Friday book review - The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Michael Morpurgo and Emma Chichester Clark

I’ve been a fan of artist Emma Chichester Clark for more years than I can remember. When we moved house this year (aaagh - I’m still recovering) I took stacks of children’s books to a local primary school but I couldn’t bear to part with my Chichester Clark collection. I bought some of them (below) before my daughter was born – I Never Saw a Purple Cow and Listen to This for starters – and the illustrations still look as vibrant and fresh as they did 20 years ago.

Chichester Clark, who was taught by Quentin Blake in her art student days, has written and illustrated scores of children’s books. In recent years she’s also worked with former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo and they make a formidable team. The duo’s latest collaboration is a retelling of Robert Browning’s classic poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and in the aftermath of this summer’s riots, it’s a parable for our times. As Morpurgo himself has said: “We are failing our young people, who feel they are living without hope, without jobs and a sense of a future.”

The story is seen through the eyes of a young boy who describes how the rich and greedy live like kings and queens in the town of Hamelin, while the sick and poor have to scavenge for scraps of food. Mountains of rubbish rot in the streets, rats run riot and the town council promises action but never keeps its word. But all hope isn’t lost. When a tall thin man in extraordinary clothes suddenly appears in the council chamber and pledges to get rid of the rats, it looks as though life will take a turn for the better. But is it too late for the people to change their ways for good?

Morpurgo and Chichester Clark have done a wonderful job of bringing the pied piper to life on the page. Master storyteller Morpurgo describes him as “so light and nimble on his feet that it seemed as if he was walking on air” while Chichester Clark’s illustrations show a dashing figure in a stylish chequered jacket, multi-patterned trousers, dashing red sombrero and fingerless gloves.

Children of all ages will enjoy this ultimately uplifting story, which is perfect for reading aloud. And take time along the way to appreciate Chichester Clark’s gorgeous (and intricately detailed) illustrations.

PS. Speaking of Michael Morpurgo, Steven Spielberg’s highly-anticipated movie of War Horse is due out in January. I can’t wait to see it...

The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Michael Morpurgo and Emma Chichester Clark (Walker Books, £12.99)

Wearing a uniform - for school, work and London 2012

There are loads of arguments in favour of school uniforms. Headteachers say they help to maintain discipline, encourage pupils to focus on their schoolwork and build a sense of loyalty and belonging. Parents reckon they’re cheaper than forking out for everyday clothes and mean fewer battles in the mornings.

But even so, I’m not keen on them at all. I’ve rarely seen anyone look chic in a school uniform and some are downright dreadful. As a teenager at a (very strict) girls’ school I wore a St Trinian’s style navy pinafore, blazer, tie, beige socks and grey felt hat with a badge on the front. We had to wear black shoes outdoors and brown shoes indoors. The outfit put me off uniforms for life – which is partly why my son now goes to a school where he can wear what he likes.

Despite my antipathy towards school uniforms, I can understand the need for them in some professions – the armed forces, police, transport staff and airline pilots just for starters. And I can see that insisting the 70,000 volunteers and 6,000 staff at the London 2012 Olympics are in uniform is a sensible idea. After all, they’ll need to look smart, efficient and easy to spot in the crowd.

But given that London has more talented fashion designers than any other city on the planet, creating a super-stylish uniform should have been a piece of cake. Vivienne Westwood, Sarah Burton (creative director of Alexander McQueen), Stella McCartney, Erdem, Betty Jackson – the list of fantastic designers is as long as your arm. Surely one of them would be perfect to dream up the Olympic uniform?

But no, the job of designing uniforms for 2012 “games makers” and “technical officials” has been a collaboration between the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, adidas and Next. And I'm sorry, but the result is hideous. The games maker version consists of a purple polyester jacket with red collar and cuffs and beige trousers, while the technical officials will be clad in blue jackets with turquoise piping – not quite so bad, but nearly.

What do you think?

