11/02/2023
A post from George, our director:
Few things in this life make me as consistently happy as . I just unearthed these from my hasty packing when separating and each one is loaded with joy. Mostly for the people they remind me of.
Micronations for the inestimable who took me along for his adventure into these worlds people made. Also and Simon Hall who were similarly along for this joyride.
The latter also nudged me into his Life Coach project based on something I said about having bleeding noses as a kid. He was a great editor and nudger into capers you might not want to go on until you get there and you realise he’s always and has the instincts on what to pen.
And of course a book, which gifted me some of the loveliest souls in my life who I still wish I could see more of and read more of. There’s always room for a 5th book in the trilogy…
Jessica Au’s debut because I hoped for a 2nd and it has won and wowed recently.
And middle age as natural history because someone clever gave it to me to remind me I’m as dumb a meatsack as anybody else.
Which weirdly leads me to Terry Pratchett. The whole reason I dig through all the boxes of books was to find this because the wee un is enjoying this series with its blue Scottish fairies. But it was a book that came to me when I interviewed for ABC Kids. It was a weird one and I may have had some daft preconceptions about genre when I got to interview the great man. What I got was two sides of a cassette tape (it was that long ago that I had no digital recorder) of the most warm and hilarious bloke you could ever hope to meet. There were lots of funny yarns from him but I remember most vividly that he asked me to stop (on side 2 of the tape) because he was suddenly very tired. In retrospect he was already ‘feeling his age’ which was his euphemism for the ‘embuggerance’ of his Alzheimers. But his writing burnt brightly for a few years after that and now his cracked world view is in the head of my kiddo and we talk about his characters not just as if they were real but alive contemporaneous. You just never know where the words you write will end up.