Richard Platt's Blog

Schools on the Cote d’Azur

I know, I know….it sounds like an author’s dream gig. I’m spending a week in the south of France, talking to groups of school kids, all expenses paid. However, I am not a good traveller, and spend days fretting that something will go wrong. Nor indeed am I a relaxed and confident speaker, so addressing four groups of 80  or so kids in the course of a day leaves me wrung out like a limp dish-rag. 

The canteen at Monaco International School has a view to die for

 On the whole, though, it’s been fine so far. I am in the capable hands of Bookbox, a small UK company that organises book fairs and author visits mostly in France and Spain. We were in Monaco yesterday, at the International School there.

The kids were great: really enthusiastic and engaged. The staff were fantastic, too, especially librarian Barbara who patiently and efficiently made sure that everything ran smoothly.

It was all very ordinary, and hardly different from many British schools… until the end of the school day. Then the parents who came to pick up their kids were fantastically well dressed! Certainly none were in their jim-jams, as a few parents at UK schools apparently are at the school gates. No, most of the mums were immaculate, and looked like they had stepped straight from the pages of Italian Vogue. I was surprised to note that really good clothes don’t have visible designer logos – unlike the “designer” clothes you buy on the high street, which have the label printed a foot high on the front.

On tomorrow to Moulin School, Cannes.

Hastings update

Another long gap…! We moved again, to the VERY old, very small house mentioned in the previous post. The books had to go, or at least most of them. My new office is tiny…

… and I have space for only a couple of hundred books in here.

What did I do with the rest? That’s rather a sad tale.

I had thought that I would be able to sell them, but this didn’t work out quite as planned. I had bar-coded all the books with stickers, like library books. Obsessive? Moi? Well, actually there was a sensible reason. As I packed them into boxes at our old house, I scanned the labels and recorded which books were in each of the 100-or-so numbered mover’s crates. The idea was that I would keep the crates in the attic, yet be able to instantly identify which box contained the book I wanted.

The fragility of our little house prevented this – and the bar-codes prevented me from selling the books. Shops I approached were interested … until I mentioned the stickers. Then they said “No.”

Even book charities refused them as a gift, and the low-point came when it looked like I would have to hire a couple of skips and send them to landfill – at considerable expense. But eventually I found a charity that accepted the whole lot.

There is a happy ending to this story. Without my own library, I now spend more time in the London library, which has much newer books, and far more of them. So the research I do now is more thorough and up-to-date!

Moving to Hastings

In this annual race commemorating a popular Hastings fisherman, competitors ride a delivery bike up steep Crown Lane. A ten-bob note on the saddle makes sure that they cannot stand on the pedals!

Massive gap since my last post: we have been frantically busy selling our house and moving to the seaside town of Hastings, East Sussex. We finally made it, about three weeks ago, arriving in the middle of Old Town Week (see picture at right.)

Old Town Week is a frantic celebration of all things Hastings, with races, parades, concerts, comedy, music, and countless other events, all in aid of charity. It was a wonderful introduction to our new home town.

We are in a temporary house up the hill from the Old Town, and I am writing in a spare bedroom. It’s a lovely, light room, but doesn’t compare with the brilliant study I used to work in up the garden at our previous house:

Almost all of the books are in storage now,  and I am facing a dreadful writer’s dilemma. We are trying to buy a small, 15th-century, timber-framed house in Hastings Old Town. I knew I would not be able to have all my books out on shelves, but I had planned to store at least half of them in the loft. There are a lot. 84 boxes, in fact, and they weigh nearly three tonnes.

We had a survey this week and when I asked the surveor about my plans for the books, he scratched his head and looked worried. “You might need to add some new timbers if you do that…” he said, “…the death-watch beetle has chewed away so much of the house that the weight of your books might well bring the ceiling down.”

Haven’t yet decided quite what to do, but I make end up having a very big book sale!

Eureka! The perils of technology

Eureka is right next to Halifax train station

Mary and I went up to Halifax this weekend to do a kid’s event at Eureka!, the national children’s museum. We were promoting our book Don’t Flush: Lifting the Lid on the Science of Poo and Wee which is shortlisted for the Royal Society Young People’s Book Award. The Royal Society had set up the gig – we are doing another one in Cardiff in the new year.

