Joanna Nadin

As you read this I am probably on a train to That London, wearing an inappropriate prom dress and feeling like have just ingested several bowls of porridge and fear. Or possibly (if you are late riser) I will be weeping in corner of Unicorn Theatre having got overexcited at presence of a Python (Monty variety, not snake, though snake less intimidating) and been unable to speak. In very, very improbable scenario, I will be wooping with joy having won Roald Dahl Funny Prize.

This is about as likely as me being cast as in next series of Gossip Girl (travesty, would make excellent kooky English midget. Much more interesting than Liz Hurley), as am not very woopy sort of person, plus shortlist hideously brilliant. Shortlist is also interesting as this year is very girl-heavy. Which is yah book sucks to tedious old men who annually dig out the “women just aren’t funny” routine at the same time as their Dickensian Christmas decorations.

And I was thinking maybe it was just in the olden days (by which I mean 1970s, when we still wore cross-your-heart bras, listened to Showaddywaddy and thought avocados were exotic) when women didn’t play for laughs. But then I remembered what I was reading back then (I was too young for cross-your-heart bras; more thermal vests and criminal cable knit jumpers) and it wasn’t just Charlie, and Danny and Fantastic Mr Fox. The books that would frequently reduce myself, my brother, and often my parents to sobs of laughter were the tales of a belligerent raven called Mortimer, with a habit of eating staircases and hunting for diamonds in the back of cabs.

The Arabel’s Raven series by Joan Aiken is one of the reasons I write books, and why I write funny books, and proof that women have always been funny. Just that maybe not so many people were listening.

So today, whether I win or not, I shall raise a glass to Joan. Both me and Penny Dreadful owe her a huge debt. And if you’re at a loose end, you could root around your bookshelves or the library for The Escaped Black Mamba (the best Mortimer book ever). Oh, and wish me luck…

Mostly I blog about one or all of the following:

1. My daughter, aka the menace, and her habits of singing about dead sheep / demanding a recap of the facts of life.
2. My mother, aka Mrs Nadin snr, and her habit of refusing to allow anyone a second biscuit / to drink potentially staining fluids in a carpeted area.
3. Snogging.

But just this once, and because the people at the Bath Kids Lit Fest asked so nicely, I am going to blog a story. It’s a chapter of an ongoing, wait-for-two-days-to-see-what’s-happening-next kind of story, written by all sorts of weird and wonderful people from Catherine Bruton (wonderful) to Barry Hutchison (weird, very weird, but in a good way).

You can read back over all the other chapters by kicking off here: http://bathkidslitfest.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/the-big-blog-story/

But to bring you vaguely up to speed, the moon (sort of Sylvia Plath crossed with Sad Ed i.e. moany with weight issues) has fallen out of the sky and into the sea, and a small furry blue mute boy called Scribble is trying to save her, along with a fisherman who can build a yellow submarine in less than three lines, and a mermaid called Moby Doris. The moon meanwhile is trying to save herself, but there are mean girl issues down at the bottom of the sea (imagine the school common room, but with French fish and twin water nymphs instead of Lindsay Lohan) and they are too busy bitching at each other to get anything sorted. Then, in a sort of Tales of the Unexpected / Eastenders-at-its-most-ludicrous twist, Scribble turned out to be one of the twin nymphs (the tattooed evil one, called Minnaloushe)…

“You have GOT to be KIDDING me,” thought Minnaloushe, as she bored of the mating krakens and turned to see a crazed fisherman heading toward her full pelt with courage and honour strapped to his belt with no more than Sellotape and faith.

And these were the same seven words that ran through Catch’s mind as he floored the tattoed legend, only to find that what he held in his fingers was no more than a suit of inked skin, sloughed off like a giant and slightly odd-shaped mamba, as the nymph revealed her latest guise, a cheerleader with braces and a birthmark on her thigh in the shape of Belgium. Who in turn unzipped her short-skirted and perpetually-smiling suit to reveal a postman with fat hands and a glass eye. Who, with fumbling and ill-focused difficulty, slipped off his bag and shorts to become a monkey who could juggle tins of mandarins. Who was really a Mexican dog called Frankie. Who was hiding a tulip grower from Delft. Who was actually concealing a can-can dancer called Kitty Sometimes.

“No, seriously,” shouted Catch, to no-one in particular, as Kitty slipped off her heels and high kicks to let out the German Chancellor. “You have GOT to be kidding.”

“Oh, yes, actually I am,” intoned a disembodied voice that echoed round the tin submarine with all the gravitas of a Saturday night game show host.

“And just who the hell are you?’ asked Catch and the German Chancellor.

“The Writer. Like, DUH,” said no-one in particular, who turned out to be someone after all. “I mean, you didn’t think all this was down to your choice, or fate, or runes did you?”

“Well…” began Catch.

“Oh, bless,” said The Writer. “So sweet. So trusting. So… foolish. It’s all down to me, my little pawns. I could throw in a first kiss, a terminal disease and an orc with a deathwish right now if I fancied.”

“Oooh, could you?” asked the Chancellor, who was down on her luck in the first kiss, and orc stakes.

‘I could…. But I shan’t,” said The Writer. “Truth is I’m rather tired of this tale. That French fish was amusing. But the blue fur was a big mistake. Far too Disney. In fact I’m minded to make Cynthia wake up and realise it’s all been a very bad dream…” She paused for dramatic effect, which was wasted because Catch and the Chancellor were busy trying to remember where the hell the French fish had come into anything.

