lamentable to be so damn vain especially when you're ( whisper it) Getting On A Bit- but my Inner Fluff-Brain occasionally does get her turn in the driving seat and such is her unfamiliarity with the controls ( ooooh, what's this knob? gosh, I wonder what happens when I press this one? what's that siren sound? why are there red flashy thingsin my rearview mirror?) that it's a safe bet that it will all end in tears.

So - not quite tears, but it is a pretty indifferent haircut, made even less flattering by the fact that due to advancing decreptitude, what I now appear to have is a sleek headful of grey ironed flat stuff. I look, in short, like I'm about to audition for Blake 7.

* Thankyou to Mel for this glorious image. Unst Grannies, Fetlar Uncles, Yell Spouses and suchlike can all be found at 60 degrees North.

Coming up for air

So that's what I've been doing for the last fortnight. Writing, thinking, scoring out and writing again. And doing two heeeuge events with children in Liverpool for World Book Day, one rather quiet event in Glasgow at Aye Write and finally two more events in Craigmillar which is full of good people living difficult lives exacerbated by appalling poverty, below average literacy levels, above average social problems all within some of the crumbling remains of one of Edinburgh's most shameful public housing estates. Needless to say, out of the five events I've taken part in, the two in Craigmillar were easily the best fun, the most rewarding and the ones I will remember for a long time to come.

Although, it has to be said, standing up on stage in Liverpool under hot, bright lights in front of heaving rows of hundreds of children was pretty memorable in terms of Need For Clean Underwear.

I used to think that being a children's writer guaranteed one a life of quiet, contemplative self-reliance. A sort of love affair between a Zen vegetarian and a Beat Poet who moonlighted as a Lollipop lady. These days, it's more like being the product of a one-night-stand between a rock star on the downward career trajectory and a hermit with literacy issues. The job description has changed beyond all recognition. I suspect E. H. Shepard would have been horrified at the prospect of 'drawing' on an interactive whiteboard, even in front of an audience of adoring fans.

Now, before the next tranche of editorial input, I'm having a wardrobe crisis of epic dimensions because next week I'm off to the Book Fair in Bologna, Italy. When you are fortunate enough to spend the majority of your working life tooling back and forth from your garden shed with occasional sorties to the supermarket, you can grow very accustomed to wearing whatever you wore the day before, even if that was what you wore the day before that, and regardless of the fact that it makes you look
a. old
b. fat
c.like you really have given up any pretensions to elegance or style
and d.as if you are acknowledging your Inner Harridan

This is all very well until you are ripped untimely from your cosy cocoon of Dressing Down. Dressing from your vast selection of washed-to-death and decidedly greying Couture Noir. A.K.A. Dressing for Expanded Waistlines and Comfortable Comfort Eating. Whatever. Suddenly you have to Dress for Work. This never fails to throw me into a complete state of terror, which will lead to my travelling with a suitcase of ludicrous heaviness and, I can guarantee, will entail a long, dark teatime of the soul in an uncharted pensione during which the complete contents of said heavyweight luggage will be tried on in various combinations with escalating cries of dismay as all are found wanting.

Don't even get me started on what shoes I'm going to take.

Long hushhhhhhhh

Please forgive the long hush/gap in comms but February went by in a haze of deadline fatigue. Don't think I've ever written a book quite as fast before, and frankly, it's not an experience I'd care to repeat, but a bit like what is coyly termed a 'precipitate labour' ( think three contractions and you're done...) it does at least have the advantage of getting the horrible bit over and done with quickly.

Yes- sometimes writing is horrible. It's a shocking admission, but after several of the great and the good 'came out' in last week's Guardian to tell all that they loathed writing and would rather floss with a circular sander than sit down with their blank pages day after day after day, I feel empowered to add my name to the list of Authors who Wrestle with Demons. It's not always the pits, but for a fair amount of the time I spend sitting at my desk conjuring words out of thin air, it is a lonely, gruelling task, and one that I can come to dread if the writing isn't going well.

Why do we do it? I can only speak for myself in saying that I go through the grey blahhhhs secure ( -ish) in the knowledge that eventually, I'll emerge out into the sunny uplands. The good outweighs the grim, and the good feels so damn good that it's worth the pain. Or something like that.

Last week we had World Book Day which involved loads and loads of children and not nearly enough cakes, and the week before, I had a Significant Birthday which involved loads of trekking across peat bogs and narrow cliffside goat-paths and not nearly enough lazing around sipping champagne and eating chocolates. And for the three weeks before that, I was doing a fine impersonation of Boring Mummy Who Shrieks and Writes 24/7. Not, I must say, a good look.

Now I'm deep in the Edit, which is a stage I've come to relish ; far more craft than Art, but consequently, the pressure to create is lessened, and the sheer enjoyment of refining, honing, tweaking and finally polishing is putting a smile on my face and a spring in my step. Sadly though, it's not putting a whole lot of moolah in my bank account, but hey - these days, why the heck would I want to put anything in one of those? Banks? Meh...

And finally, today felt like spring was winning. Time to redecorate the blog. Much as it pained me to take down the dragons in the snow picture and haul it upstairs to the blogattic, I hope its replacement finds favour. The running foxes with wind-tossed trees are from a book called Stormy Weather which, if Western capitalism doesn't crash and burn beforehand, will be published this coming October.You saw it here first.