Eureka! is just brilliant: if you have not seen it, and you are under 11 years old, pester your parents to take you NOW! It’s just packed with fantastic, crazy exhibits that will keep you busy all day.

I got chewed up by giant teeth…

Our event worked fine: the audience laughed at all the right places, and thankfully didn’t groan at the terrible jokes. The staff at the museum took really good care of us – thank you Jenny, Sophie and Aisha.

However… setting up the event was an IT nightmare.

I was using a slide-show built on my Mac in Keynote, Apple’s looky-likey Powerpoint equivalent. Since PPT shows are usually a synonym for boredom, I had stuffed my show full of animations and sound. I planned to show it from an iPod, but since I have weary experience of technological hiccups, I also had a Plan B. I took a second copy on a Mac laptop. And a Plan C: I exported the presentation to Powerpoint format on a USB thumb-drive, and checked that everything worked on a neighbour’s Windows machine. Paranoid? Moi?

So, when we went in to the museum late on Friday afternoon to check that everything would work, I was quietly confident. Cocky, even. What could possibly go wrong?

… and Mary went searching for treasure in a huge nose

We plugged everything together, and the pictures showed up immediately. “That was easy!” said Jenny when the first slide popped onto the screen. But alas, there was no sound. We checked all the cables: nothing was obviously wrong.

Macs are no longer the strange incompatible beasts they once were, but – as anybody who uses one for presentations will know – when something doesn’t work, your hosts always assume that it’s your Mac that’s causing the problem, not their data projector or sound system. So I said “Don’t worry, I have a belt and braces.” I unpacked my MacBook and its rat’s nest of cables, switched on, and plugged in. Still no sound.

Now I was beginning to get a little uneasy. We pulled out all the cables, and discovered that there was a problem with the sound system. “It was all working on Monday” said Jenny plaintively, and trudged off to find a stand-alone PA.

Half an hour later, we tried again, but neither my iPad nor the laptop had any sound. So I played my trump card “Shezam!” I cried smugly “…I have the talk on a thumb drive that I have TESTED on a Windows machine!” Jenny got one of the museum’s laptops, and fired it up. I plugged in my thumb drive and got … an error message. I had used Powerpoint 2008, and the museum’s version was older. It wouldn’t play.

An infrared camera showed which parts of us were hottest

I broke out into a cold sweat. Our talk has an explosion in it. It simply wouldn’t be the same without an ear-shattering “BOOM!”

In the end, we got the problem sorted, by cannibalising one of the museum exhibits and borrowing its sound connector. But I had learned a valuable lesson. Taking a backup, and a backup of the backup isn’t paranoia: it’s a sensible precaution. And next time, I’ll take my own audio cables.

Night: much more than just darkness

I am enjoying Roger Ekirch’s fascinating book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. He describes the night as “the forgotten half of history”, and sets out to demolish the idea that night is simply a negative – the flip-side of day, when everything happens.

It’s a thick book – 450 pages – but Ekirch’s scholarship and encyclopaedic research more than justify the length. He covers every aspect of night, from the dangers of being stabbed by crowds of drunken “gallants” (upper-class rowdies) in 17th century London to the problems faced by escaping slaves in colonial America.

A running theme in the book is that conventions were relaxed, and the rigid structures of society loosened, as soon as night fell. Before the invention of gas and electric lighting, masters could not see what their apprentices were up to, nor wives their husbands. Freedom descended on cities and villages alike, and those who were used and abused by day could take their revenge without the risk of discovery.

There are some surprising insights: Ekirch reminds us that in times of persecution, religious groups held meetings at night to escape detection. He gives the example of the Adamites, who were active in England in the mid-17th century. They eccentrically evoked the innocence of the Biblical Garden of Eden by worshipping without clothes.

I originally bought At Day’s Close because I needed some information about fear of the dark for a book I am writing for Collins, but it has proved to be far more entertaining than I ever thought possible.

The Royal Society …again!

Poo piles like these were the starting point for making gunpowder.

Hot on the heels of the School Library Association’s Information Book Award (see previous post) comes the news that Don’t Flush is on another shortlist, this time for the  Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize. I was up for this one last year, with Pox, Plague and Pestilence, but didn’t win. Hopefully Mary and I will have better luck with our new title about all the really useful things you can do with wee and poo (see left.) The judges who chose the shortlist described the book as “A light-hearted but informative look at the science behind the use of poo and wee throughout history to build houses, wash and dye our clothes, fertilize crops, treat illnesses, solve crimes, control pollution and create fuel, energy and explosives. A perfectly disgusting book: Kids will love it!”

