The best children's book of the last ten years

Blue Peter is running a competition to find the best children’s book of the last ten years. The ten contenders include JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, Jacqueline Wilson’s Candyfloss and Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry and the Football Fiend.

The vote is open till 4pm tomorrow (February 23) and the winner will be announced on Blue Peter on March 1 – World Book Day. You can find out more here.

But today, to mark the competition, The Times has hit on the idea of asking the ten authors vying for the accolade to reveal the books they loved as children. And it turns out that JK Rowling loved I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Little White Horse and E.Nesbit, David Walliams adored Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory while Jacqueline Wilson plumped for Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild.

Some great choices, but my own out-and-out favourites were The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown and Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans (above).

Pamela Brown was only 14 when she wrote The Swish of the Curtain, a story about seven stage-struck children who launch their own theatre company in a disused church hall. Typing her manuscript on a battered old typewriter with two fingers took her a whole year and she then followed it up with four more – Maddy Alone, Golden Pavements, Blue Door Venture and Maddy Again. Those early editions are highly sought after collectors' items now, so I clearly wasn't the only fan.

Meanwhile Madeline is the tale of a little French orphan who gets into a series of scrapes at her school in Paris. It’s written in verse and the first lines are so captivating that I remember them to this day. “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines,” runs the story. “In two straight lines they broke their bread. And brushed their teeth and went to bed. They left the house at half past nine in two straight lines in rain or shine. The smallest one was Madeline.”

What did you read as a child? I’d love to hear.

Tribute to a fine reporter - Patrick McGowan

Sitting on the Oxford Tube on the way home from London last night, I flicked idly through the Evening Standard. There, on page five, was a single column paying tribute to one of the most outstanding reporters on the paper – Patrick McGowan, who died last week at the age of 60. 

Pat was a straight-talking Yorkshireman, who joined the Standard in 1978 and for nearly 30 years covered all the major stories of the day. He was a brilliant newsman, able to turn his hand to anything the news desk threw at him without any fuss.

During my first months at the paper I was a bit nervous of him. He was so calm and unruffled about reporting, even five minutes before the edition deadline, when the atmosphere was tense and everyone’s nerves were on edge. But he was kind and funny, with a dry wit that got right to the heart of things.

I didn’t realise until I read the Standard tribute (written by friend and longstanding colleague Paul Cheston) that it was Pat who coined the famous phrase “the wrong kind of snow.” The saying caught the imagination of thousands of fed-up commuters when London train services were completely disrupted in the winter of 1991 and went down in history. Every time I hear it now I’ll think of Pat, one of Fleet Street’s finest. RIP Pat.

Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery

If you live in London and haven’t seen the amazing Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, go now.

I’d bought tickets as part of my husband’s Christmas present – a nifty idea on both counts as it was a treat to look forward to and I sneakily got to go along too. Actually, I wasn’t sure he’d make it as he arrived back at Heathrow on Saturday from Kuala Lumpur – bleary-eyed after a 13-hour flight and no sleep. But he insisted he wasn’t going to miss out on Freud, so after a bracing coffee (or ten) to revive him we pitched up at the gallery.

The exhibition is, quite simply, stunning. It spans seven decades and gives a real sense of Freud’s world – his family, friends and lovers, many of whom sat for him. The paintings themselves (more than 100 of them) are a tour de force, scrupulously detailed, often very personal and not necessarily flattering. I’m no art critic but stand-out paintings for me included Girl in a Dark Jacket, a wide-eyed portrait of his first wife Kitty Garman (above left), and a series of life-sized portraits of the late performance artist Leigh Bowery (famed for his amazing costumes and body piercings, he posed naked for Freud).

And then, of course, there are the incredible pictures of Big Sue, 20-stone benefits supervisor Sue Tilley, who sat frequently for Freud in the 1990s. Tilley once described to The Guardian how the sessions would start with Freud cooking breakfast. She’d then sit for him and said: “It taught me that it is real work: each painting took nine months, and he was seeking perfection right up to the minute he finished.”

The exhibition is expertly curated and many of the details I learned as we went round have stayed in my head. It was fascinating to learn, for instance, how in the mid-1950s Freud decided to paint standing up and to use coarse hog’s hair brushes, how he used hotel linen to clean his brushes and palette knives (the rumpled white linen often appears in his work) and how paintings often took more than a year to complete.  A 2002 portrait of David Hockney took 130 hours – though when Hockney asked his friend to sit for him in return, Freud sat for precisely two and a half hours.

Freud died last year (2011) at the age of 88 and the most poignant portrait in the exhibition is the last one of all. Portrait of the Hound depicts his assistant, the artist David Dawson, sitting naked with his whippet Eli. Unfinished (it hadn’t been seen by anyone outside Freud’s immediate circle till the exhibition), it’s  remarkable and very touching. 

Lucian Freud Portraits can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in London till May 27 2012.

