I am in awe of your collective gingerbread boyfriend-making skills, gentle readers!  Apparently inspired by having made 60 gingerbread personages (YEP! SIXTY!), the divine Rosie has produced a selection of mini-dress and monokini-ed gogo dancers, hippy chicks, and Nehru-jacketed Beatles, look!  Cor, etc.  Anna, meanwhile, has beaten me to the TARDIS with her spectacular selection of Gingerbread Doctors (and Donna too, hurrah) – not to mention some unidentifiable-by-me-but-probably-very-recognisable-if-you-know-who-they-are snooker players, who you will find in the Fabulous Bake-A-Boy Gallery along with many magnificent new pics! Applause all round to Tina, Jess, Alex, Cerys, Other Jess, James, Small Person, Josie, and anyone who volunteered to clean up the kitchen afterwards.  I hope your Gingerbread Beloveds were all as yummy as they looked.

I feel strangely hungry now.

  Sally Nicholls, Season of Secrets.  READ THIS BOOK.  I mean it.  Find yourself an enormous box of tissues first and someone to hug you at regular intervals, because it’s an unflinching look at the impact on a family of the death of a parent.  But don’t let that put you off, because – like her brilliant debut, Ways to Live Forever – it’s also extraordinary.  Like David Almond’s Skellig, a family tragedy runs parallel to a child’s encounter with an improbable saviour (in this case not an angel but the mythical Green Man), which represents all their fears regarding the terrifying fragility of life, but also offers the hope of renewal.  Unmissable and unforgettable.

Have also just read Joanna Nadin’s My So-Called Life, the first of her Rachel Riley series, which is very very funny (though there was a disappointing lack of Jordan Catalano), and made me feel really quite relieved I’m not 13.

  I’m currently writing a comedy/romance/sci-fi/musical set in Oxford/space/The Future/1832, in which a girl/boy/wisecracking armadillo sidekick have to save the cheerleader/save the world/save the Wispa bar all over again, and also fight crime/some Conquistadors/each other! with hilarious consequences.  It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing.  Maybe.  Oh, all right, I’m not writing that really.  I quite want to now, though.  Who doesn’t love a wisecracking armadillo?  In the meantime, here’s my interview with the lovely Jenny at Wondrous Reads.

Being startled by how much I loved the new Star Trek (Gingerbread Kirk, Spock and McCoy? oh, I think so); cooking feijoada, mmm; getting overexcited by muppets all over again.