Library Lion

Appropriately enough, we borrowed this book from the library recently, and liked it so much that we bought our own copy.

Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen with illustrations by Kevin Hawkes, is a simple tale about a lion who goes into a library. I love the way that sort of thing can happen in a book, and no one wastes time asking where the lion came from, or why he's gone into a library. He's just there. He sniffs the card index; he rubs his head against the new book collection; he goes to sleep on the bean-bags in the story corner.

No one knows what to do because there are no rules about lions in the library. There is a theme running through the book about rules, and whether one should break them or not. As it happens, the lion hasn't broken any rules, so there is no reason to ask him to leave. And so he stays. He stays for the whole of story time, but when it's over, he becomes upset and roars in frustration. A new rule is created: "No roaring in the library." But the librarian, the charmingly named Miss Merriweather, states that a quiet lion would be welcome to come back the next day.

The lion becomes quite a fixture, and Miss Merriweather comes to rely on his help, though her assistant Mr McBee is very resentful. Eventually, of course, there is a crisis, and the lion is forced to break the rule...

I won't be spoiling much (it is a children's picture book after all) if I let you know that it all ends happily. It appeals on many levels, not least because in a past life I worked as a librarian for several years, and there were many days when I would have dearly loved a lion like this to keep me company! There is something rather wonderful about the character of Miss Merriweather and her gentle insistence on the importance of rules, and her equally gentle admission that occasionally there is good reason to break them. The illustrations are beautiful, and the characters are portrayed with subtlety.

My 5 year old loves it, with its combination of the unexpected (a lion in the library! "Don't lions eat people?" she asked) with more recognisable details ("No running!"). We will be reading this one a lot, I think.

Pumpkin

Today I had to throw away last week's pumpkin, so this is in its honour. I'm not a fan of the modern Halloween traditions in general - I've always hated horror films, don't see any pleasure in dressing up as any kind of weird or violent creature, and feel rather threatened by the "trick" part of trick or treating - but I have to admit there's something rather wonderful about the glow of a pumpkin.

As a child I remember one year when my mother either left it too late to buy a decent pumpkin, or was trying to economise, and we ended up trying to carve turnips instead. They were very hard, and smelled terrible when the candle caught the turnip flesh on the inside. Naturally I was anxious to avoid repeating this experience, so when my 5 year-old came home from school full of excitement about the idea of a Halloween pumpkin (she's never expressed an interest before), I bought one several days early in order to make sure we had a lovely plump looking specimen. Poppet drew the face and I carved it.

  

Like many modern celebrations, the "new traditions" have obscured the old. My googling tells me that Halloween probably has its origins in the Celtic festival Samhain. Then during the Roman occupation of Britain they attempted to replace Samhain with two of their own festivals: Pomona, celebrating the harvest (the symbol of the goddess Pomona was an apple, so perhaps this is a tenuous link to the tradition of apple-bobbing?), and Feralia, a celebration of the dead. By the 800s, Christianity had taken hold and 1 November was designated as All Hallows Day, probably in an attempt to create a church-sanctioned way of celebrating the dead. 31 October then began to be referred to as All Hallows Eve, which eventually led to its current name.

There seems little consensus about exactly when or why people began carving pumpkin lanterns; google throws up a number of possible stories, most commonly the Jack o'Lantern v. the devil story, and I was amused to find that the original lanterns probably were in fact made of turnips, until Irish immigrants to America discovered pumpkins, which are much easier to carve. It seems an innocent enough pleasure - it's a chance to light a candle, really, and that's always a hit in our household!

Next year Poppet wants to dress up and go trick or treating; this gives me nearly 12 months to work out what I'm going to do about it, and canvass neighbours with older children. What's your take on it?

Barefoot Books, Oxford

When Barefoot Books opened its north Oxford branch a couple of years ago, there was a ripple of interest around the parental circles – a genuinely baby friendly café/bookshop is a real find – and it soon became popular with the buggy-pushing trendy mothers in the area. Since I aspire to be trendy, and have a bit of a thing about books (and cake), I thought I’d feel at home there.

