The Grubtown Daily Herald

Yup, those of you smart enough and awake enough — and interested enough, come to that — may have spotted that there are NO JOURNAL ENTRIES for July 2010. Is that because I didn’t do anything in July? No, no, no, I say. And no again. Far from it. I did LOADS OF STUFF in July, quite apart from eating, sleeping and keeping my beard entertained. (Did you know that you can now buy board games designed specifically for you and your beard? No, neither did I. Perhaps you can’t. I would say that I might have dreamed it, but there’s no time for sleeping in my busy, busy, busy regime.)

Pembrokeshire: my shed in the woods

I also got out and about at the end of June, which isn’t mentioned in this blog either. (What a DISGRACE. Who can I blame? You, yes, you: the tall bearded chap at the back with the idiot grin. It’s all YOUR fault. No… Hang on. That’s my own reflection in the shiny foil of a giant Kitkat wrapper. I hardly recognised myself having lost OVER FIVE STONE — yes, stone not pounds — since January.

The beautiful setting for the Borders Book Festival

Pembrokeshire: my morning walk

Now, where was I? Oh yes, at that end of June I took the Henry’s House Roadshow to Borders Book Festival in Scotland where we tried out a brand new medieval guess-who’s-more-important quiz, involving fake swords, a crown, a (fake) horse’s head and a loo brush, then I visited eight schools in three days in beautiful Pembrokeshire where I was made EXTAORDINARILY welcome and was put up in an attractive log cabin just three minutes from the sea (or less than one minute if there was a REALLY BIG WAVE).

I’ve also been writing Grubtown Tales Book Seven… but more on that later.

Ps. Wooooah!!! These photos are all over the place, aren’t they? I must be out of practice! Hey! Ho! (NOTE TO SELF: Must blog more often.)

The Wychwood Music Festival tea bus!

Cafe Twit cakies!

I spent Bank Holiday Monday at the Roald Dahl Museum. As well as the two events I did in Miss Honey’s classroom — and what fantastic fun they were — there were beard-making and duck-colouring workshops in honour of Beardy Ardagh. Roald Dahl famously disliked beards and distrusted people who grew them… so it seemed wonderfully subversive taking over for the day!

[To see the top of my head and the rest of the photos in full, or to leave a comment, click on a particular picture.]

I didn’t actually have enough time to have more than the briefest of glimpses at the exhibits in the museum — though I did spend some quality time in Cafe Twit — so those awfully nice Roald Dahl people have very kindly promised to send me a GOLDEN TICKET. It’s at times like this that I’m proud to be a Roald Dahl Funny Prize winner!

This year’s trip to the Guardian Hay-on-Wye Festival was an unusual one for me. For the first time ever, I didn’t received a festival ‘thank-you’  of a half-case of champagne or carva. For the first time ever, I was driven all the way there and all the way back — rather than enduring several taxi rides and long train journeys — which would have been the ideal circumstance for popping a half-case in the boot. For the first time ever I received a fee. (Yes, folding money.) And for the first time ever, the Hay-on-Wye festival had a schools day with schools in the tents on the festival site. In fact, to be honest, the “festival proper” hadn’t actually started yet. It was a weird feeling. The ‘green room’ tent where authors sit and chat was virtually deserted, with workmen still putting up parts of it.

The event itself was great fun. I was there to do a new, improved HENRY’S HOUSE ROADSHOW with the help of Scholastic children’s book guru Alyx Price as one of my assistants and Siobhan, a festival intern, as another. There were a ridiculous number of props and much shouting, clambering up on stage and throwing of foam dice from the audience. In addition to Alyx — and Murderous Maths author Kjartan Poskitt — I was kept company by local artist/illustrator Dix (no photo) and First Mammal (numerous photos below). First Mammal first worked with me at a HENRY’S HOUSE ROADSHOW back in Cheltenham last year, as part of a prehistory timeline.

As those of you who are expert at identifying cars from their interiors will no doubt spot,  First Mammal isn’t sitting in the Bentley in one of the photos. That’s because it wasn’t Rickets who drove me home. He managed to drive me there but he also managed to drive into a ditch. Fortunately, it was near enough the hotel form me to walk the final few hundred yards/metres. Because the car and, pressumably, Rickets was still in the ditch the following day when it came time to leave, the festival organisers arranged for me to driven home in a very nice Jaguar.

As to when I’ll get the Betley back, we’ll have to wait and see.

[Click on the photo to enlarge and/or to leave a comment.]

