Authors Electric

Jan Needle - Baxter Ferret or Boddington Stoat? * Reposted from 9 May 2014 * In memory and appreciation of Jan Needle, 1943--2023 When I was making  plans for a party to celebrate the new edition of Jan Needle's Wild Wood  I began to fantasize about asking all the guests to arrive dressed as the character who most closely resembled their secret self.  The male guests would have had a generous choice: the Big Four from Wind in the Willows -- Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad ( and perhaps Otter for the more elusive spirits) and then Wild Wood 's dour ideologue Boddington Stoat, flamboyant champagne  socialist,   O.B.Weasel, geriatric Harrison Ferret and any number of old sea rats and enthusiastic volunteers. I would be Wild Wood 's Daisy Ferret, the tyrannical illogical mother, always ready to lash out with her ladle at any furry offspring within range while dimpling at O.B.Weasel's waistcoat and raising ...

I went to a charity folk festival last week (as Teresa May might say, I'm not making this up) but not, for once, to play slow Irish airs on my whistle. I donated my "services" as a children's author to help raise funds to save the Barlow Memorial Institute in the Lancashire village of Edgworth from the cuts. It's Cameron's Pig Society, innit? Good fun it was, too - worth every penny that I didn't get. The assembled children were suitably shocked and delighted by the adventures of Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy, and some of their parents were suitably horrified by some of its content, as well as Roy Bentley' s wonderfully gruesome pictures. {Above and below you can see Carl Grose as Waggie in Kneehigh Theatre's lovely version. I'd have done captions, but computer says no, due to my technical incompetence, no doubt.} Anyway, the Edgworth folk festival started with a specially written poem, and - inevitably - I was featured in it as a woman. An...