The book will be coming out at the beginning of November which in some ways feels an ETERNITY away. In other ways, though, it really doesn’t seem very long ago that Violet Mackerel was just a name in my head. And now look – she’s come alive! It’s like magic.

This doll has a fimo head and hands and the rest of her body is just pipe cleaners wound round and round with wool - she is only about four inches long. She was great fun to make and I like the way she is posable! I’m hoping to provide her with some friends in the near future.

Nonetheless it has made me wonder what sorts of things I am optimistic about and the first that came to mind as a possibility was the impact of blogging. I recently read the argument that blogging might play an important role in the evolution of democracy which I think is an excellent point.

My own thinking about it leans more towards CS Lewis’s hunch that ‘We read to know we are not alone’. One can only have so many books and can only guess, for the main part, what will be inside them. It’s a good system which I hope blogs and other websites will never replace, but at three o’clock in the morning there’s a unique comfort in googling a phrase like ’sense of impending doom’ and reading that at three o’clock in the morning five years ago in Indiana, a young mother of two was sensing the same thing (and in the morning she had a smoothie with wheatgerm in it, walked the dog and seemed to feel better).

She said, ’I cannot write a review of Crockett Johnson’s book of Barnaby. I have tried and tried, but it never comes out a book review. It is always a valentine for Mr. Johnson.’

I’m a great believer in telling people when they’ve made important and positive contributions to your life, whether they’re someone you know in person or someone you can only send a letter to via their editor. And while I’m not attempting anything as impartial as a review in these acknowledgements, I do try (and probably generally fail) not to let my gratitude descend into utter gushery. But I bet my messages do often sound like Valentines.

I must remember not to send them in February.

Also, last week Penguin sent me the finals for Sophie’s Salon and they’re looking lovely, I think! So all the wheels sort of feel as though they’re in motion now.

With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking that soon this should start being a blog for child readers more than for the little handful of my mainly adult friends who read here (and for whom I’m very grateful ). I’m having daydreams about posting craft projects and children’s poems and more beautiful pictures like this one and this one.

In the meantime, though, I’m reading a very interesting book by psychotherapist (and philosopher, I’d say) Adam Philips, called Going Sane. It’s a kind of critical analysis of the concept of sanity, looking historically and sociologically and psychoanalytically at the way the concept is constructed and the implications it might have. The following passage gave me something to mull over during my train journey to work this morning:

“It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are driven lives. On the one hand we idealize the artist, the lover, the person with a passion for justice, the person who seems to have no choice but to do the good thing that she devotes her life to; and on the other hand we fear the addict, the workaholic, the person who is driven to ruin his life, to harm himself and others. It is the project of the cultures we grow up in to tell us what our lives should be driven by, what we should have an appetite for, what forms our passions should take. A sane life in this context is one in which a person is driven by the right, by the socially acceptable things; or it is a way of describing a life in which one is not driven at all. But either way sanity seems to suggest an unusual degree of self-possession, of independence in relation to appetite. Whether the sane person resists his hungers, or has found satisfying ways of including them, of weaving them into the texture of his life, his sanity will be a story about appetite” (Phillips, 2006:118-119).

Interesting hey!

He has represented me manga style in my favourite red dress with a black cardigan over it, included my cat Florence in the image (those who know her will recognise it as a very good likeness) and also added some details from the Sunday School room. If you look closely at the book, it is the one whose cover is now in its final stages, the first Violet Mackerel story. And finally, there is a picture of the doll I was making while chatting to him and his mum, which is another of these.

Thank you S for the beautiful drawing! I’ve put it up above my desk to inspire me .

But I swear, never again shall I skim a single sentence I read. It could have taken a fortnight to write it!

But because I spend quite a lot of time talking with people at universities, I do also wonder if there is a twin trend by which we are called to demonstrate our academic rigour by being perennially gloomy – as if any world-is-going-to-pot analysis must be somehow aligned with intelligence (and any maybe-it-will-never happen analysis reduced to an appalling lack of familiarity with fashionable theory and current affairs).

With this possibility in mind, something else I read recently and enjoyed was an article in April’s issue of The Spectator by Owen Harries called ‘Don’t panic, it’s only prophecy’. Having just turned eighty, he takes the opportunity to reflect on all the horrors predicted during his own lifetime which never, in fact, eventuated. He remembers the world during the Cold War, ’poised on the knife-edge of a nuclear disaster’, he quotes Jean-Francois Revel describing democracy as ‘a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes’ , and cites Cyril Connolly’s statement that ‘from now on an artist will be judged only by the responance of his solitude or the quality of his despair’.  (While I write these out, Sting is hovering around at the back of my mind singing ‘what might save us me and you is if the Russians love their children too…’)

Noting the slightly updated  prophecies of utter doom that continue to hang over our postmodern heads (‘global warming, the collapse of capitalism, the prospect of more terrorism and further nuclear proliferations’ ) he writes that a vantage point of eighty years ‘can do something to rescue one from what has been well termed “the parochialism of the present” – the tendency to believe that what is happening now, and to us, must be of unprecedented and transcendent significance’.

For me, this is all very welcome thinking and should such thoughts ever be compiled into a book or even a regular publication like a magazine, I would gladly subscribe – not out of any adherence to the doctrine of positive thinking, but as an antidote to the gloom of academia which might be just as irrational.

Even though we did actually cover this at Easter, they all suddenly wanted to know about him again, so I went over the story of the betrayal and the kiss and the pieces of silver. I think because of the context of the discussion (a list of Jesus’s inner circle) the whole narrative took on a brand new resonance.

A particularly bright button, S, eventually picked his jaw up off the carpet and said ‘GET…HIM…OFF…THE…LIST.’ They all looked at me (and at the whiteboard marker) expectantly.

I love this group of kids and they always get me thinking.

Personally, I’m a fan of Nikos Kazantzakis’s approach to Judas. After all, someone had to kick off that whole extraordinary and tumultuous chain of events and if Judas was anything other than 100% pure evil (and no one really is) then surely he was given the most difficult and dreadful role of all?

I’m also grateful to CS Lewis for humanising Judas through the character of Edmond in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I loved the way the recent film version humanised him even more as a child missing his father.

S, you’re a star. But I’m leaving Judas on the list.

All that said, a curious yearning has been pulling at my heart strings lately, associated with images like this one:

The yearning has been rubbed much sorer by recent visits to camping shops like Paddy Pallins and Kathmandu. It might just be the aesthetic appeal of those brightly coloured fleecy goretexy fabrics and matt stainless steel water bottles. Maybe the multitasker in me is made glad by the very thought of having an object that is a knife, fork and spoon all in one. Perhaps I’m imagining freedom from the weight of the trappings of adulthood when I am delighted by the impossible lightness and smallness of high-end tents and sleeping bags.  And even though I’ve no real intention of ever hovering about in sub-zero temperatures, or insanely high altitudes, or dangerously low ocean depths, how very nice to think that an energy efficient torch no bigger than my finger could function perfectly in all of them.

I wonder if this longing means that there is a hint of  family intrepidness in my blood after all and perhaps I am being called to some sort of adventure in Antarctica or the Himalayas? If this past year has taught me anything, it’s that even the wildest of dreams are worth a shot.

Dreaming aside, the realist in me can’t help suspecting that (in my case at least) the experience of ascending Everest with a backpack and tent might best be appreciated in fantasy, leafing through Paddy Pallins catalogues in a lovely warm cafe.