I travelled up to Birmingham by train after the Write Away conference and was very pleased to discover that there was a Tesco’s opposite my hotel. It’s not that Tesco’s buildings are particularly lovely to look at — they’re not, and my room didn’t have a view of  it anyhow — it simply meant that I was able to stock up on fruit despite having arrived at that late hour. I had an excellent meal at the hotel restaurant, washed down with some fine drinkies, and then returned to the privacy of my own room, to be alone with my bag of fruit. What better way to end the day than with an apple, banana and orange, followed by bed? (I ate the first three, but not the last. I slept in that instead.) I was able to drift off to sleep in the sure knowledge that additional apples, oranges and bananas were waiting for me, ready to be eaten the following day.

The next morning, I  hobbled downstairs for some Earl Grey tea and a low-fat yogurt , to be confronted by an extraordinary sight. In the hallway leading into the restaurant there was a wheelie-bin, positioned to catch water GUSHING from the ceiling. I’m not talking a slight leak or a drip-drip-drip. I’m talking serous water issues, here. The wheelie bin wasn’t the most hygienic thing to have squeeze past — it wasn’t a clean, shiny new one but had a brought-in-from-a–back-ally look about it –and it was difficult not to get splashed. Add to this the fact that you had to go past it to reach the ‘breakfast bar’ in a side room and you can imagine that guests weren’t thrilled about it. A very jolly member of staff, with a strong Brummy accent was brought in to make cheery comments to encourage people to eat rather than stomp off and demand to see the manager, or to ring a health inspector…

What great entertainment to start the day. As I left the room, a plastic dustbin had joined the wheelie-bin. I was later told that the water started off on the fourth floor!

And so to the Birmingham event itself. I was there to launch the Young Readers UK festival at the library theatre. It was Michael Rosen’s job last year and I suspect that they wanted someone with a more impressive beard this time around. I was a little concerned that it had turned out to be one of the sunniest, hottest, loveliest days of the year so far and that no one in their right mind — whether they’d already bought tickets or not — would chose to sit inside a theatre when they could be out cavorting in the sunshine. The organisers — and what a nice bunch of people they turned out to be — reassured me that all would be well and, sure enough, we had a splendid crowd, with much laughing and joining in.

At the end, during the signing, one audience member was kind enough to give me a Tupperware box containg carrot, cucumber and celery sticks. Add that to the bag of fruit and I was in dieter’s heaven. What a day!

What’s a pun? A pun is small cake or a bread roll and, traditionally, in stories elephants like eating currant puns. ‘Currant pun’ is also Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘Sun’ as in the big ball of burning gas up in the sky.

No, hang on! Sorry! That’s a BUN isn’t it? A BUN is small cake or a bread roll and, traditionally, in stories elephants like eating currant BUNS. ‘Currant BUN’ is also Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘Sun’ as in the big ball of burning gas up in the sky.

Phew! It’s lucky I realised my mistake in time, or I’d have seemed a right fool!

A pun is actually a play on words: a joke using the fact that a word (or similar sounding word) has different meanings. So, you might write away when applying for a bag of apples but you might also say, “Right away!” when you decide that you’re going to do the writing-away-for-said-apples at once… which brings me to the organisation called Write Away which recently asked me to be the closing speaker at their May conference. The closing speaker is the person who’s job it is to make everyone feels GREAT at the end of a busy conference. It’s about ending everything on a high, high, HIGH! (Which made me the obvious choice.)

My assistant, Dotty — see journal entry below — also suggested that the closing speaker’s role is to encourage everyone to leave — “probably halfway through your talk” — so that the cleaners can start tidying up for the next conference — “which makes you the obvious choice” — but I’m not so sure about that.

Eitherway, it gave me a chance to visit the revamped Wellcome Institute in London’s Euston Road. This mighty fine building houses anything and everything — well, not quite everything — to do with the history of medicine.

Once the conference was over, with many delegates leaving in tears (probably at the beauty of my closing speech), I had a chance to catch up with the poet Roger Stevens before nipping across the road to Euston Station and catching a train to Birmingham. When I say ‘nipping’ I actually mean hobbling, so I was grateful to Catherine from Scholastic Children’s Books UK who — for reasons best known to her — looked after me so beautifully for much of the day. (I only discovered later that the reason she stuck so close to me throughout was because someone had tied our shoe laces together ‘for a bet’. See? Sometimes something good does comes out of the evils of gambling.)

Visitors to the Wellcome Institute laugh at earlier (beardless) guest speaker

I headed off to a secret location on the 14th to record some material for videos to appear on the www.visitgrubtown.com website, YouTube and a couple of other places. Because Rickets is having his false knees polished or something — to be honest, I stop listening when he goes on about his ailments — Toto, my houseboy, drove me to the station instead. He is an excellent diver (if you’re not too fussy about which side of the road, or which pavement, you’re driving on). His English can’t be quite as good as I thought it was, though, because when I told him to ‘drop me off’, he took me literally. He leant across, opened my car door and pushed me out onto the pavement. I dropped, all right!