The ground floor is designed in three sections which flow front to back: first a bookshop, then a café, with plenty of high chairs, space for pushchairs, and a low table supplied with paper and crayons for toddlers to test their new teeth on, and beyond that there is a story “tent” – a carpeted area with benches around the walls and heaps of cushions, a throne for the story-teller, and drapes hanging from the ceiling to look like a colourful nomadic tent. Outside the front doors is a small area with more café style tables, which has recently been fenced off from the pavement, to prevent free-range children escaping.

It’s colourful, bordering on garish, it’s welcoming, and the books are an interesting mixture of modern and traditional stories from all around the world. Barefoot Books has an impressive reputation so far, and an ethos it would be hard to argue with. The founders say they want to give children nourishing “soul food” in the form of art and story. It's a way of life for Nancy Traversy, Owner, co-founder and CEO of BB) who says:

Living Barefoot for me is creating beautiful, magical and authentic stories and art and bringing these to a grassroots, global community of people who care about how our next generation of children is raised.   

So far, so good. But I have to confess I don’t like the Oxford studio (as they call it) as wholeheartedly as I want to. More bluntly, if it weren't for the baby-friendly nature of the place, I wouldn't go again. My main bugbear is the enormous TV screen on the wall of the café area, which is permanently on, showing the DVDs that tie in with many of Barefoot Books’ titles. At best it’s distracting, at worst downright intrusive. The words scroll along the bottom of the screen with a little bouncy ball to tell you which one to sing along with, karaoke style. I accept that DVDs are a significant part of their marketing strategy for their books (this makes me uneasy in itself, but that's another matter), but if I’ve gone to a bookshop/café, the chances are I haven’t gone there in order to watch TV. It makes me feel really cross just being near the bloody thing. When it's really busy, they turn the volume down slightly, but today, with the café surprisingly quiet, it was loud enough to make conversation difficult, and no-one was watching it at all. They even left it playing while a shop assistant led a story session in the tent area just beyond the café. She did her best, but it was difficult to concentrate on her with tinny singing coming from the TV the whole time.

I've also been disappointed by the café itself. It is styled in keeping with the rest - bright colourful crockery and a family friendly space, but having been there three times, I’ve had bad food twice: first, in the very expensive fresh fruit platter, a pear so unripe as to be crunchy and inedible; and more recently, carrot cake that was both stale and strangely bitter. The café is a big selling point here, so why these basic errors? It’s pricey too, even by north Oxford standards (and that's saying something). Oh, and did I mention there’s a whacking great TV on the wall? Maybe it’s to distract you from your food…

That said, they do run an impressive-looking series of events, both in the story-telling area downstairs, and a larger studio area upstairs, and they have definitely fulfilled a need in providing such a child-friendly place for parents to hang out, especially now the fabulous Summertown Wine Café has sadly closed down (sob!). Doubtless I will go there again, despite these bugbears, but maybe next time I'll smuggle in my own food, and pluck up the courage to ask them to turn off the screen.

A Necklace of Raindrops (2)

Many of you will have enjoyed the works of Joan Aiken in your youth, and perhaps saw my earlier blog post about her story A Necklace of Raindrops. That blog was seen by a Twitter friend of mine, the lovely Kate, who blogged about it in her turn, and then did something even more wonderful. She took the idea of the raindrops, found some glass teardrop beads that were just perfect, and commissioned me to make a new version:

Now I've found a supplier who can get me more of these beautiful beads, so I can create more of this lovely design. I've also made some matching earrings. What do you think?

Tonight, I think I shall read A Necklace of Raindrops to my Poppet again, who at five years old is ready to be utterly bewitched by such magic. I imagine she'll want a necklace of her own after that!

Do you have a favourite children's story? Has it ever inspired you to create something as an adult?

Cumbria (for National Poetry Day)

It's National Poetry Day today, so here's one I wrote earlier...

Cumbria

Cumbria travels with me,
a two-inch ragged oval on the atlas
penned in by the blue motorway.

Larger scale, I can contour the kitchen wall,

Exploring hidden valleys with coffee in my hand.

Each mountain conjures a postcard:
Fairfield - where sudden snow lit up the air;
Wetherlam - where muddy sheep stole sandwiches;
Coniston - where a thunder-storm tore the sky and day apart;
Mardale Head - where we climbed
    away from cars and cares
    and lay map-flat on the grass
    listening to the skylarks
    and heather humming bees
just off the pink dotted Right of Way.