Image: London 2012

Handpicked Media Gets Social Part 2: Blogging Tips

The organisers of the Handpicked Media Gets Social blogging event promised wall-to-wall talks on everything today’s bloggers need to know – and they certainly delivered. The blogging industry is moving at lightning speed, so whether you’re a novice or an old hand, it’s crucial to keep up-to-date. And thanks to speakers like Garry Davis, managing director of Why Communicate?, and super-inspiring businesswoman Sháá Wasmund (above), I learned more this week than I have in months.

First up, here are some tips from Garry’s "tech boot camp" on how to get more traffic to your blog:

1. Content is king. Focus on producing quality, compelling content.
2. Blog regularly. And remember that over time and the more visitors you get, the more content you’ll need to produce.
3. Images are a great source of traffic.
4. Pay attention to blog post titles. You can increase the number of visitors by up to 73 per cent by using compelling headlines.
5. Set up an RSS feed, add social media share buttons and include a blog roll that lists the sites you rate (good for search engine optimisation too!) It’s really important to get visitors to engage with your blog. Ask them to leave comments, include questions in your posts and always reply to comments.
6. Engage in the blogging community. Comment on blogs in your particular industry. It’s a real opportunity to build up your network.
7. Set up Facebook and Google+ pages for your blog.
8. Write guest posts. By doing this, you’ll gain linkage to your site and create awareness of your blog with a new audience.

Meanwhile Sháá, an online entrepreneur and founder of Smarta.com (which offers advice and networking resources to anyone starting and running a small business), instantly endeared herself to the audience by declaring that over the years she’d “probably made more mistakes than anyone in the room.”

Dynamic, driven and fizzing with energy, she quickly ran through her route to the top. She grew up in a single parent family, was the first in her family to go to university and became one of the first ever female boxing managers before turning her hand to business.

She’s recently written a motivational book with Richard Newton called Stop Talking, Start Doing (subtitled A Kick in the Pants in Six Parts) and reckons we should all take control of our lives and do something we really believe in. “I’m not saying it’s easy,” she said, “but it’s utterably achievable.”

PS. For more about the conference, read yesterday's blog, Handpicked Media Gets Social Part 1.

Handpicked Media Gets Social Part 1 - Blogging Event

The first speaker at yesterday’s Handpicked Media Gets Social conference looked slightly stunned when he walked onstage. "The audience is usually full of grey-suited men," said Garry Davis, managing director of Why Communicate?, as he gazed out across the wood-panelled chamber.

This event, however, was packed with 200 top beauty, fashion and lifestyle bloggers, most of them women. They were a very impressive bunch - ranging from the multi-award-winning Fleur de Force, who at 23 has racked up more than 180,000 YouTube subscribers with her engaging, articulate beauty tutorials, to ReeRee Rockette, 29, who blogs about “rockabilly, vintage, tattoos, alternative fashion and lipstick.” Not only that, she’s launched an on-line beauty business selling her own Rockalilly Lipsticks in four stunning shades.

I got chatting to ReeRee, resplendent in scarlet lipstick of course, because she tweeted brilliantly right through the conference. She swears by her BlackBerry by the way – by far the speediest phone to type on, she says.

The event, held at RIBA’s HQ in London’s Portland Place, was organised by Handpicked Media and hosted by founder Krista Madden. Krista launched the highly successful Beauty and the Dirt website 11 years ago and quickly realised that independent sites and blogs were the future.

Two years ago she hit on the idea of handpicking like-minded sites and attracting advertisers to work with them as a group. So Handpicked Media was born - and now comprises more than 230 sites and blogs, which together generate well over 15 million page views a month. Impressive stuff.

I was lucky enough to get an invite and leapt at the chance to learn more about social media and blogging. I’ll blog tomorrow about some of the tips I gleaned but one of the best things about the day was the chance to meet some inspiring bloggers, all of whose sites I signed up to the instant I got home.

First up is The Women’s Room, launched by Amanda Carr and Jane Kellock. The stylish duo have worked in fashion for years and met when they both worked at WGSN, the global fashion trend forecasting website. Frequently lamenting the dearth of fashion and style publications for women over 40, they started The Women’s Room. A fantastic and eclectic mix of fashion, style, art, culture, health, happiness and much, much more, it’s my new must-read.

