People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
~ James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

I’m reading at seven libraries this week, as part of the kids’ holiday program. Here are a few of the highlights, all of which, of course, come from the audience – much more interesting than the author:

– Where’s Anthony Browne?
– Don’t be stupid. Girls aren’t pirates.
[and then, following assurances of historical fact, “That’s not even true.”]
– Nana, I love you [“I love you, too,” said Nana from the rear of the room, “now sit down and listen to the story”.]
– What’s that great big thing on your head? [It’s a mole. And it’s coming off next week, but thanks for pointing it out.]
– Are you Margaret Mahy?
– Pirates are really ugly, aren’t they?
– I’ll swab the deck. That sounds good. What’s swab?
– No, let’s not read that book. Let’s read a different book.
– They better not feed ME to the sharks. I’d just eat those sharks right up.
– How do you find the pirate treasure?
– Can you read three more books? OK, two. And then another one.

(That’s all quite apart from the girl who asked if I used to wear my eye patch when I was a pirate)
We’ve made treasure maps and pirate hats, we’ve dressed up, we’ve even played pin the parrot on the pirate’s posterior, we’ve eaten quite a bit of treasure, and we’ve read pirate stories until we’re hoarse.

Now we need a cup of tea and a good lie down.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerers and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
~ Virginia Woolf (1932)

The Hegarty clan has a new member: Eve Ferrier, born yesterday morning in Melbourne, weighing in at a svelte 8 pounds 4 (we don’t do things by halves in my family).
Welcome Eve. I’ll be over there to read Olivia to you in a couple of weeks.
I’m sorry your parents have not bowed to the intense lobbying to name you after me, but maybe next time. I’ll start the campaign as soon as they wake up.
If your great-grandfather were still here, he’d be singing, “Thank heaven for little girls” all over the hospital, as he did when I was born, and when your mother was born. If you hear a faint song on the breeze, that’ll be him.

One of those silly quizzes, this time on topic (as opposed to “Which B-grade country and western star are you?”). It also features quite funny questions, in a pirate kinda way. And, as you can see, they even cater to those concerned about gender neutrality.

Apparently, I am … wait for it … A Pirate!
Oh good. I love a plunder.
Take the quiz: What Type Of Swashbuckler Are You?

In The Times, Amanda Craig reviews two time-slip novels for young readers I’ve been anticipating with some relish: Gideon the Cutpurse, by Linda Buckley-Archer, and (ring the bells and deck the halls) Jeanette Winterson’s first children’s book, Tanglewreck:

What is particularly interesting is that, where adult novelists such as Audrey Niffenegger and Liz Jensen have recently used time travel to explore romantic love, these children’s authors use it to explore the moral debt adults owe children – a challenging preoccupation that guilty parents will recognise all too well. The special nature of childhood rests on having the luxury of time, as Dylan Thomas’s great poem, Fern Hill, recognises.
Tanglewreck, like Gideon the Cutpurse and Kate Thompson’s The New Policeman, is partly a satire on our current perception that we all have too little time due to a change in the nature of reality, rather than our own greed and impatience.

Love a good cutpurse story – I have a hankering to do a highwayman novel, meself. Someone’s also recommended Charley Feather by Kate Pennington.
I’m less keen on timeslips, with some notable exceptions (such as Stravaganza), but find myself in the middle of writing three of the buggers so it must get into the blood somehow.
Been out on the North Shore reading at two libraries today. As there are little kids there I have a secret cache of pirate picture books in case they get bored with mine, which is for 9 to 12 year-olds and gets a bit scary for young ‘uns.
I wasn’t so impressed with Cornelia Funke’s Pirate Girl when I read it, but can report it goes down a treat – if you ham it up enough and read it with your eye-patch on. Now I think it’s hilarious.
One girl asked me: “Did you used to wear that eye patch when you were a pirate?”
What can one say to that but: “Of course”?

Woke up this morning at six knowing it was the 90th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the day on which more soldiers died than on any other day in British (and Commonwealth) military history: 20,000 souls in a matter of hours.
The numbers have so many noughts as to be almost mind-bogglingly meaningless: 420,000 British casualties for the entire mess known as Somme, which dragged on until November 1916; 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans. That’s over a million people killed, wounded or ill from trenchfoot, gas poisoning, tuberculosis, shell-shock.
All those men – and the women in the support services – woke up on this morning ninety years ago knowing they were about to be thrown into something momentous, purgatorial, unprecedented. But even they had no idea what was about to descend upon them. Imagine waking up that morning, in the dark – if you’d slept at all. Imagine crouching in a hole in the ground as the greatest artillery storm the world has ever known flies over your head – hopefully. Imagine climbing up out of the hole to greet the bullets.

