I haven’t ever done any sailing. Apparently it’s great though. I had a friend called Wil who I used to work with in a bookshop who once asked me if I’d sailed. When I told him I hadn’t he told me I should, and he told me why. I don’t remember anything about what he said but I remember how he said it and I remember the look in his eyes. This was something he really loved: it was there in his face, in the tone of his voice, the passion he had for it. He wasn’t even talking to me anymore. He wasn’t really there. He was out at sea somewhere, far from the bookshop, and very happy. But I still haven’t tried it. And I left the bookshop not long after (to go and draw pictures for a living) and a while after that Wil left too (to go somewhere or other to learn how to build boats) and we lost touch. But I like to think that Wil’s still sailing, maybe on a boat he built himself.

So I haven’t ever sailed, and I’ve barely ever been in a boat at sea. I’ve been on a ferry a handful of times. Once each way going on a tour of Germany, Holland and … um, was it Belgium? I forget. It was a trip with a brass band when I was about eighteen I think. I didn’t play anything, but a bunch of friends were in the band and I just went along to make up the numbers. I wasn’t even a brass band roadie, I was just hanging about with my mates (Michael Casey on trombone, Andrew Shaw on B flat euphonium, I forget who else). 

And I remember, many years later, looking over the side of the ferry going over from Oban to Mull and seeing a seagull exactly matching the boat for speed, so that for long spells it looked as if it was just hanging there, perfectly still in the air. Oh, and there was a fishing trip with my dad and my brothers on a family holiday, out on a small boat from Dartmouth to catch some mackerel, and a touristy boat trip out on a catamaran from Barcelona. And, um, we had a little rubber dinghy that we used on family holidays that took ages to blow up with a foot pump. But that’s about it. Not exactly an old sea dog, I’m afraid.

Does that make me odd for choosing to set the whole of A Boy and a Bear in a Boat at sea? Not so much, I think. Read the rest of this entry »

A Thursday evening, last year. I am in a pub in smelly London attending the very jolly and well-attended launch party for Sarah McIntyre’s magnificent Vern and Lettuce book. (Buy it. Buy it now). I have had some champagne and some cake. Rude not to. Now I have some beer. Mr David Fickling has given a rousing speech which has, as usual, entertained and roused. There is more cake available and there are any number of talented cartoonists knocking about the place with whom I may converse freely about pens should I so desire (and I so do). In particular I spend a good deal of time catching up with my good friend Faz Choudhury. In short, all is very much well with the world.

Into this personal paradise enter a man, a woman and a boy. The man approaches me in familiar fashion, smiling. Says hello. Says, “This is my wife, Lucia”. I think, “never mind your wife, who are you”. Read the rest of this entry »