Fiona Lewis

You can find out more about National Poetry Day 2012 from the official website, and from the Poetry Society, who also have an events page.

Perspective

Yesterday morning I heard BabyGirl saying "Climb. High." This is a child who is fearless, and at 20 months is regularly found balancing ("look no hands!") at the top of the slide, or on the kitchen table, or on the back of the sofa, so a part of me was suddenly very afraid. I abandoned all hope of a nice long shower, turned off the water and hurriedly grabbed a towel...

This is where she was:

She continued to climb on and off the book for several minutes, before inviting me to do it too, and holding my hand to keep me steady. I wonder what we'll climb next!

Communication without words

Kidnapped, and Penguin

We tend to rely on the written word for a great deal of our modern day communications. But is this as wonderful as we think? Certainly language has its limitations, and is notoriously open to mis-interpretation. Great writers over the centuries have illustrated its power to persuade, confuse, incite and threaten as well as to teach, inspire, inform and entertain. Local and personal idioms render writing less simple than it might at first appear, and we often hear nowadays of the difficulty of reading expression in emails, text and tweets. There are still many cultures around the world that remain entirely oral, whether through their own determination not to write anything down, or because the way they live their lives means they have no need of it – a small tribe, who see each other all the time, and remember their history, might see little need for writing. The Druids, who lived in Iron Age Britain, Ireland and Gaul, are said to have avoided writing down their knowedge in part because they felt such knowledge was powerful and of great importance and should only be passed down to their own, and not spread about the place in the way a written text might be.

What I’m really interested in is the variety of other ways of communicating, from the Victorian language of flowers to much more complex systems. One of my favourites from literature is the wonderful example from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Set not so very long ago, really, and on our own shores, the scene involves David Balfour and Alan Breck hiding out in the woods, and needing money. Alan decides to send a message to his friend John Breck Maccoll, asking for help. He does this by making a cross out of a sprig of pine and a sprig of birch, tied together with a strip of cloth from his coat, and adding a button which once belonged to his father. David, puzzled by this, asks Alan what he thinks his friend will make of finding such a strange thing on his windowsill.

"Well," says Alan, "I wish he was a man of more penetration, for by my troth I am afraid he will make little enough of it! But this is what I have in my mind. This cross is something in the nature of the crosstarrie, or fiery cross, which is the signal of gathering in our clans; yet he will know well enough the clan is not to rise, for there it is standing in his window, and no word with it. So he will say to himsel',The clan is not to rise, but there is something. Then he will see my button, and that was Duncan Stewart's. And then he will say to himsel', The son of Duncan is in the heather, and has need of me."

"Well," said I, "it may be. But even supposing so, there is a good deal of heather between here and the Forth."

"And that is a very true word," says Alan. "But then John Breck will see the sprig of birch and the sprig of pine; and he will say to himsel' (if he is a man of any penetration at all, which I misdoubt), Alan will be lying in a wood which is both of pines and birches. Then he will think to himsel', that is no so very rife hereabout; and then he will come and give us a look up in Corrynakiegh. And if he does not, David, the devil may fly away with him, for what I care; for he will no be worth the salt to his porridge."

"Eh, man," said I, drolling with him a little, "you're very ingenious! But would it not be simpler for you to write him a few words in black and white?"

"And that is an excellent observe, Mr. Balfour of Shaws," says Alan, drolling with me; "and it would certainly be much simpler for me to write to him, but it would be a sore job for John Breck to read it. He would have to go to the school for two-three years; and it's possible we might be wearied waiting on him."

Alan’s hope that John would interpret his twig cross in this manner (which he does, turning up a couple of days later to offer the help they need), is evidence that within his clan this kind of language of symbols was well understood, and a powerful means of communication; David’s incomprehension also demonstrates the usefulness of such symbolic language for keeping secrets - had a Redcoat found it, they would probably have realised that it was a message of some kind, but they would not have been able to interpret it.

And if you haven’t yet read Penguin by Polly Dunbar, please do – it’s a wonderful picture book about a boy who becomes increasingly frustrated by his new friend Penguin’s inability (or refusal!) to talk or communicate with him in any way.

At last, after the (disconcertingly blue) lion eats Ben for being so noisy (a subtle warning to all those of us who talk too much?), the penguin rescues him, and finally tells him what he's thinking:

 

 Who needs words when you can say all that?