With thanks to the curative community of ABBA - Rowena House

 

The mind bug that seems to be blocking new words in the work-in-progress infected this month’s ABBA blog too, and yesterday I spiked a thousand words of rehashed waffle about scene building which were meant to be this post.

In the dark this morning, I felt I’d let the ABBA community down. My 15^th slot would be a sad gap in the New Year’s list. Lynne Benton had made the better decision, I felt, bowing out gracefully as she did yesterday. (Bye, Lynne. Very best of luck with the future.)

But then I read back further and found in Sheena Wilkinson’s post from Monday the wisdom of being in touch with your own working rhythms and the time of the year, and the lesson of knowing we are in dark days; productivity is allowed to slow down too.  Thank you, Sheena. Make me hardworking ... but not yet.

Then reading Paul May’s Ideas post from Jan 6 felt like a writer friend telling me all about his mind bug and how he overcame it. I hear you, Paul, about those brilliant night-time ideas that “evaporate in the cold light of day” and absolutely love that a peregrine falcon falling out the sky solved a plot problem about seagulls, which was really a story about so, so much more than a feare of seagulls.

After that, what I felt like doing was reading all the ABBA posts I’ve failed to read over the past year when I’d been juggling a complex business project with family commitments and the WIP felt like a refuge. A place to hide in. 

Instead, though, or rather beforehand, I decided I should thank all the writers who share their journeys, including (especially) everyone here on ABBA.

It is a community. A support group. A source of knowledge tempered by experience AKA wisdom. I don’t engage with you as much as I should but whenever I read your posts, I learn so much and am grateful as well as enlightened.

Like Lynne, I’ve switched from writing for young people with the current work-in-progress and wonder if I have the right to still be here. There is another WWI children’s book I would very much like to write – and should have done, even though my then publisher rejected it. So, perhaps, I’ll be a writer for young people again one day and Joel Castell will have his time in the light. Just writing his name makes me miss him!

In the meantime, my resolution for 2025 is to try and earn my place here by searching out ideas that might be useful to all writers, and avoid the more esoteric stuff I’m researching and experimenting with for the creative writing PhD.

Whoever we’re writing for, backside on seat is the same iron rule. But so is knowing when to back off. To slow down, to look around for inspiration, to have patience and trust in one’s creative instincts.

I think today is a reading day, not a writing day. And it’s dawn. Which is lovely.

Happy, Hopeful New Year, everyone. May stories be antidotes to the terrible realities out there.

 

 

 

I'm still on Twitter but not really for writing anymore.

Live blogging about the WIP on Rowena House Author FB page. 

Planning on joining Substack and Blue Sky.

Answers to Christmas Anagram Quiz by Lynne Benton

Happy New Year, everyone!   I hope you all had a really good time over Christmas/winter holiday, and that you've come back fully refreshed.

And for anyone who had a go at my Christmas Anagram quiz, here are the answers.  I hope you enjoyed doing them, and I'm sure most of you will have worked them out by now.  (And yes, to my reader who spotted my mistake: no. 7 was incorrect, having too many a's and only one c.  Sorry, everyone!)

1 Christmas Tree                                        16 Candles

2 Star                                                           17 Angels

3 Reindeer                                                  18 Sprouts

4 Jingle Bells                                              19 Stable

5 Mistletoe                                                  20 Santa Claus

6 Turkey                                                       21 Manger

7 Crackers                                                   22 Snow

8 Carols                                                       23 Shepherds

9 Mince Pies                                               24 Frankincense

10 Stockings                                               25 Mulled Wine

11 Presents                                                  26 Wrapping paper

12 Decorations                                           27 Gold

13 Tinsel                                                     28 Chocolates

14 Oranges                                                 29 Sleigh

15 Myrrh                                                     30 Poinsettia 

And, since this is my last blog for Abba, I also have to say goodbye. Now that I no longer write for children, but have begun writing for adults, I don't feel I can continue to justify my presence on this site, so with some reluctance I've decided to bow out.  However, I will keep reading other people's blogs and sometimes post comments.  There is so much of value here!

