Josie: I’ll be reviewing, don’t worry: will put something a bit more coherent together when I actually am a bit more coherent. :) Rolf did not sing to me, alas. I’m starting to get a bit worried by how much of my time is currently taken up by biscuits that look like boys, come to think of it…

Are you all done with the book tour now? (Till the global one, natch :P)

I agree about the swearing issue, and was almost moved to post something on Michael Rosen’s Guardian blog about it (but have been quite overdosed of the Guardian blog this week). I remember JW saying that about the matches and there was also something about sniffing substances as well. I think that there’s a fine line between representing real children’s real lives and putting ideas into ‘innocent’ heads. One of the reasons I opted for adult literature over children’s is the restrictive nature of the latter. And don’t get me started on age banding! There’s nothing to stop a child from reading an adult book. If anything like Silence had been around when I was thirteen I’d have devoured it (probably under the covers with a torch, lol). And there are at last, thank goodness, some teen books that deal with gender issues and outside-of-the-box sexuality but you still have to search obsessively to find them.

I loved the Dog in the Nighttime too.

The Rolf Harris faces are great! Do they sing ‘Tie me kangeroo down sport’?

“‘Now my dears’, said old Mrs Rabbit one morning, ‘You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr MacGregors garden. Your father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by that f*cking bitch Mrs MacGregor…’”

As I understand, in 1902 there was a huge kerfuffle and several thousand copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit were pulped because one Mrs Padget of Bollywood Gardens, Lempshire, read it to her children and was so shocked by what she read she vomited up her gall bladder.

Though now thanks to Jess I feel faintly guilty for chomping poor Rolf. It’s not like I minced a womble and made him into bolognaise, woman!

I don’t believe swear words ever appear in a children’s book without there being thought behind it, and a fair bit of discussion. And certainly not from a former children’s laureate who’s always massively aware of the sensibilities of her audience: I remember her telling us (at that BBC workshop, back in the Whump! days) about agonising over having a character lighting lots of matches and accidentally starting a fire, and whether the consequences and the fact it was an unlikeable character outweighed the possibility of it being copied. Depressing that the publishers have caved, tbh. Although I might be inspired to rush out and grab an unbowdlerised copy…