Heffers

I had a very sad invite yesterday - to attend a farewell party for the staff at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge's Grafton Centre. It closes on 21 May.


I have been particularly involved with the children's section there over the last few years. I have been to so many well-attended events there - both as an author and as a punter. I will be very sad to see it go, and so will many, many other people in this area. It will be missed by children first and foremost; by their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles - and by those of us who write and illustrate for children.


Children's bookshops are one of the areas in book selling where the purchaser often does not quite know what he or she wants. They need a pleasant place to browse, but they also need help and advice from staff who know about children's books and love them. Kate Johnson at Heffers is just such a person and I wish her well with her move to the Trinity Street branch.


A few years ago Cambridge had a dedicated Children's Bookshop in Trinity Street as well as a dedicated Art Bookshop, both under the Heffers banner. It seems terrible that a city like Cambridge cannot support such shops. And now we have lost another.


I met Suzanne Jones, the events organiser for Heffers, for coffee in the Trinity Street branch. Suzanne is another reason Heffers is so important to the cultural life of Cambridge. She is one of the most energetic and enthusiastic people I know and has been hugely supportive of local writers and incredibly encouraging of me personally. People like Suzanne make a difference. A real difference.

More doodling

I popped round to see my friend Anne Cunningham this morning. She was having problem with her blog and asked me for help. I wasn't much use, but it was good to see her. We shared a studio together here in Cambridge for a while and I miss our putting the world to rights conversations.

Anne has a background in textile design and used to rent a studio in the same building as me in Shoreditch many years ago when I was working as an illustrator. She built up and ran her own design agency for years and is now having a lot of success locally with her paintings. You can see them by clicking on the link to her website.

When I got back there was a big box of books from Doodled Books. Doodled Books got in touch with me via this blog. They get authors to doodle in their books and then sell them. It is a step up from signed first editions I suppose and I like the idea. All I have to do now is get myself in a doodling frame of mind and hope I don't ruin the books.

Peter Doig

I went to London today for a meeting and took the opportunity to go and see the Peter Doig exhibition at the Tate - something I've been meaning to do for a while. It seemed wrong to be inside on such a sunny say, but it was worth it - the show was fantastic. I came away itching to paint (if only I had the time).

Peter Doig's work is an advert for the continuing validity of painting. And not only is it a big 'Yes!' for painting, it is a big 'Yes!' to the image in painting. Peter Doig paintings are very much about paint and the quality of the painted surface, but he actually paints recognisable things. He works from photographs a lot, but not in a photorealistic way.

Doig is fascinated by reflections. I remember a trendy art teacher coming to my school and getting us to draw a pile of boxes - but not the boxes themselves, she insisted: the spaces between the boxes. We all thought she was mad, but I suspect Doig would have got what she was on about straight away. He often paints the spaces between things and leaves the things themselves as vague ghosts. There's a real poetry in this.

So much of what is important in life, good and bad, happens in those spaces between things.

Fear and loathing in Cambridge

Cambridge was basking in sunshine today: wisteria blossom dripping from Sidney Sussex railings, cow parsley, marsh marigolds and lady's smock in Sheep's Green, birds twittering in the willows. And yet my mood was anything but bright today.


Bouts of self-loathing, existential angst and general fury with the venality of the world are no doubt vital parts of any artist's make up, but writing requires a calmer spirit than I have at the moment. If I was writing an angry, existentialist novel of self-loathing, then it might help, but I'm actually writing the follow-up to the as-yet-unpublished Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.


The new book is another set of chilling stories with another story linking them all together and will hopefully sit nicely with the previous two. Do I mean nicely? Horribly: crouch horribly as if ready to pounce.

Coveting

My son and I cycled over to the American military cemetery today, on a beautiful sunny day, stopping off in the village of Coton to look round the church. On one wall there was a board with the Ten Commandments written in lovely wonky old script. The one that particularly caught my eye was the instruction not to covet thy neighbour's house.


I am SO guilty of that. I covet houses all the time as I am cycling around. And I'm not sure my coveting stops at houses. I spend far too much time coveting I have realised. It's definitely not good for the soul.

I shalt try not to covet so much.

I used to work at the Economist. . .

But I'm alright now.

I went to a black tie dinner tonight as a guest of a very clever friend of mine called Mardi Dungey, standing in (if such a thing were possible) for her husband Ross. Dr Dungey is an economist. The dinner was at the Judge School of Business Studies, which is a zany redevelopment of a hospital, with a massive atrium and lots of colour like the inside of an Egyptian temple - the inside of a Playmobile Egyptian temple.

Mardi introduced me to everyone by saying I was a children's author, but then followed it up with, 'and he used to work as a cartoonist for the Economist'. Now this indeed true: I worked at the Economist for six years between 1990 and 1996 (when it was still in black and white and George Bush's dad was in the White House). My good friend Dave Simonds still works there - as well as doing the political cartoon in the New Statesman. But I never - ever - thought working at the Economist would win me any kudos. I guess I haven't been to enough dinners with economists. Or then again. . .

The food was great and we had a laugh. Mardi was great company and we're going to miss her and Ross when she goes back to Tasmania. She keeps threatening to try and find me a writer in residence deal down there. I hope she does. I like the sound of Tasmania.

Proofs

The proofs of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship arrived today. They are the end result of a lot of searching questions and detailed inspection of my work by my editor, Helen Szirtes.

I always dread the arrival of proofs. They are exciting in as much as they give you the first glimpse of what the book will look like, but they are scary because they also represent the last possible chance to get things right before publication. Anything that slips through now will have to wait until the paperback to be corrected.

So I will attempt to read them through, without getting lost in the content and trying to check the structure is correct. The best way I know of doing this is to read the stories aloud. There is something about the act of reading aloud that shows up any errors in a flash. When you silently read, your mind (or maybe it is just the author's mind) corrects mistakes as you go. But reading aloud is different. You can not make yourself say something that is clearly wrong on the page.

Reading aloud is an important part of writing I think. A sentence can look nice on the page, but I want it to sound nice in the readers head. Saying the words is the only way I know of ensuring this. And anyway, books for children are often read aloud and should sound right.