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air…

Alan Seeger’s rendezvous came on July 1. An American poet who had lived in Paris before the war and fought with the French Foreign Legion, he was 28.
Whole villages were effectively wiped out in minutes as the Pals Battalions, men all recruited from the same area, walked or ran or crawled into the machine guns. The haemorrhage didn’t stop for another two years.
The end result was that the Allied front line moved forward six miles, ground lost later in the great German push of 1918.
I meant to be there, on the other side of the world today, but then remembered that battlefields are best visited alone. I went to Gallipoli alone. I certainly wouldn’t want to be there with a million other people. And the stretch of countryside around Albert and Baupaume, the fields near Pozieres, the little towns and the memorials: for all of those I need time and solitude.
Half a world and a lifetime away, I feel like I know it already, that unconsecrated ground. I’ve spent years with my head wrapped in the Somme for a book I once wrote, that has never seemed quite finished or quite good enough.
But this morning, in the dark, I suddenly realised what’s wrong with the manuscript and how to fix it, and had to get out of bed urgently and scribble. We all pay tribute in our own ways.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.
~ Walter Raleigh, History of the World

I’m not entirely sure JK Rowling really wanted to kick off the global thunderstorm that accompanied her recent comments about poor Harry’s future – or lack thereof. Maybe she thought everyone would be distracted by the World Cup (she should have waited until the semi-finals, but perhaps wasn’t sure if England would scrape through). But she ought to know by now how hysterical the media will get over any mention of what happens next. But, love, did you really think you could get away with an off-the-cuff comment like: “A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here”?
I feel pretty sure that most readers – of all ages – are well prepared for anything that might happen in book 7. The good folk at The Leaky Cauldron took it all in their stride. They’re even running a poll on which characters are most likely to die. I imagine you can place bets on it in London by now. (My money’s on Hagrid and Ron, and I think Snape has to go too. Voldemort doesn’t count. But I’ll just pretend to be a grown-up and act like I can deal with the suspense.)
But all hell’s broken loose in the papers and the(adult) blogosphere.
Chasing Ray makes an impassioned plea for Harry to live on:

When did the good guys winning become something that a young adult author needed to avoid?

The Guardian thinks a bit of grief is good for youngsters:

The rumours alone of Potter’s demise, whether or not exaggerated, will be enough to bring the issue of mortality firmly on to the breakfast table where it will further loom over many a school run in the coming weeks and hype-filled months.

Those of us who still haven’t recovered from Beth’s demise in Little Women might not agree, although our therapists may.
But they’re not pulling any punches over at Bookninja:

I hope he dies while listening to bad prose, or better, by eating his creator’s words.

Bitch-slapped by Bookninja. Nasty.
No wonder she’s a recluse.
Anyway, the most interesting thing, besides the frenzy, is that in the same interview Rowling admitted she’d boxed herself in on a couple of issues early in the series and now has to write her way out of them. The most astounding thing for me, when I read Rowling now, is how incredibly foresightful she has been, and how she lays the groundwork for characters and events early on – even minor things – and how complex the plotting is. Now I know what it’s like to write a series I am awe-struck at the prescience. It’s remarkable, if you ask me, that she’s only boxed herself in a couple of times.
There must be literally hundreds of characters and dozens of strands by now, including red herrings and insignificant details, and I can’t imagine how she keeps it all in her head. She can’t go back and change anything. She’s stuck with words she imagined last decade, when she was a different person and had no idea who her readership would be. Remarkable.

I am now the proud possessor of the sexy new hardcover edition of War and Peace , a translation hot off the press by Anthony Briggs, with nobody called Andrew in it, you’ll be pleased to hear.
It features the usual headless woman image on the front cover, so you know it’s historical fiction (which it is, even when first published) and a gold sticker on the front that screams: “A life changing NOVEL a must read NEW translation”. Will people really only buy it if it has gold sticker that promises life changes, like Oprah?
Best of all, there are blurbs by Flaubert, Woolf, Updike, AN Wilson, John Bayley (of course) and Simon Schama.
This cracks me up.
“Love and battle, terror and desire, life and death. It’s a book that you don’t just read, you live.” Thank you Mr Schama.
If it wasn’t my favourite book I’d never read it in a million years with that wrap. Normally I’d believe Simon Says, but that makes it sound like Bernard Cornwell’s latest.
She was a timid princess, trapped in her own home by a tyrant father – he was a reckless but penniless hussar … etc
Which reminds me, I have long believed people can be classified according to which plotline in War and Peace they consider most romantic:
– Natasha and Andrei
– Natasha and Pierre
– Marya and Nikolai.
[drum roll] Your votes please.
I don’t know what it means, but it’s a theory I hold dear and will one day form the basis of a doctoral thesis.
I’m a timid princess/reckless hussar person myself, and the only one I know. Hence the theory, half-baked though it may be.
I wish they’d asked me for a blurb. Imagine being so famous you can blurb Tolstoy. Even if you’re dead.
Anyway, silence will now descend upon us as I have completely screwed up my schedule and now have to do a month’s homework in a week.