A nose by any other name... By Jan Needle
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...