I like to make something every day

I don't often read the This Much I Know feature in the Guardian magazine supplement on Saturdays. I am seldom interested enough in the person involved to bother. In any case, I have an aversion to these interviews reformatted as a series of bold statements.

But for some reason I did look this week. It was Kyle MacLachlan of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks fame. There was one line in particular that caught my eye:


I like to make something every day, whether it's a film, a cake or a piece of furniture.


Isn't that great? What a fantastic principle to live by.

Werewolf?

There wolf!

We have been having a bit of a wolf-fest in this house of late. My son read Jack London's Call of the Wild recently and loved it, and no sooner had he finished than a movie version of White Fang appeared in the TV listings. It was 1991 and Disney, so expectations were not great, but it turned out to be nicely done with a young Ethan Hawke as Jack Conroy and Klaus Maria Brandauer, no less, as Alex Larson.

Then today there was a David Attenborough programme about a wolf-hunter turned naturalist and hunter, Ernest Thompson Seton who wrote a story about a wolf called Lobo he tracked and killed (though later hugely regretting the fact). The story comes from a book called Wild Animal I Have Known, published in 1898. Seton became a huge influence on the boy scout movement in America, but was in fact born in the north-east of England, in South Shields in 1860. He emigrated to Canada as a child and only became a US citizen in 1931.

And lastly, on Chris Riddell's recommendation, my son is now reading Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver and is enjoying it enormously. It is a pre-historical novel, set in northern Europe in the age of hunter-gatherers. It is part of a series entitled (adopt deep, gravelly, movie-trailer American accent here) Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.

Gothic fest

Nice to that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror was picked out in the Book Trust's Best New Children's Books pullout in the Guardian newspaper here in the UK on Saturday. It was given a spot in the 11+ section.

The review was as follows:

When Edgar visits eccentric Uncle Montague, he is subjected to a series of compelling stories with scorpion-like stings. In an age when gore and guts dominate the horror genre, Priestley's gothic fest of Poe-like fables stand out like shining beacons, further enhanced but suitably grim illustrations by David Roberts.

Certainly a better reference to Edgar Allen Poe than I got last year. The sentence 'More poo than Poe' formed part of a slightly hysterical (inboth senses of the word) review in SFX magazine. It cracks me up every time I read it.

And speaking of heads

Writing about Cromwell's head got me to thinking about severed heads in general (as you do). The obvious link is to Charles I, the king whose head Cromwell was instrumental in removing (and thereby causing the later post-mortem severing of his own).

Charles I was executed on a black-draped scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House, whose amazing Rubens ceiling I saw for the first time last year when the New Statesman held it's summer party there. When his head was lopped off, bystanders rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood as a memento.

Charles' head was lopped off in one go, which is more than can be said for Mary Stuart - Mary Queen of Scots. The executioner managed to hit the back of her head with the first blow and only severed her head on the third. He held up the head with a cry of 'God Save the Queen' only to find that her auburn curls were a wig. The balding head slipped from his grasp and bounced across the floor towards the audience.

Jack Ketch (who gave his hated name to all executioners) was horribly incompetent. The Duke of Monmouth gave him six guineas to do a good job when he was to be executed, but he also felt the axe and raised concerns about whether it was sharp enough. He may have had a point. Ketch's first go simply wounded the Duke. Two more goes and the head still wasn't severed. Ketch threw down the axe and said he couldn't carry on. Ketch was forced to continue amid boos, had two more goes and finished the job like a butcher with a knife, narrowly avoiding being lynched by the crowd.

Sir Walter Raleigh worked the crowd at his execution for three quarters of an hour. When he was shown the axe he said, 'This is a sharp medicine but it is a physician for all diseases' and when the axeman faltered said, 'Strike, man, strike!' As with Mary Stuart, onlookers noticed his lips were still moving as the head tumbled to the floor. The head was put in a velvet bag and Raleigh's wife, Bess, had it embalmed and kept in a special case.

Cromwell's head

I mentioned the other day that we had peeked into Sidney Sussex College here in Cambridge and that there was a plaque in the ante-chapel that reads:

Near to this place was buried on 15 March 1960 the head of OLIVER CROMWELL, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland & Ireland, Fellow Commoner of this college 1616-7.

I love the nonchalance of that '& Ireland' by the way.

So what is Oliver Cromwell's head doing there? Cromwell was not executed. He died of natural causes - well of a urinary condition or malaria (possibly) or both on 3 September 1658. But then again he was. Executed that is.



You see, when Charles II was restored to the throne, Parliament decided that they would show their devotion to the new king and teach Cromwell a lesson - despite the fact that he had been dead and buried for two years. In September 1660, these brave souls voted to exhume the bodies of Cromwell and his fellow regicides - Ireton and Bradshaw - and on 31 January 1661 they were hanged at Tyburn gallows (near to the present day Marble Arch roundabout at the end of Oxford Street in London). Their bodies were tossed in a pit, while their heads were severed and stuck on a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall where they became a grisly tourist attraction.

Twenty-five years later, the Great Storm of 1703 hits London, snaps the spike and blows it and the Lord Protector's head into the street. Or so legend has it. The head certainly disappears from the roof after the 1680s.

Things get a little vague here. But the head pops up again in 1787 being sold for a hefty £118 by a showman called Samuel Russell. Dr Josiah Wilkinson gets his hands on it in the nineteenth century and in 1960 his family bequeath it to Cromwell's old college, Sidney Sussex. The head is buried and the plaque put up to record it. The exact location is a secret

And in case you think it is just any old head, it does appear to be Cromwell's. It still has part of the spike in its skull for one thing.

What am I doing?

Well, as usual, I am doing several things. . .

I am doing my usual weekly Payne's Grey strip for the New Statesman, which requires not only the time I spend doing the actual published version of the strip every week, but also time for writing the scripts and drawing the characters. What I have not been doing, is getting to my studio at all. My routine has been thrown out by writing projects and my son's Easter holidays.

I am sorting out the final edit on Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. Next week I will go into Bloomsbury's offices in Soho Square and work through any last remaining problems with my editor Helen Szirtes and then have a chat with Adrian Downie about the website.

I am also in the process of sorting out, via my agent Philippa Milnes-Smith, the next couple of Bloomsbury books, what they will be and when they will come out. I have started work on these already and I am very excited about them. More about the specifics at a later date.

I am also working on a couple of historical fiction ideas, one of which I will be writing a couple of chapters for. I don't want to say too much about this at the present time as it might not develop into anything. At the moment I have just written a short synopsis. Until there is a contract all books are hypothetical (and all work therefore unpaid I might add), but if it goes ahead I'll give more details.

I am also working on a top secret job that I cannot talk about at all and I am only mentioning to make myself sound more cool and exciting. It does exist though. The job, that is. Honest. Though it isn't really a job quite yet, it is more of a pitch. And it is top secret. So I will have to ask you to swallow this blog when you've read it.

The stern of the Black Ship

Bloomsbury sent me the cover proofs for both the hardback of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship and the paperback of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, both of which come out in October this year.

This is the back cover of the Black Ship. As usual, the elegant illustration is by David Roberts.