Luckily Dotty, my assistant who was cycling behind us with my briefcase, didn’t run me over. (I don’t actually let her in the car. She’s of an age where rather a lot of her hair falls out, and it’s LIGHT BLUE! Not a natural light blue, of course. She gives it a blue rinse, which is also the name of the rock band in which she plays bass guitar, I hope I’m not as weird as her when I’m seventy.)

Anyway, the recordings went ahead without a hitch and, as soon as I can work out how to post it on here, that’s exactly what I’ll do for you to feast your eyes on. The sound quality isn’t brilliant but that’s because the Grubtown Tourist Office is mainly full of nothing but echoing space. If you want echoing space, that’s the place to visit! Only one poster-type-thingumy fell down during the filming, and the camera operator wasn’t a complete idiot so, all in all, it was a good day, I’d say.

Mrs Dotty Hendrix

Some bright spark once called Brighton “London-by-Sea” but I’ve never been quite sure whether it was supposed to be an insult, a compliment or simply a statement of sort-of-fact. I’ve always thought that Brighton has the buzz and busy-ness — not to be confused with business — of London, along with the crime and grime (in places) to go with it… as well as some fantastic architecture, a fabulous diversity of people and, of course, the sea. Whatever you may think of the city — yes, its a city nowadays, along with nearby Hove — you can be sure that the Brighton Festival is not-to-be-missed. I was dead chuffed to be invited back again this year, at a new venue and with a good crowd.

Because I was coming from Tunbridge Wells — rather than Grubtown — I had Rickets our faithful family retainer* (*dodgey old manservant) drive me in the Bentley. We were a little late setting off because my staff thought it amusing to hide my walking stick as a ‘bit of a joke’. (For those of you who don’t follow my regular health-check updates, I’m waiting for an operation on my left ankle.) I eventually found it, slightly charred, in the drawing-room fireplace, smeared in goose fat. Anyway, the long and short of it is that, when we eventually arrived in Brighton, I found that FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, in all the years I’ve been dong events, I’d left all my books and props behind!

I could, of course, have panicked. I could have blamed Rickets. I could have wailed, gnashed my teeth and pull clumps of hair from my beard by the fistful. Instead, professional that I am, I simply rang my assistant Dotty Hendrix, shouted at her for a few minutes, felt much better then went ahead with the event using books from the bookshop. I was, of course, sensational.

After signing  some books, I made my way to ‘The Dome’, next to the extraordinary Brighton Pavilion, where the festival have set up their own radio station for the duration of the festival. I gave such a wonderful interview that I’m only sorry that it wasn’t broadcast to the entire nation.

Rickets was silent for the entire journey home. I think he was sulking because I’d made him replace his chauffeur’s cap — yes, I insist he wear a uniform when driving me — with a ‘KISS ME QUICK’ hat. Good ol’ Brighton. Love it. Hate it. You can’t ignore it!

A photo of Brighton Pavilion taken with my phone. (My camera was in the bag I left behind.)

Tomorrow is the official publication day of  my fifth Grubtown Tale, Trick Eggs and Rubber Chickens, which introduces the world to the delights of The Grubtown Aquarium and Carwash. It’s run by Slackjaw Gumshoe who owns Slackjaw Gumshoe’s Paint and Hardware Store over own Gibbon Street. (It used to be called Hillock Portal’s Paint and Hardware Store, but that was back when Hillock Portal owned it.) Slackjaw gets to keep all the money from people paying to go into the aquarium, whilst Mayor Flabby Gomez gets to keep all the money from the car-washes. (As Flabby pointed out: “People always need clean cars but don’t always need to see fish in tanks.”)

The sixth Grubtown Tale, Splash, Crash and Loads of Cash, has already been written and Jim Paillot is busy finishing off the illustrations — between doing some fantastic colour artwork for the new www.visitgrubtown.comwebsite, including one of the selfsame aquarium and carwash mentioned above — whilst I’m in the VERY early stages of writing the seventh Grubtown Tale… of the seventh-and-a-half if you count The Great Pasta Disaster, the £1-World-Book-Day flip-book.

Trick Eggs and Rubber Chickens includes tell of a landmark in the history of Grubtown: the day that Flabby Gomez and his family moved out of their eight-storey garden shed and into the official mayoral residence he’d been knitting for all of those years. As if that weren’t excitement enough, this is also a tale of revenge, dodgy dealings and a great big soaking.

Something fishy afoot...