We have also been invited to the Society’s prestigious annual summer soirée, which is attended by a glittering flock of Nobel prize winners and other eminent scientists. I shall have to borrow my brother-in-law’s dinner jacket again! The invitation says that decorations should be worn. This is going to be more of a problem. The best I can do is my Blue Peter badge, and the one I got from the Blood Donors when I broke the 25-litre barrier.

Poo book shortlisted

The book I wrote with my wife Mary about the many uses for human and animal waste has been shortlisted for the School Library Association’s Information Book Award.

Don’t Flush: Lifting the Lid on the Science of Poo and Wee has a jokey title, but the contents are deadly serious. Each day we flush away and forget material that was once regarded as a valuable commodity. You can use sewage to soften leather, fertilise fields, grow mushrooms, and even to make gunpowder. Scientists use ancient turds to determine our ancestors’ lifestyles, and to find out what dinosaurs ate.

The annual Information Book Award is in its third year. It’s a major development for information books, and was designed to support school libraries, to reinforce the importance of non-fiction and to highlight the high standard of resources available. During the summer, children will choose a favourite book in their age category, and pick a final winner.

Learning to read, the hard way

I am working on a book about English medieval history, and I have just discovered the most astonishing fact (well, I think it’s astonishing.) When the children of wealthy families learned to read in the Middle Ages, they first learned the alphabet. No, that’s not surprising – the astonishing bit is what followed. Their next stage in literacy was the jump from recognizing and naming individual letters to combining them into sylables. Kids did this with the aid of a prayer book, and guess what? It was written in Latin. Only when they were profficient in Pater Noster did they progress to a language they could speak and understand.

Please don’t pass this on to Michael Gove. He might think it was a good idea, and incorporate it into his Guidelines for the Primary Classroom.

This amazing information came from Nicholas Orme’s wonderful book Medieval Children, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

A clear-out for Readathon

Hoping to sell our house soon and move to Hastings, so we are in a frenzy of tidying, decorating and cleaning. As part of this blitz, I had to confront a huge pile of books in the attic. On publication, authors receive “voucher copies” — typically six free copies of their book. We usually end up giving these away, and keep only a couple. However, when books are reprinted, the publisher sometimes sends a copy or two more. Occasionally I have received a dozen extra copies when, through a mix-up at the publishers, two people send me voucher copies.

Anyway, these books accumulate, and I had more than eight plastic crates full of books. I didn’t want to shift then from one loft to another, so I looked around for a worthwhile home for them.

I found one in Read for Good. This wonderful literacy charity distributes books to sick children in hospital, and sponsors visits by storytellers. They also supply books to schools in deprived areas whose pupils have no little or no access to books at home. Teaching staff in these schools work exceptionally hard to encourage their pupils to read, often without any significant budget to buy new books.

Read for Good sent a van and collected nearly 100 kg of my books, and I had a sweet thank-you from coordinator Debbie Young:

“They are beautiful books and will be greatly appreciated by children in hospital, who, because they’re so poorly, don’t have the concentration span to get stuck into a novel. Also it’s lovely that so many of them are on educational subjects. Missing school time can be a real issue for children who are being treated for very serious illness, and these books will help keep them in the loop. We especially love the “diary” series which is such a lovely way of learning about history in a very palatable way.”

A truly brilliant school!

I feebly excused my lateness on the grounds that I had struggled to get all my presentation material into our small car.

This week I gave a couple of talks to the upper and lower schools at Long Ditton St Mary’s Junior School. What a wonderful experience! All the kids were really engaged and keen to hear about what’s entailed in working as an author. I spent the whole day at the school, talking to kids as they wrote stories based on images from some of my books. The staff were well prepared and keen to make the most of the day. In particular, the charismatic head, David Gumbrell, worked hard to ensure the day was a success, and made me feel very welcome.

I really needed his reassurance when I arrived: a journey that should have taken less than 90 minutes actually took two and a half hours, and I was very late. Next time I have to use the M25, I’ll just double the driving time!