Yay! I won an award!
Oh God, is he boasting about that award? You’d think he’d won the Nobel Prize. No, not the Nobel Prize, but the Awesome Book Award, voted for by children in 46 schools across England’s southeast, and I couldn’t be happier that Time Travelling With A Hamster won. Apart from anything else, it was a fun evening. Each […]
The first copy!
Exactly a year ago, I was eagerly awaiting the appearance of Time Travelling With A Hamster in the shops. If you had asked me if there would be another book in a year’s time, I’d have said, “I hope so,” with little idea of what that would entail. In fact, I knew there would be another: I […]
“Blue Peter” and me
From the age of about six to twelve, one thing marked the passing days as surely as swimming with Dad on Saturday, church on Sunday, scouts on Friday, and that was – every Monday and Thursday on BBC-1 at 5.00pm – Blue Peter. Even the Blue Peter year had its own internal calendar: the lighting of […]
“Hamster” and the Geordie accent
No – obviously, hamsters don’t have a Geordie accent. It just made a good headline. But seeing as Time Traveling With A Hamster (note the absent extra “L”) was released in the US last week, I thought it would be helpful for the American readers to get an idea of how they speak in the […]
Book number 2: thank God for that!
I’ll be honest – there were times when I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps I was destined to write only one book. That Time Travelling With A Hamster would have its brief moment in the limelight and then gracefully move along the bookshelf to make room for books by other, more prolific and successful authors. I would tell myself […]
The Encounter: time-travelling magic
I’ve written before about my, shall we say, complicated relationship with the theatre. I take the approach once described by Sir Michael Parkinson: “I have never sat in a theatre without wishing I were in a cinema instead.” Except…sometimes. This was one of the sometimes. Tempted by a friend who promised that it would appeal […]
A gem on every page
Fifteen years ago I was holiday with my then-girlfriend (now wife) in Zahara de los Atunes in southern Spain. Three things are especially memorable. Mrs W told me she was pregnant; Islamist psychos flew aeroplanes into the Twin Towers in New York (the horror of which we watched unfold on a television in a village bar); […]
My book’s in the shops!
…well, one shop anyway. The official publication date of “Time Travelling With A Hamster” is December 31, but at least one shop – thank you Waterstone’s, Kensington High Street – have received a bunch of them already and decided to put them out in the store, sandwiched – handily – between two David Walliams books. […]
Geordie Haka
Apologies if I am late to the party and you’ve already seen this… There are some great Geordie expressions included in it, my personal favourite being “geet fat knacka” which my brother and I used to call each other. (Who am I kidding with the “used to”?) Incidentally, for some reason this inserted video has […]
