We took the pretty way to the Bath Festival of Children's Literature this year, making a long loop up into Wiltshire so that we could visit Avebury. For some reason I've never been there, although it's a place I've always wanted to see. Famously, the village is built in the middle of a complex double circle of ancient standing stones. Naturally it's been adopted by the New Age numpty fraternity, who were much in evidence when we were there, hugging stones, flogging crystals and conducting 'druid' ceremonies in one of the circles. But even for rational people Avebury has a strange and haunting atmosphere. Despite the sunshine, the hippies and all the other visitors it felt distinctly eerie, and I could see how it had inspired all those spooky books and TV dramas of my childhood like Children of the Stones and The Moon Stallion. Here, two of the stones are creeping up on an unsuspecting cottage...
After Avebury we stopped off at Silbury Hill, a huge, conical burial mound that forms part of the same sacred landscape, but isn't quite as impressive as its photographs on account of having a busy main road thundering right past it. We stayed the night at The Old Forge B&B in East Kennett, and over a very nice breakfast got talking to two ladies who were walking the Ridgeway, the long-distance footpath which stretches from nearby Overton Hill for 87 miles across the middle of England to Ivinghoe Beacon, near Tring. I've never seen myself walking the Pennine Way or Hadrian's Wall, but I've always rather fancied doing the Ridgeway. We did a tiny bit of it ourselves that morning, parking at the National Trust car-park on White Horse Hill and then tramping along the Ridgeway for a mile or so to the bronze-age barrow known as Wayland's Smithy, which was looking very lovely on a quiet and misty autumn morning. There are lots of barrows near where we live on Dartmoor, but they're all rather small compared with the Smithy, which you can actually climb inside...
White Horse Hill is so called, of course, because our long-ago ancestors carved the figure of a galloping white horse into it. Like Avebury and Wayland's Smithy, the Uffington White Horse is something that I've always wanted to see (Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a very fine, short novel about its making, Sun Horse, Moon Horse). Oddly enough, though, when you get to White Horse Hill you can't actually see the horse itself, only odd, abstract bits of it. This is part of its head and its eye...
Then off we went to Bath, making very good time until we turned off the motorway and got wedged in the massive tailback of traffic trying squeeze through the bottleneck of picturesque Georgian streets. I can never work out whether I like Bath or think its a ridiculous heritage industry theme-park, but one thing I can be sure about is that the Bath Festival of Children's Literature is BRILLIANT. It carries on for two weeks, so it's well worth checking their website - there are loads of great events still to come. I was on on Sunday morning, in conversation with festival organiser John McClay and the lovely Moira Young, whose first novel, a brutal and dusty YA dystopia called Blood Red Road, is garnering great reviews wherever it goes. Here we are preparing for our event - and, as Joseph Nixon pointed out, looking like a duo of eccentric TV crime-fighters, so if the bottom drops out of the YA fiction market we shall know what to fall back on.
But while we wait for some right-thinking producer to cast us in a remake of The Avengers, we do a pretty good YA Dystopias event, if I say so myself, and I hope we will be able to offer a repeat performance at other festivals in the future. The audience had some interesting questions, and they included several people I know from Twitter or Facebook but hadn't actually met in Real Life before. They didn't include my old friend Nick Riddle and his daughters Eve and Eloise because they were busy looking after a dog that morning, but they turned up afterwards and we went for lunch together and a hasty catching-up (I don't see nearly enough of Nick, with whom I used to write comedy sketches at college - or, rather, he used to come up with all he ideas while I giggled and wrote them down. If you've read Starcross, the cheery old music-hall song entitled 'Dearest Margaret You Are Danish And Your Dog's Not Very Well' is one of Nick's.)
Then we were on our travels again, stopping off in Bristol, where I did an event on Monday morning at Colston's School, telling 200 students there the secrets of How To Write Stuff and Drawing Gollarks. And then home, wishing we could have stayed a bit longer in Bath, and full of admiration for John and Gill McClay and all the festival staff for organising such a great series of events.
(Thanks very much to Scholastic for arranging my trip to Bath, Colston's School for their warm welcome, and to Sarah for all these photos, except the last one, which is by John McClay. )