Meanwhile I'd like to thank everyone who has read my blogs over the last few years, especially those who have posted comments, and to those who organise it all so efficiently.

And I wish you all, wherever you are, a Happy 2025.  

Website: lynnebenton.com

Make Me Good .... But Not Yet by Sheena Wilkinson

 Is anyone out there struggling with broken resolutions? Or are you all having great fun with Dry January, Veganuary, or any other form of abstemiousness? 

Sometimes January is like this...

Or are you, like me, eyeing up the last of the Quality Street and thinking, Well, if I just eat them then they’ll be gone and they can’t tempt me any more…? 

... but also like this

I am actually a great one for resolutions, and promises, and new beginnings. Although I thrive on routine, I also love change and self-improvement – or rather, I like the idea of self-improvement. I will do more yoga! I will eat less chocolate and more salad. 

it's hard to leave the stove

But I am also a realist. You have to do as things do with you, my granny used to say. This time last month I was preparing to go on a retreat, and at that retreat I wrote over 4,000 words a day – because it was easy to be productive; I had nothing else to worry about. Things did with me very well. When I got home, things did with me very differently: though I finished the book, as planned, by the end of the year, it was a struggle to carve out the time, in the middle of the holiday rush. 

a very clear picture of how things do differently with me on retreat and at home

So at the moment, things are doing with me nicely enough for the time of the year, but I’m not averaging thousands of words a day, or taking up a new hobby or reading improving works or learning a new language.  And that’s fine. 

It’s cold, and though the days are on the turn, you don’t always notice that when the countryside has been gripped by freezing fog for days, so everything looks grey. There is good stuff on TV. I have just discovered a Susan Scarlett novel I didn’t realise I hadn’t read, which has immediately bypassed the worthier stuff on my TBR pile and funnily enough seems to go particularly well with a blanket and a few Quality Street. And this morning, though I was meant to go to the gym at 9, I just couldn’t be bothered to spend ten minutes defrosting the car so the dogs and I went back to bed instead. 

beautiful but grey 

When the Romans measured the year in ten months, it started in March, with the days of deepest winter not assigned any particular month. Perhaps that accounts for the fact that January, while possessing only 31 days, always feels as though it lasts for about 67 and people often feel like hibernating. It’s a natural response. It makes sense to see March, the start of spring, as a better time for new beginnings. And even though there are 24 hours in each day, the days feel longer as we respond to more daylight and more sense of possibility. 

Daisy doesn't mind the wintry weather 

Of course I don’t intend to hibernate till March. For one thing, if I don’t get outdoors for a couple of hours every day I get very grumpy. For another, I have a book to submit this week, and then I’m excited about redrafting the one I worked on at the retreat. I have workshops booked into the diary, manuscripts to critique and student essays to mark. I’m actually quite a productive person. But I do intend to be gentle and realistic, at least until the Quality Street are all eaten. 

Stroller doesn't mind a bit of a snuggle by the stove

 

 

 

'Prove you are not a robot' - Anne Rooney

 

My whole working life now is a giant CAPTCHA.

Publishing contracts generally now have a clause requiring that you don't use AI in preparing a book. I usually try to get the publisher to add an equivalent clause, that they won't use AI in preparing it either — not in editing, proofreading, indexing, illustrating or translating it. This last bit is to protect the jobs of other real people and to protect the quality of the book I've written but it does nothing much to deter them from using AI to write the book entirely and never let me near a contract. That is the real (personal) threat. I know illustrators and translators are ahead of me on death row, but as I write mostly non-fiction I'm not far down the list. It's easy to get AI to write non-fiction as long as you don't mind it being rubbish — or at best dull.

AI is good at dull. What it's not good at is innovation, humour, and finding/making unexpected links. It's not good at seeing a new angle. It's not good at knowing what is interesting, particularly to a child. It's not good at using language a child will enjoy, rather than just understand. It can write a book, but the book will not be fun to read. 

Occasionally, when I have completely finished a book, I will ask AI to write an outline for the book, just from a brief description of it, such as '50 interesting questions about astronomy for nine-year-olds'. So far, it has never come up with anything remotely interesting. It is a triumph of banality. I even got it to write a list of chapters to include in a book on AI  which I finished at the end of 2024. Although there was some obvious overlap (you do have to explain what AI is), it didn't even know what was interesting about AI. 

