• National Botanic Garden of Wales. The spectacular roof of the great glasshouse. Probably the best bit of the whole place.
    National Botanic Garden of Wales. The spectacular roof of the great glasshouse. Probably the best bit of the whole place.
    Friday I drove to Haverfordwest in the far reaches of Pembrokeshire, stopping off at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. It was a millennium project. My wife and I visited it the day before Prince Charles officially opened it in 2000. I was hoping it would have softened and developed, but It seemed to have been stuck in a timewarp. Gardens are supposed to grow – but this one hasn’t. I kept telling myself to be positive, but it was quite difficult.

    It doesn’t help that it is in the middle of nowhere, and a long way to go to visit. Its not connected with a university, and so hasn’t got that academic bustle about it and, being a botanic garden, tries not to be a visitor attraction or a pretty garden or place to show off gardening equipment and systems or what you can do with your gardens. I came away confused. Not knowing what it was meant to be. It’s quite nice, but…

    The walled garden was quite nice but it was filled with a jumble of things – bananas to pumpkins via the greenhouse, which was full of orchids and subtropicals. I could only compare it to the wild romance of the walled garden in Castle Kennedy near Stranraer, which I visited on Monday. No contest. Castle Kennedy knew what it was and did it superbly.

    The Haverfordwest Book Fiesta was very well advertised and organised – I feel the Library would have wished for more people to come out than did. We are so comfortable in our living rooms these days, it gets harder and harder to get people out to see something live – even when it’s free! Maybe that’s an element. We get so much for free today that we take things for granted.

    However what we had was a quality audience and I have a great time telling stories. It was great to see Bernard Ashley there too, who had had quite a journey getting there, following a fatality on the line.

    I was also pleased to meet Illustrator, Teresa Jenellen, who had a lovely way with watercolours – very dreamy and ethereal, and storyteller, David Pitt, who goes by the name of the The Crow Man. He was mixing storytelling with mask making. The trouble with doing events like this is that I come away thinking that maybe I should do masks and making things with children too. Never satisfied! I have to keep telling myself that there are only so many things in life that you can do and do well.

    Thanks to everyone in Haverfordwest for a great day.

  • Yummy cakes in the staffroom
    Yummy cakes in the staffroom
    Having been in Scotland last weekend and the beginning of last week I returned home very tired and spent Wednesday recovering, doing family stuff and sorting out the things that had piled up in the meantime ready to go to…

    Blundell’s Preparatory School in Tiverton, Devon on Tursday, where I had a lovely day – made even better by home-made cakes in the staff room! Coffee and walnut have always been a bit of a favourite of mine, since I had a slice in the Copper Kettle tea rooms somewhere near or in Bletchingley, Surrey, in the mid 1960s. I can still taste it when I close my eyes.

    How the cobra came about
    How the cobra came about
    I had a wonderful day, telling stories from the nursery up. I showed years 5 and 6 my haphazard methods of creative organisation. We tried to come up with a story and chose to work on How the Cobra came to be.

    For a long time, I thought we would not get a story, then it all came tumbling out. I find it fascinating how stories appear in these sessions. One minute I’m in despair, the next its flowing out towards a reasonably satisfying conclusion for a pre first draft plot. In this case the cobra, unlike other snakes, had ears for gossip. The more he listened the bigger they got! I won’t tell you the end, because I think there may be a good story in there.

    Children always ask me if I’m going the write the stories we come up with. It’s a tricky one. Who came up with the idea. I’m conscious that I push the children in the direction I want them to go and often have to drag it out of them when I can see the story and want them to provide the important influences on the plot. But sometimes a child will say something so left field that it turns something mundane into something quite good. Even so, it’s generally my interpretation of their comment that gets us to the end of the story, otherwise we would be discussing it for weeks!

    I think I came up with the answer on Thursday, when a child asked the question again. “Its just a framework of a plot at the moment,” I said. “There is no copyright in it until someone publishes the story. So the first one to get it published is the winner.” Everyone seemed happy with that. Of course, if everyone wrote their version of the story, they would all be so different, there probably wouldn’t be a copyright issue anyway. So I’m beginning to feel more comfortable about maybe using the ideas that come up in these sessions.

    Maybe the thing to do is start another blog, where I write up the stories. After a while, it may turn out that some of them would make a collection, and then a book. The act of putting them on my blog would copyright my versions of them, so I could share them as I went along, but it would also protect me and my future publishers, if I were to make a book out of them.

    It’s a tricky subject. How far does copyright extend? I don’t think copyright covers ideas anyway. But at least if I did make a blog of it, those who were involved would be able to follow the stories.

    So many people assume that a story is worth millions and that there is a fortune to be made from the copyright. The truth is that one story can barely support the author for the time it takes them to write it out. Sometimes authors get lucky – but that is such a rare occurrence.

  • I’ve been in Scotland the last few days, at the Wigtown Book Festival in Galloway. Where’s Galloway? That’s what I wondered. It’s in the last remaining corner of Scotland that I’ve never been to before – bottom left, with views across to Ireland from Stranraer, whose Primary School I visited on Monday afternoon.

    I arrived on Saturday, flying to Glasgow and driving down in a hire car. I realised that I didn’t have a map and had put my faith entirely in the SatNav. I stopped in Girvan to check I was doing okay and bought an ice cream from Bob Bordone, a third generation italian ice cream maker.

    He told me that the great big rock out there in the sea was Ailsa Craig, part inspiration for my Craig M’nure stories! I almost felt at home eating my 99 on the beach staring out at the misty monolith.

    Wigtown is quite grand, as it used to be the county town of Wigtownshire. It is now a booktown like Hay-on-Wye. It was a wonderfully friendly set up and I met up with John Fardell and made new friends at a late night supper in the pub.

    Monday Morning I visited St Ninian’s Primary and spoke to about 15 children who make up KS1. We spent sometime coming up with an hilarious story about the tooth monsters who torture you with toothbrushes and drills if your teeth fall out with holes in them. This was one story, we decided, that it was not a cop out to have the hero wake up in the morning and find it was bad dream after all.

    In the afternoon, I visited Castle Kennedy, where I nearly tripped over a Red Squirrel. It waited while I got my camera and posed for me, then it let me take a profile shot before he skittered off into the woods again. They are totally enchanting creatures. The castle benefits from the warm air of the gulf stream, so the walled garden is an impossibly romantic tangle of herbaceous borders, still flowering away in late September.

    Tuesday morning I drove to Carsphairn in the middle of Galloway’s nowhere, and had a lovely time at the school that has only 13 pupils!

    I worked out that I just had time to visit Culzean castle on the way back to the airport. What a wonderfully romantic place, perched up on the rocks staring out at Arran.