My precious. . .

And talking of rings - I lost my wedding ring a year ago tonight. My son and I went to the annual firework display here in Cambridge and later I realised my ring was gone. I have few things that are truly irreplaceable, but that was one of them. Every day, I hate that its gone.

We didn't go to the fireworks this year. Thursday night is football training night and my son opted for that instead. Not that it really matters. Cambridge is firework crazy. There is a massive display every other week.

I drove over to Bottisham to pick my laptop up from Kevin, my new computer support guy. He has had all kinds of nonsense with Dell, of course. An angry letter will ensue. If only I had bought a Mac!

On the way over there I caught a bit of Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 doing a 'Top Ten Bedtime Stories' thing with Michael Rosen. By a spooky coincidence they - and Bea Campbell - were extolling the virtues of Each Peach Pear Plum. Although the whole enterprise was partly derailed by Jeremy Vine's weirdly creepy reading of the book at the end. It frightened the life out of me.

Michael Rosen was great, though. As I have already mentioned, live radio can be daunting, but Rosen was so incredibly articulate and generous about the books mentioned. He is a national treasure.

I watched the first part of my old friend and boss (and national treasure) Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain on BBC iPlayer. It was great. Andrew is just one of the cleverest people on the planet. There isn't much he doesn't know an awful lot about and, more importantly, he he has that rare gift of making that knowledge accessible without making it simple or easy. The sad state of history teaching in this country is a bit of a thing with me at the moment. This programme shows why it is so important.

Although I wasn't sure about Andrew's George Bernard Shaw accent. It sounded a bit like Dudley Moore.

Ring around the moon

There was a ring around the moon last night. It was really magical. Cambridge is very badly lit. This can make cycling rather more exciting than it is perhaps meant to be, as pedestrians loom out startlingly from the surrounding murk, but it does have the benefit of allowing us to see the night sky.

It is lovely to be able to see the stars while cycling across my local park, and better still to be able to step out of my front door and see a bright moon, a little smudged by mist, with a great glowing ring around it.

I gather that it is an effect caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. That may explain it, but it does not contain it somehow. It was weirdly moving. I stood for some time in the middle of the road just gazing up at it. Tap 'ring around the moon' into Google images. There are lots of photos. It will give you a little glimpse of what it looked like.

But it won't give you the magic.

All saints

All Hallows or All Saints depending on you preference. I had a friend at school when I was about nine years old who was inordinately proud of being born on All Saints Day. Robert Turnbull his name was. Where are you now, Robert, I wonder?

My son played and lost a game of football in the pouring rain this morning, bless him. Bad enough to play in driving wind and a cold shower without getting thumped 4-1. Ordinarily I would have been on the sidelines berating him, but my friend Ian Farnan (whose son also plays for the team) was good enough to take him there and back for me.

The day got better though because he managed to sell some of his old toys to a neighbour. Not only did he make some money but he had the satisfaction of knowing his cherished toys will be enjoyed by children he knows and is fond of.

Certain toys have such a sentimental aura about them. It was what the Toy Story films tapped into so brilliantly. Some toys doggedly refuse to have a life of their own, but others will seem to embody a whole period of a child's (and so by extension, their parents') life. They may not be sentient, but they do come alive in play.

It is the same with books of course. Picture books - favourite picture books - get read over and over again. If they are really good - and so few picture books are - then they become something else by that repetition. Something is created in the air - a mixture of you and the way you read and the voices you adopt for characters, the strange bedroom twilight, the hush, the expectant, listening child, the pictures, the words: they all become more than their parts. They are ingredients in a recipe. It won't work for everyone every time, but when it does work, it is perhaps the most magical book experience of all - for reader and listener.

I never bored of Janet and Alan Ahlberg's Each Peach Pear Plum for instance. It remains, in my opinion, one of the cleverest children's books ever.

Of any kind.

Happy Halloween!

Japanese tunnel

I was very pleased to hear that there is to be a Japanese edition of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. It occurs to me now that I am not sure that there is to be a Japanese Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. I'll have to check.

I've done a couple of interviews this week. I had a chat to Lorne Jackson who is Books Editor on the Sunday Mercury and Birmingham Post. It was a pleasure to talk to him but I do find interviews tiring. It was no fault of Lorne's - it was a very relaxed affair - but the dread of saying something completely stupid is always with me, and someone taking notes just makes it seem all the more threatening.

And if this were not terrifying enough, I have also had a chat about an upcoming radio interview for Radio Scotland that I will be doing from the BBC studio here in Cambridge on the 16th of this month. I haven't done much radio, to be fair - but I can't say that I have excelled in the medium.

I have never been asked to do TV.

Not yet anyway.

Strip club

I have been doing some life drawing at a class run by the appropriately named Kate King, at King's College here in Cambridge. The classes are for King's students but there are spare places and so the likes of me can - for a fiver - have a small taste of what it would have been like to come to a Cambridge college.

I get a pathetic thrill walking through the small door within the large locked door in the gatehouse. Last night there was an Atkinson Grimshaw sky with a bright moon lighting up a scattering of clouds. The big old lamps were lit and I wondered what it must be like to take this kind of place for granted. I'm not sure I would ever stop pinching myself if I were a student here.

As for the life drawing, the classes - or strip club as my son insists on referring to them - are not classes in the sense of teaching; at least not for outsiders like myself. Kate will certainly give guidance to students, if called upon to do so. But for me it is just the access to a model and the chance to get back into drawing for the hell of it.

Blood red splatters

I went up to London today with my son to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. I've never been a great fan of Kapoor. It all seems pleasant enough, but it has never moved me. His childlike love of materials often seems to produce work that is a bit, well, childlike for me. For all the talk of alchemy and mysticism, a pile of coloured pigment can often doggedly refuse to be anything but a pile of pigment - not less colourful or even beautiful, but not invested with the power that it is clearly intended to have.

But this exhibition - with certain exceptions - seemed different. The huge railway carriage made of red wax, extruding its way through the Royal Academy galleries so slowly it was almost imperceptible, was extraordinary. I can't say I've ever had a dream involving a wax railway carriage, but it was certainly dreamlike. Or is it nightmarish?

And the canon that fires blood red wax at a wall was also rather wonderful. We waited ten minutes but it was worth every second. A man appeared and silently performed the preparations and then BANG - the noise was not so much deafening as shattering: you could feel it thump through your body as the wax shot out and slapped against the far wall.

My son and I had looked at the plaque to the Artists' Rifles as we queued for a ticket, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found this more than a hollow art trick. While we stood waiting behind the canon I find my thoughts turning to my father who was in the Royal Artillery during World War II and for much of his life thereafter.

Blood red splatters.

The wax dripping down the wall brought a few whoops and a ripple of applause, but I think the noise and the spectacle also stunned the audience a little. Like the wax railway, it was darker than it seems.