So now my working life consists of writing as unlike AI as possible so publishers still want me to write something. Maybe it's not just life as CAPTCHA. Maybe it's life as the wicked queen in Snow White. So far I'm still the fairest, but for how long? The more of my own books AI reads, the better it will become at copying me. This is why we don't want AI trained on our books. 

At the moment, keeping one step ahead makes me write better books. They have to be more imaginative, they have to be more up-to-date (ChatGPT's training ended a couple of years ago so I'm the only one with access to scientific discoveries that happened last year).  I think I can keep ahead for a while at least. But only as long as the public and publishers continue to value originality and quality and wouldn't rather just have something cheap and mediocre. 

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts
illustrated by Ro Ledesma, Arcturus 2024

 

Members' News

 Happy New Year!

This is a new monthly slot where Scattered Authors can celebrate their publications and advertise anything they've got going on.

Congratulations to Eva Wong Nava on the UK release of  Dancing Dumplings For My One And Only from Walker Books on January 2nd 2025.

A little girl is shown how to make dumplings by her grandma and they absolutely love the ritual of cooking together: We roll. We fill. We pinch and pleat. We cook! When Grandma gets sick, the little girl takes her turn to make dumplings and help soothe her grandma back to wellness – channelling as much love and comfort as she can into her cooking. Luckily, delicious homemade dumplings hold a lot of goodness inside.

Mentoring opportunity

Naomi Jones is offering three hours of free picture book mentoring to an under-represented writer. The deadline for applications is the end of January. Please help spread the word about this very generous opportunity. For details and how to apply, click on the link.

https://naomiandjamesjones.substack.com/p/free-picture-book-mentoring

Writing day

Jenny Alexander is running a collage-making day on zoom, on January 25th. Limited places remain. Details are here. 

https://jennyalexander.co.uk/writing_workshop/

Scattered Authors events

The 'Spotlight on' zooms organised by Camilla Chester have a change of day and will continue on the second Tuesday of the month, 7:30pm-8:30pm. Please contact Camilla if you'd like to offer your expertise.

The Folly Farm winter retreat is happening later this month. It's fully booked, with a mix of regulars and new faces, which is very exciting.

Anyone wanting to organise an event, a retreat, use the zoom account etc, you are all most welcome to do so. Post in the Facebook group or ask Tracy Darnton to send a message to the email list.

Ideas by Paul May

People often ask writers where they get their ideas from, so I thought I'd try to answer that question by talking about one specific book of mine, Billy and the Seagulls. When I've been asked, I've often told people that it's not having ideas that's the problem for a writer, it's turning them into something. That's true of course, but not really an answer. The more important truth is, it's complicated, much too complicated to explain in a few words. 

I have ideas all the time, especially early in the morning and often in the middle of the night, but they usually evaporate in the cold light of day. Billy is (almost) the only book I've written which takes some of its inspiration from children I've taught and, most unusually, with this book I can trace back where almost all of the ideas came from.

Cover illustration by Kate Sheppard

Let's start with Billy. Billy is (in my mind at least) the small, round, smiling five-year-old who I taught for a year and who was almost invariably cheerful. Call him George. George actually did look a lot like the Billy in Kate Sheppard's lovely illustrations (it's her cover, too). It's a bit of a mystery how I came to graft onto him the fears and worries of various other people—both adults and children—that I've known. But I did.

So, although I always knew that I wanted to write a story with George as the main character, by the time I finally started to write he had morphed into someone who was really nothing like the original. He'd acquired my daughter's fear of earthquakes and wobbly bridges, and the fear belonging to a small, quiet four-year-old I knew who was terrified of flushing toilets. He'd also acquired some other random fears that came right out of my imagination, including the fear of toast made soggy by baked beans. And, of course, he was terrified of seagulls.

