Mud everywhere and a cold, cold wind. I`m off to spend a weekend near Bennachie which is still marbled with snow so it`ll be interesting to see what the walking`s like.
Finished Michael Morpurgo`s latest book for children, Running Wild. It`s a beautiful story of loss and resilience and relationships built up between man, or in this case a boy called Will, and animals.
Morpurgo is brilliant at pacy, gripping yarns which tackle political and moral issues - in this case the consequences of war and threats to the environment - without for a moment being patronising or didactic or pretending that there are easy answers.
Read the story of how he became a writer*: the "house built of books" and the "music in the words" of the stories he heard as a child and the subsequent "snuffing out" of that love at school, where stories became
"full of difficulty and threat. There was spelling to master, punctuation, handwriting, comprehension, and worst of all, grammar. There were endless tests, I remember, and the penalty for failure - I found myself doing plenty of that - was disapproval from parents and teachers alike, ridicule and humiliation from my fellow students, detentions, red slashes all over my homework, and sometimes even the cane from the headmaster when my marks and my reports were particularly dreadful, as they so often were. That early love of books, that my mother had given me, all but vanished."
Then go and find a child to read a beautiful book to.
*http://www.michaelmorpurgo.com/resource-centre/public/download/f3bcf2348b388582c0bfa5ee0c774a4c/
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