Hay Festival with Peter Bently, Micheal Morpurgo & Korky Paul: How Much Better Does it Get?

Peter and I were on stage at 10am - nice to get it done early. I got to meet his lovely family too (hello there!). Egmont had printed us some Lark in the Ark T-shirts to wear - what do you think?

There are even llamas in pyjamas on the back (these are in my garden - I forgot to take any photos on the day - duh!):

In keeping with the rain theme, we also had umbrellas and wore wellies. The projection worked really well. Peter read the story, choosing children to open the flaps, then I drew some of the animals for them to guess (I threw in the odd one that wasn't in the book too, to trick them, like kippers in flippers and giraffes in scarfs).

Then the kids drew their own animals in silly outfits. We got them to call out suggestions before they started. One boy said 'an elephant with underpants on his head', so almost every drawing included underpants somewhere!

We finished with a song: changing the words of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, to 'Old Man Noah had an ark'. The kids enjoyed trying to work out what noises llamas, pandas etc made.

After Peter and I had done a bit of book signing, I sat in on a similar storytelling session by the wonderful illustrator Korky Paul. I'm always curious to see what other people do. He had the great idea of drawing portraits of the children, but as dinosaurs. He also used a splash of watercolour on the flip chart, which worked surprisingly well.

He read them The Fish Who Could Wish and got them designing fish. I scrawmed around on the floor with them, trying to capture what I could:


Before heading home, I was given some lunch tokens and, amazingly, ended up eating with none other than Micheal Morpurgo, a previous Children's Laureate. He was really lovely and chatted to me easily, as though I was his equal (as if!), then headed off to do his talk, to 800 people, while I headed back to the station.


I spent a good part of the journey chatting and drawing with this lad and his mum (hello Adam! - your email address didn't work by the way) and time flew by.