London Fashion Week - guest blog by student journalist Lottie Kingdon

As a student in London, I’m living in the fashion capital of the country, some might say the world. This is one of the many reasons I was adamant I had to come and study in London. Never in a million years, though, did I dream of getting a press pass to attend London Fashion Week. But it turns out that student media is regarded as highly valued publicity for designers, and that the tightly packed rows either side of the catwalk are not just full of fashion editors, bloggers and buyers, but student journalists too.

My first London Fashion Week was last season, SS12, and took place in September 2011. I attended on behalf of Fashion Hacks, the fashion branch of Wannabe Hacks, a website for aspiring journalists. Turning up on the first day was scary. For a start, I had swapped my heels for my flats on the bus there. So at 5ft 7in I was a good few inches shorter than anyone else crossing the courtyard at Somerset House. Collecting my press pass made me feel a bit better. I suddenly felt like I fitted in a bit more (even though I wasn’t wearing vertiginous heels, a neon pleated skirt or carrying a Proenza Schouler bag).

But once I got the hang of it, attending shows wasn’t daunting at all. Sitting alongside the catwalk when the lights go up at the start of a show is so exciting. Knowing that you are among the couple of hundred people to see a designer’s creations for the first time is a privilege and I got such a buzz from running to the press room to file show reports to be published online in double quick time (you can tell I’m the daughter of a hardened reporter!)

This fashion week, AW12, I feel like I know what I’m doing. I’m here with my student publication, Cub magazine, and attending shows, tweeting, taking pictures (like Carlotta Actis Barone's show, above) and filing copy is fun. My latest challenge was being asked to interview designer Bernard Chandran, after his show. I had a slight hiccup when I had to argue my way into the show in the first place - the show was so packed that the organisers shut the doors and refused to let anyone else inside. But the show was spectacular and Chandran was absolutely lovely – I think I got pretty lucky for my first interview.

So to conclude, London Fashion Week isn’t scary. Yes, it is full of ludicrously well dressed people in heels, but looking at what everyone is wearing is great fun too. In fact, waiting for a show to start is probably one of the few times that it’s fine to stare at complete strangers. When it comes down to it, what is important is what the designers have spent months and months creating. And there is some incredible talent about.

The PR who made me feel like a museum exhibit

The PR glanced at my scribble-filled notebook and did an astonished double take. “You write shorthand?” she gasped. “Wow. You’re the first journalist in ten years I’ve seen do that.”

Her words made me feel like a museum exhibit from a bygone age. But then again, shorthand is one of the most useful skills I’ve ever learned. Before I started as a trainee reporter on a small weekly paper on the edge of Dartmoor I spent eight weeks in a shabby Plymouth Portakabin mastering the rudiments of a shorthand called Teeline. Our teacher was the delightful Ella, who must have been in her sixties and thought Teeline was the bees-knees. Only when I’d got up to a decent speed did my editor send me out to cover the local magistrate’s court, industrial tribunals and the thing I dreaded more than anything, the district council’s planning committee meeting.

Even now I use my 100 words per minute shorthand every day. It's a bit scrappy these days, with the odd word written in longhand, but when it comes to tight deadlines and interviewing people on the phone, a notebook and pen are still the best tools for the job. Far easier and far speedier than laboriously transcribing from a tape recorder. And there are still places where you can’t use a recorder, like courts for a start.

Shorthand seems to be a dying art so I was delighted to see it in the headlines this week. Why? Because a diary kept by First World War veteran Edward Sigrist has just been discovered in his family’s attic. It’s written in an obsolete form of shorthand and gives a vivid account of the dangers and discomforts of life on the front line.

Like most journalists I’ve hung on to most of my old notebooks. They’re stacked up all over the place in my office – but somehow I don’t think historians of the future will be poring over them.

Friday book review - A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison

Once described as “Enid Blyton meets Cosmo Girl,” Louise Rennison’s books are hilarious romps for teenage girls who love sparkly nail varnish, Topshop and boys.

With their fluorescent covers and wacky titles, Rennison’s stories are snapped up in their millions by fans around the world. Her last novel, Withering Tights, won the 2011 Roald Dahl Funny Prize, set up by writer Michael Rosen to celebrate books that make children laugh.

Withering Tights was the first of a trilogy about an irrepressible teenage heroine called Tallulah Casey, who enrols at Dother Hall, a performing arts college in the wilds of Yorkshire, only to discover that she can’t actually act or sing. Oh, and at first glance there don’t seem to be any boys around either.

Now the second in the series, A Midsummer Tights Dream, is out and it’s just as crazy (and strewn with exclamation marks!!!) as the first. After a barnstorming performance as a comic Heathcliff earned Tallulah a place at Dother Hall for another term, she’s determined to throw herself into the experience with gusto. The trouble is that she's worried about her gangly legs and her cousin Georgia’s “scoring system for snogging” and her feelings for local bad boy Cain Hinchcliff and whether she’ll ever “climb the ladder of showbiz.” And if all that isn’t enough, it suddenly transpires out that the future of Dother Hall hang in the balance.

Warm-hearted, with snappy dialogue and a clutch of laugh-out-loud jokes, girls aged 12 and over will love it. 

A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison (HarperCollins, £10.99)