NEW!!

I have been afforded some extraordinary honours lately which I’m sure I didn’t deserve. 

Recently I went up to Kirriemuir in Angus, Scotland for the 150th birthday celebrations of J M Barrie, author of Peter Pan.  All the world’s experts on Barrie were there (no I’m not among them).  Check out the birthday cake!

Barrie was born in Kirriemuir and the National Trust for Scotland have preserved the house much as it was when he was a boy – plus some things from later in life – like his writing desk.


So I was allowed to sit at Barrie’s very own desk to sign copies of Peter Pan in Scarlet.  His glasses, pens and typing were right there beside me.  I didn’t hear any ghostly, resentful mutterings about sequels to his Peter Pan and Wendy.  Phew.

Talking of sequels, I was invited to the annual conference of the Schools Library Association in Nottingham, as be one of three authors talking about “Stepping into Another Author’s Shoes”.  David Benedictus was there, who wrote Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, continuing the adventures of Pooh et al.  And to my great delight, so was Hilary McKay whose books I admire enormously.  She was talking about her sequel to The Little Princess, Wishing for Tomorrow.

At the Cheltenham Festival in the autumn I’m sharing a stage with David Almond, also talking about the sequels/prequels thing.  David has written a prequel to Skellig, My Name is Mina, and my new book’s a sequel to Stop the Train. 

                                      David, Hilary & Me

One of the bonus extras that comes with this job is that people occasionally invite you to go somewhere really exciting to talk about writing.  So at the end of May I was in Norway for the Lillehammer Book Festival – quite a major event on the world book scene!  I don’t suppose I would ever have got there otherwise, but Norway in the spring is a really beautiful place to be – wooden churches with dragons rampant on their roof ridges; kilometre after kilometre of lake and trees and trees and lakes…   Books there are so expensive that I wonder anyone ever buys one - £40 for a hardback - £25 for a paperback! – but it was lovely to have the excuse to visit.  Lillehammer was the centre for the Winter Olympic in 1994 and the ski jump was visible from our bedroom window.  (What kind of maniac ski’s down a vertical drop and into mid-air??) Had a wonderful tour of the surrounding countryside, which inspired Ibsen to write Peer Gynt and Grieg to write the music to it
. 
The Festival happened at the same time as the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, so the planes out and back were crammed full, not of authors but of Eurovision junkies.

Last month, The Royal Society of Literature did me the extraordinary honour of making me a Fellow of the Society, which was very startling.  (And this after being made a Fellow of the English Association back in March!)  Now I can put FRSL after my name as well as FEA!  Quite the best thing about the meeting where new Fellows were welcomed was that we had to sign the Membership Book using either Charles Dickens’ pen or Lord Byron’s.  What a choice!  When I went up (already a bit too nervous to remember how to hold a pen or write my name) they whispered to me that Byron’s was the easier one to use.  I wasn’t going to ignore the hint.  So I signed with a pen once used by George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRSL about 200 years ago to write

                                     a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses                                                               Instead of speech…
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his.
                                                  Don Juan

Lord Byron and Charles Dickens (fellow Fellows!)  How’s that for august company?

And then there was Harrods.

Happy Christmas everybody!  No, don’t drop your ice cream and sun-screen.  It’s Christmas now.  Every year Harrods, grandest shop in the world, prides itself on being first to begin the Christmas shopping season by opening their ‘Christmas World’.  This year the theme is “Peter Pan”.

So on 6th August, there I was amid the baubles and glitter of Christmas.  Not just that, but seated at a splendid table, in a vast chair, ready to sign copies of a special limited edition of Peter Pan in Scarlet  which comes complete with a matching copy of Peter Pan in a terrific wooden treasure chest.

  Behind me was a wooden galleon just about life size.  When Harrods do something, they don’t do it by halves!  I had an escort of Peter Pan characters, too – Hook in black diamante, Peter with glittering woodland togs, Wendy so reed-slender that she must be a ballet dancer underneath the costume, a very cheery, plump crocodile, and Mrs Christmas (yes, all right they were stretching a point, but these were Christmas celebrations).

I met some lovely people taking a cautious glimpse at Christmas-in-August.

One lucky customer had won an all-expenses-paid day out – the delightful Sarah and her heroically game four- year-old daughter Lara.  This is definitely a family worth knowing: Sarah is sarahslovelybuns.co.uk and  the Cellini of cupcakes.

Which reminds me: My daughter, Ailsa Joy, has  just now staged and performed a one-woman play entitled CAKES which she wrote herself. It’s about… well, yes, you guessed.

I must say, having an actress daughter makes me crave to  write plays instead of books for a while, but I suppose I‘ll have to be sensible.  Who puts on plays these days without a couple of film stars in the cast and a famous playwright?  I am evilly jealous of Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pullman… and Jamila Gavin… and David Almond… Oh now look, I’ve turned green.  So not fetching.

Which is ridiculous, since books bring fun of their own beyond trips to Norway.  The launch party for Pull Out all the Stops is going to be aboard a boat on the Thames.  (The story is set aboard a paddleboat on the Missouri.)  Also aboard will be Alan Snow, launching his new book in the Ratbridge series, Worse things Happen at Sea.