There's only one Ardizzone

The last day of half term and I got a call from Chris Riddell. He rang me on Friday to say he would ring me on Saturday and then forgot. We don't speak that often but when we do we have a lot to catch up on and so Chris was booking himself in.

It turns out he and Paul are going to the Lake District about the same time as us. 'The Lake District' is such a prosaic name isn't it? They don't call East Anglia 'The Flat District' do they? Anyway the prospect of meeting Chris on a fell-top is an amusing one. Paul knows the Lakes quite well I think, but I'm not sure that Chris has ever been. Maybe we can all meet up if we do happen to be there at the same time.

I have been going to the Lakes for years and to one particular corner - the area around Ullswater and Brotherswater especially. It has been great introducing my son to the simple joy of staggering up a steep slope and the euphoria of reaching a summit and eating your lunch among ravens and buzzards with no sound but the roar of the wind in your ears, the bleat of lambs or the occasional Tornado fighter jet. Despite - or maybe because of - my vertigo, I feel intensely alive up on those fells.

Oddly, considering we are both illustrators, Chris and I had quite a long chat about the problems of illustrating and the issue of illustrations getting in the way. I think that any book can be illustrated and in a way that compliments the text. But of course, in children's books, the illustrations are often doubling up on what is written because they are often unnecessary descriptive.

This is OK for younger fiction, where illustrations can help the reader, but in older fiction overly pedantic illustrations can simply kill the story. What is the point of the author straining him or herself to come up with a fantastic description for the villain's sinister appearance, if the illustrator is going to simply draw the villain on the opposite page? And this dilemma seems all the more striking when you are in the position of being both author and illustrator.

It is a constant struggle between what good illustrations can add to a book (which is a lot) and what bad or indifferent ones can take away. Edward Ardizzone was a master of not giving too much away and adding atmosphere to a book. Sadly there are no Ardizzones working in children's books at the moment and I have a feeling that if there were, someone would be giving him art direction along the lines of 'Can we not see a bit more of the boy's face?'


I spent a large part of the day sitting with my son as he did his homework - a writing project based on Mal Peet's The Penalty. I tend to help with English and History (and Science) while my wife handles Maths and French. Though I'm not sure how much help I was, not having read the book. I've not read any Mal Peet come to think of it. I haven't met him either. Chris assures me he is a very nice chap.

I did have horrible memories though of having my love of books and of reading ruined by what we called English Literature. That feeling of having to read something knowing that you will be asked questions later. That horror of being asked to read something out loud in class - particularly if there was dialogue and strange accents.

Schools now don't seem to make the big distinction between creative writing (what we called English Language) and this study of books, and that has to be a good thing. The focus seems to be on analysing what a writer is doing, thereby hopefully improving both the students own creative writing and their ability to look at something critically and order their thoughts. It is a constant danger, though, that what began as a pleasure, a form of entertainment and something done willingly and eagerly, can be turned into a chore.

The stream mysterious glides beneath

We spent a lovely day today punting down the Cam to Grantchester and back, with Anne Cunningham for company, me on the pole, my son on the paddle (for emergencies) and the womenfolk providing the conversation. In passing, we saw reed buntings, robins, mallards, moorhens, damselflies and naked male buttocks

There is something magical about the river. Even on a busy day like today, there are moments when there seems no one about at all and there is no sound but the rippling of the water and the twitter of birds. Everything was so green: the water surface reflecting the overarching trees, and the drifting river weed beneath. Rupert Brooke describes it thus in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester:

Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.

Death didn't seem much in evidence to us, though there is always something melancholy about a river somehow. And I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way. There is just something about the pace of a river that lends itself to quiet contemplation.

We picnicked at the foot of the hill by Grantchester village in the shade of a willow tree, while a succession of punts, kayaks, canoes and the odd swan, floated by in the bright sunshine. It was idyllic actually.

Beowulf

The BBC poetry season continued with Michael Wood singing the praises of Beowulf. I love Michael Wood. I do. His BBC TV programme - In Search Of the Dark Ages - from many years ago, was one of those programmes (like Civilisation and The Shock of the New and The World At War) that expanded my knowledge and showed that television can educate and inspire - be a kind of open university.

And he seems like such a genuinely nice guy.

The BBC still produces work of that quality - the wonderful series with Dr Alice Roberts - The Incredible Human Journey for instance; but for how much longer?

Anyway - I had a tape of Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf in the car when I was writing a book for Scholastic about the Battle of Hastings. It is wonderful. It came to mind a lot when we made our recent visit to the Sutton Hoo burial (that's my son wearing a copy of the famous helmet).

History is so last year

There was a depressing piece in the Guardian saying that there has been a huge drop-off in the numbers of students taking History at A Level here in the UK. Children are so predisposed to be fascinated by history and the UK is such a rich place historically, that if you can't keep them interested in the subject then something is going badly wrong isn't it?

Boys in particular seem hot-wired to be spellbound by the ancient world in particular. I find it upsetting as a sometime writer of historical fiction - that we are losing children's interest in what seems to me to be an endlessly fascinating subject as they get older.

Any man's death dimishes me

There was a Simon Schama programme about John Donne tonight in the BBCs poetry season. It made me want to rush out and by a book of his poetry. I already have one, but sadly it is in storage with most of my other books. It is really beginning to annoy me.

I am not a fan of Simon Schama - I find his presentation style too off-putting. If it was just the weird vocal delivery, that would be one thing but there's also the squirming about. Fiona Shaw read the poems. I don't know why. Perhaps Schama didn't feel up to the job. But they are a man's poems, surely and very male. It was worth watching anyway just to be reacquainted with these words:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Any man's death diminishes me. There few political leaders I can think of who wouldn't benefit from reading those words on a daily basis.

Read the book

As well as seeing Sickert In Venice yesterday, we also went to see Coraline (in 3D). I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had seen the trailer and was a bit concerned that it looked a bit too conventional for such a weird story. My opinion was pretty much the same after seeing the movie.

Not that we didn't enjoy it or it wasn't well done and didn't have some great things about it. It just wasn't creepy enough. It wasn't weird enough.

Anyway it gives me another opportunity to send anyone who reads this back to Neil Gaiman's book, which is a much more sinister creature. Go and see the movie if you haven't already.

It's fun.

But don't miss out on reading the book.

Sickert in Venice

We travelled up to London today to see the Sickert in Venice exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I had taken the trouble to ensure there was no engineering work on the line between Cambridge and King's Cross, but foolishly had not checked the train from London Bridge to North Dulwich, which did not exist because - as we discovered on the fairground ride of a bus journey we took instead - a bridge was being replaced.

The Sickert exhibition was small but had some lovely pictures in it. There were two facades of San Marco that were especially good and a couple of nighttime paintings. It was especially nice to see paintings of places we had so recently visited. It was very inspiring too. How ever many times I think that my painting days are behind me, a show like this reminds me of how much I love painting.

I thought it was very odd for the bookshop to be selling crime-writer Patricia Cornwell's book in which she details her crackpot claim that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Cornwell destroyed one of his paintings in the service of this delusion.

She should get no encouragement from a gallery surely.