I had a great day at St Andrew’s Primary School in Newport yesterday, where I told stories, answered lots of questions and got lost on the way to Morrisons – only a hundred yards away!

I showed Key Stage 1 how to draw whales and years three and four how to draw the Pizza Man from my Little Horrors’ story – The Swamp Man. The drawing shown here is the scariest Pizza/Swamp Man drawing anyone has ever drawn in one of my school sessions. It just has that element of scariness about it!

St Andrew’s has been a split Juniors and Infants for a hundred years, but this term the two schools have combined to become a Primary School. If there was a lot of paddling going on under the water as the new systems are worked out and put into place, it wasn’t noticeable and everything worked smoothly and serenely – like the proverbial swan.

There are around five hundred children in the school at the moment but, with the building of a new housing estate on the old steel works, they are planning to increase to 750 children very soon! Good luck with that and thanks for a great day.

A special thanks to years 5 and 6 who valiantly put up with my manic Dylan Thomas impersonation while I told them about my book Dragon Gold, reading from the section where Mr Davies the school teacher in the story, tells his class how the Red Dragon of Wales came to be – a story from the Mabinogion that Mr Davies is very fond of!