It was great too, to meet two other journalists. Loma-Ann Marks’s Culture Compass gives you the lowdown on the latest places to go and what to see, while Miss B is the founder and editor of Belle About Town. Billed as a blog “for stylish women who want to get the most out of their lives,” Belle About Town fizzes with interviews, reviews, celebrity news and style. I love it.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s blog: Handpicked Media Gets Social Part 2.

Twitter helps writer Maria Duffy get a book deal

I love Twitter. It makes me laugh, recommends everything from books to blogs to recipes and keeps me up to date with the news on a minute by minute basis. The only drawback is that it’s so addictive that hours can fly by without getting a stroke of work done. Lots of writers say they have to switch it off altogether between nine and five-thirty. Otherwise they wouldn’t write a word, let alone stand a hope in hell of hitting their deadlines.

But yesterday, thanks to a fascinating post by Chick Lit Club, I discovered that Twitter can even help writers get book deals. Dublin-based Maria Duffy explained how she got a message on Twitter from Curtis Brown literary agent Sheila Crowley.

“To cut a long story short, Sheila loved my Twitter voice and told me that if I could get that down into a book, I’d have something special,” said Maria.

The upshot was that Maria wrote the novel, Sheila sent it out to publishers and within a few weeks it had been snapped up by Hachette Books Ireland. Any Dream Will Do, the story of a group of people who meet (how else?) through Twitter hit the shelves earlier this month.
So next time you’re on Twitter, write the most superlative tweet you can. You never know, it could be the first step on the road to publication.

PS. Tom Stoddart, one of the best photographers in the business, was granted “exclusive, unprecedented access” to David Cameron and his family for a week. He snapped the PM sitting round the No 10 breakfast table with his family, poring over his red box, striding through rain-soaked Cannes at the G20 summit and being interviewed by BBC political editor Nick Robinson. But my favourite image by far was the picture on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine. It showed the PM strolling at Chequers, his country retreat, with his baby daughter Florence strapped to his front. Somehow I can't see Nicolas Sarkozy following suit...

Pyjamas - what not to wear at the school gate

Mornings have never been my strong point. In the days when I took my daughter to the bus stop soon after 7am I used to rush out looking like I’d been pulled through a hedge backwards, without a scrap of make-up and my hair unbrushed. I’d then dash into Sainsbury’s to buy the papers and hope I didn’t scare the cheery man on the till or, horror of horrors, bump into someone I knew.

My lackadaisical approach wouldn’t go down well in London's Notting Hill, where yummy mummies like Elle Macpherson and Claudia Schiffer swear by glossy hair, immaculate make-up and high heels at the school gate. If you don’t wear the right outfit, some mums have warned, your children might not get invited round to play by their friends.

My teenagers are fiercely independent now but even when they were younger they were appalled if I ever tried to escort them into the classroom.

But at least I didn’t have to worry what I looked like. I cheered up no end when I realised I was a lot more appropriately dressed than parents doing the school run in some parts of the country. Why? Because at least I was dressed. A couple of years back the head of one UK primary school was so appalled at the number of parents arriving in their nightwear to drop off their children that he appealed to them to show a little more respect. Known as the “pyjama mamas,” some were turning up in baggy pyjamas and slippers while others sported dressing gowns and curlers.

As the head wearily told his local paper: “People don’t go to see a solicitor, bank manager or doctor wearing pyjamas so why do they think it’s OK to drop their children off at school dressed like that?”

PS: On the subject of night gear, a report in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph said millions of us stay in our pyjamas till midday on Saturdays. And shock horror, four out of ten sometimes go the whole day without getting dressed. I’m guilty of the first (not the second), but I’ve got one question. Does the Telegraph know that pyjamas are all the rage as daywear these days? Fashion designer Stella McCartney included a rather fetching paisley pair in her spring/summer 2012 collection while the likes of Celine and Louis Vuitton have featured them on the catwalk too. So don’t assume that the woman wearing pyjamas in the supermarket has just stumbled out of bed. She could be the most fashionable person in town.

PPS: I couldn't resist these gorgeous tartan reindeer (above) I spotted at Bicester Village. They're the best Christmas decorations I've seen by far this year.