Book Week - To Wales and Beyond!

Sorry for the delay: it's been such a frantic week. I got back from Denbighshire on Tuesday evening, tired but happy after a lovely couple of days. This is my sketch for the train to Wales. The visit was all very well organised, as usual (thanks Bethan), with enthusiastic kids and really supportive librarians. I visited 4 libraries in all, doing 3 storytellings a day, with a minder each day to pick me up from my hotel, escort me between venues and get me fed.

The Denbighshire Festival arranges for school classes to go to their local library for the author events, rather than authors visiting the schools. This is to encourage children to use their library more (sadly, there are families who never take their kids).

I was sharing my hotel in Ruthin with Shoo Rayner (right) and Cliff McNish (below), both great fun and excellent company for the evenings (which can otherwise be rather lonely). We spent the whole time swapping tales about previous visits and trying to better each other's horror stories. Shoo and I both work mainly with primary kids, but Cliff has mostly teenagers, some of whom like to 'test' him ("Your books are rubbish!" for instance). Rather him than me.

Unfortunately I finished on a slight downer: the last school decided 20 minutes before the start that they didn't want to bring the class to the library after all, so we had to dash across town with all our gear. When we arrived, nobody was around to let us in, so we had to run around the outside of the school in the pouring rain, knocking on classroom windows to attract attention. Finally inside, we humped everything, unaided, down corridors and across the playground (still in the rain), to a classroom crammed with 60 fidgety children and several teachers, none of whom had bothered to erect the flip chart while they waited. We wasted yet more time out of the hour struggling with that, trying not to take any kid's heads off.

The children were a little excitable but ok, however the teachers decided to use the session to do their marking, only surfacing to occasionally shout at kids. They even walked in and out of the room, fetching things while I was talking. My minder was livid. I worked late to make up some of the lost time, and we even offered to stay to sign books for the school library, but the teachers were completely uninterested.

Still, that blip apart, it was a very enjoyable visit, in a beautiful part of the country. The train run in is particularly lovely: it hits the sea quite suddenly at Prestatyn and shadows the coast, virtually on the beach, for quite a while. The hills around Ruthin are lovely too: Cliff McNish actually went for a long hike up one after his Monday sessions. I'm ashamed to say, I vegged in front of a DVD!