 “Oh for heaven’s sake,” snapped The Writer sulkily. “As if I’d resort to lazy cliché anyway. Instead I shall just use a sneaky plot device to move the entire action to Scotland immediately.”

“What plot device?” asked Catch. But the words dissolved into a gurgle as he, and the German Chancellor, and the submarine, and the mating krakens, and a packet of digestive biscuits that the Writer had been thinking about all afternoon, and a herd of sheep that she had thrown in for comedy effect, and a box of fireworks double-wrapped in plastic to stop them going soggy got caught in the whirlpools and eddies of The Writer’s imagination and spat out unceremoniously onto the shores of Loch Ness…

You can find out what happens next (ooh!) when LA Weatherly takes over on October 14^th back at the main Bath Kids Lit Fest blog: http://bathkidslitfest.wordpress.com/

But, mark my words, if the moon does not end the story by performing ‘Santa Baby’ in close harmony and fishnets with the German Chancellor and Moby Doris I shall be utterly disappointed.

Spot me, radiating boredom...

The best thing about writing for and about teenagers, is that it gives you a chance to do it all again, and better. Actually, that’s not true. The best thing about being a writer is being able to watch Gossip Girl and claim it’s research. But the second best thing is definitely redrawing your past, and giving your heroine the happy ending you didn’t get (the boy, the dress, the comedy revenge on the mean girl involving a chocolate doughnut). Because, believe me, when you’re five foot nothing, with mental hair, a mum who walks around with a j-cloth welded to her right hand in case you spill Ribena, and a brother who dresses like the Virgin Mary, you don’t get that many happy endings. Or at least that’s what I thought as I glowered with ill-disguised jealousy at my five-foot-eight best friend with her poker-straight shiny-plum Toners and Shaders dyed hair, brand new Wham cassette and mother who looked like Sue Ellen (ask your dad).

But the thing is, the further away from teen years I get, the more I get told how actually cute I was (in good way, not in furry rabbit way). Or, weirder, how cute my brother was (despite him having glasses with Sellotape on, hair like moss and a liking for ladies clothes). Or, triply weird, that the Most Beautiful and Coolest Girl in Saffron Walden (official, as measured using several criteria, including shortness of skirt, thickness of eyeliner and having a dad who worked in film), hated her bohemian family, her looks, and the boys who fought over her (actual fighting, and not just two boys, but two entire schools on one occasion) and sometimes kind of wished she was me. (Which, like, I KNOW).

And so Buttercup Jones was born. The opposite of my own alter ego Rachel Riley. And I hope, a girl we can all learn from (including me): that, whoever you are (tall or tiny, with or without boobs, and with or without a Wham cassette (honest – it was highly coveted on the sheep field at County High), growing up is hard, and sometimes it does suck lemons. But in the end, being yourself isn’t all that bad. Honest.

I knew her only vaguely. Billie, I mean. That she was a girl who had been raised In London – Peckham, where I had spent thirteen years – who was then transplanted, airlifted from that teeming, dirty-pavement, all-night city, with all its infinite possibility, to the crowding, claustrophobic Cornwall of my childhood memories.  Not to the picture postcard technicolour template of a hot August holiday, but to the bleak, ever-raining February, when every day is like Sunday, and Sundays never end. To a Paradise lost.

I had a sketch of her in my head. But, like Billie’s faint line drawing of her may-be father, there were so many pieces, features missing. I tried flicking through the faces of teenage friends, of TV actresses in my head, like a rail in TopShop, waiting to find one that fit. I tried picturing myself as Billie – because in the end, all our heroines and heroes are a part of us. But it was just that, a part. Just an awkwardness. She was too tall, too ethereal, too cool to be me.

But then I saw her. Trudging along St Saviour’s Road in a rain-soaked school uniform, her hair clinging to her face in tendrils: dark, like her eyes and face. Carrying a guitar and an art folder. My Billie. And from that moment she came alive.

But Danny, he was easy. The boys always are. Like Ed in Wonderland, and others before him, he was a redrawing of my first love, or crush, at least.

Pennington he was called.

I still remember him in stark detail. The way his hair curled over his collar, defying school rules, and endless and pointless detentions from masters. His hands stuck stubbornly, sulkily in his pockets. Then the way they would come to life at the piano, dancing up and down the ivory as he practised the Liszt.

He was seventeen, a dishevelled tortured soul. And I was younger: fourteen, too young, really. But old enough to know that this was true love. That I was the only person who understood him. His moods, his genius. Ruth claimed to. But I knew deep down she wasn’t the one. I was.

If only he could see that. If only he could see me. If only he were, well, real.

But then again, if he had been, would he have been as perfect? If he’d been on the bus to Peterborough Ice Disco, would he have sat next to me? Or would he have fallen for Karen: captain of the netball team, and owner of not one but three ra-ra skirts.

I’ll never forget him. The way he made me (and hundreds more) feel. The way I still feel when I flick through the pages of KM Peyton’s ‘Beethoven Medal’.

That’s what I wanted for Danny. So his hands on the piano, his hair curling long over his collar, his possibility, all belonged to Pennington first. But they fit Danny perfectly. They are his alone now. And yours.

(Read the original post at: http://www.undercoverreads.com/2011/09/peopling-paradise-by-joanna-nadin.html)