Yesterday I received a nice bottle of red wine from those lovely people at  The Booktrust, as a thank you for appearing on the funny-books panel at the London Book Fair, and a goodie bag from Puffin,which included my very own cuddly Moomin, and Snork Maiden boiled-sweet lolly. Life is sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Just the right mix

Yup, the Grubtown Tourst Board — with more than a little help from my Grubtown Publisher Faber & Faber — have launched a new website www.visitgrubtown.com which changes every week and has some fantatsic interactive stuff (which is a technical Internet-kinda term). You can even get your very special Grubtown name (so that you can fit in with the likes of Jilly Cheeter and Garlic Hamper) and can even review Grubtown restaurants and actually write articles for The Grubtown Daily Herald. I’d be on it all day myself if I weren’t: (1) Growing my beard; and (2) Writing a new Grubtown Tale. ENJOY!

A leaflet all about it. I hope.

You’d better believe it! (My pride and joy is the Hattifattner mouse mat!) And, yes, even my knitted cakes and buns are in a Moominpappa bowl.

Moomins? I love 'em!

What an honour!

Today, I’m due to be interviewed by The Big Issue (on some big issue or other, I’d imagine), then I’m off to The official Residence of the Finnish ambassador this evening to celebrate 65 years of Moomin books by the late and extraordinarily great Finnish writer, Tove Jansson. I was last at the Residence in what I’ve worked out must have been 2003, to celebrate the publication of The Summer Book by Sort Of Books, an adult novella also by Jansson. [A novel is a story that's too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel.] That it was 2003 is what we bearded people call an educated guest. I was there on a 22nd May and that particular 22nd May fell on a Thursday which, according to my calculations — which involved tea leaves, sheep’s knuckle bones and ancient runes (I said runes, not prunes) — makes it seven years ago. This event should be even more Moomin-tastic!

One of the fun things about being a writer is seeing your characters grow.  They start off as ideas in your head. Then they are formed — given shape — in words on the page. Sometimes, they’re even given a physical form by illustrators in their pictures. Then they live — however briefly — inside the minds of the readers who’ve read about them… and maybe, later even as animated characters in films or on television, or as portrayed by actors in some shape or form. Then there’s the merchandising toy, perhaps a very small plastic one, given away as part of a children’s meal at a fast-food outlet as an ideal choking hazard… And all these characters started out as was nothing more an idea in your head. Brilliant.

But let’s not forget the character costume, either. I was reminded by these at the Shewsbury Literary Festival over the weekend…. with Axel Schiffler and, of course, the Gruffalo.

It's behind you!

It’s hard to believe that my last blog entry was back in whenever it was, telling you about the recording of the audio book for STINKING RICH AD JUST PLAIN STINKY made at the end of March. Well, it’s  May the 4th now — “May the 4th be with you!” and SO much has happened in between times. I went to Oxford for the literary festival. (I was marevllous.) I cooked an ENORMOUS meal for Easter. (It was marevllous.) I went and had my eyes tested and got myself two pairs of prescription sunglasses. (They’re marvellous.) I went to the London Book Fair to be on a panel to talk to grown-ups about the Roald Dahl Funny Prize in particular and writing funny books in general. (We were marevllous.) AND, after months and months and months of work, I finally got to present the work I’ve been doing with Anne Teletubbies/In The Night Garden Wood and the Ragdoll team for a proposed new TV series. (We… We have to wait and see what the BBC think!) My fingers are crossed, and — now that the Bank Holiday is over — I’m already at work on my 7th GRUBTOWN TALE.

The bespectacled Messrs Mitchell and Ardagh

David Mitchell as he usually appears

When I heard that Faber were going to make an audio book of STINKING RICH AND JUST PLAIN STINKY — the Roald Dahl Funny Prize-winning first of my Grubtown Tales — I jumped up in the air with a cry of ‘WHOOPEEE!’. The cry soon turned into that of an “OUCH!” because I was in a very low-ceiling-ed room, and the top of my head came into contact with said ceiling pretty sharpish (with a dull ‘THUD!’). My cry turned to one of delight when my first and only choice of reader for this book — who is, in effect, playing me-as-Beardy-Ardagh — agreed to do it. I wanted a well-spoken young chap with an excellent sense of humour and grumpy undertones. (He doesn’t necessarily have a beard, but you can’t have everything.) My choice was David Mitchell from a variety of Radio 4 shows and TV series such as Peep Show, The Bubble and That Mitchell & Webb Look, and — despite his reading the book first — he was happy to do it. (Probably for nothing. Just for the honour. Maybe. Perhaps not. In truth, they probably paid him EXTRA.)

We recorded the book on Friday and David — note the firstname terms — was a delight to work with. (No punching, scratching, uncontrollable sobbing or even unreasonable demands for cake.) This is his first audio book, which made me even more pleased. The wildlife in my beard hummed with pure pleasure (but you shouldn’t be able to hear that on the recording if the engineer’s any good at his job). The result should be in all good bookshops and downloading outlets — ??? — by November… unless it can be RUSHED FORWARD due to public demand.