Herring gulls can be very scary. When I wrote this book I was teaching in a large Primary School in Lowestoft. As I drove into town there would often be a herring gull sitting on top of every lamppost, and when the children went in from playtime the gulls were always waiting to swoop down and clean up the crumbs from their snacks. The kids at our school weren't scared of the gulls. I guess they were used to them. But I thought someone who moved to that school from somewhere else just might be. 

As I remember it, I started off by writing the first paragraph of the book without any idea where it might be going, although it seems to me now that I must have very quickly decided that Billy and his brother had a mum and dad who had split up, and that both mum and dad had new partners, and that mum's new partner, Dave, was going to find a new job by the seaside. So, in this case, the idea was generated by the necessities of the plot. Boy must be scared of seagulls, therefore boy must move from elsewhere, therefore there must be a reason for the move . . .

That opening paragraph was set right from the beginning though, just as you see it above, but the next couple of sentences indicate that I must have written them a little later once I'd realised all about the family situation:

I reckon it was the earthquake that started it. It was just after our dad moved out, and Billy was only three.

I was quite pleased with the way I slipped that info in, but there was more back story needed here, so in the next chapter I had to do this:

I'd better explain about Dave. Mum said he was our new dad, but we already had a dad, even if he didn't live with us any more, even if Mum and Dave had got married. Everyone liked Dave except me. Nan liked him. Billy liked him. Mum liked him, obviously. I didn't hate him. I just didn't want a new dad, that was all.

Sometimes it's only by writing that you start to see new possibilities. I started writing a book about a little boy who was scared of everything being confronted by really scary seagulls, and then discovered I was writing about a couple of boys trying to come to terms with all the upheavals involved in their dad leaving, their mum's new relationship and moving to a new house in a new town.

Other ideas grew out of this. It didn't take me long to realise that although Eddie, the book's narrator, loved his little brother, he was already worried about how embarrassing Billy might be when they started their new school. I know a thing or two about starting new schools because I started new schools five times when I was young, so my own feelings fed into Eddie's at that point. And I knew that the boys would need school uniform and they'd have to meet the head teacher and make new friends. That was fun because I was able to put my real school secretary into the book as a fictional school secretary. I suppose you could call that an idea. She was alarmed when I told her, but I reassured her that all she did was take Eddie along to his classroom. I should say here that Kate Sheppard's illustration looks nothing like the real Mrs Gooch.

I also needed a class teacher (a good one) for Eddie, so I gave him my friend, Mike Ingham. You can read about the real Mike Ingham here. But Mr Ingham, and the project about recycling arrived about nine months after I started working on the book, and that was because I got stuck. It wasn't until I was cycling on the Isle of Skye that summer that it occurred to me that a peregrine falcon and a landfill site were the answers to my problems with the book, and that idea literally came to me in an instant. 

Mike Ingham was an inventive teacher

Where did the idea come from? I could never have thought of it if the school where I was working hadn't organised a visit to a landfill site as part of a recycling project, and if the foreman who showed us round hadn't explained that the council had someone who flew a peregrine over the site to keep the seagulls off, and if I hadn't happened to read about the problems caused by seagulls nesting on buildings. But in the months that I'd been stuck and unable to complete the story, all these things had happened, and they all fell into place that afternoon, more or less as I was taking this photo, on the road between Glen Brittle and Sligachan. But if I hadn't been trying to write the story those random bits of information would never have coalesced into an idea.

When I started writing, all I really knew about the structure of the book was that Billy would end up not being scared of seagulls. What I hadn't realised was that Eddie was just as scared as Billy and that the book would eventually be at least as much about Eddie overcoming his own fears. Those fears found a direct expression in Eddie's reaction to the awesomely fast plunge from the sky of the peregrine falcon, at which point Eddie discovers something about himself. I don't think I knew that was going to happen until I actually wrote about the peregrine.

Excellent peregrine!

The very first idea I had, to write about a little boy who was scared of seagulls, that never changed. But it's what happened during the process of writing that turned it into a book. I'm not sure if there's anything left in Billy of the original George who I taught. Maybe there's a kind of heroic magnificence about the hugeness of Billy's fears, and his ability to carry on despite them, and eventually to overcome them, or most of them, that owes something to George, but I definitely owe to George the original impetus to start writing. I put myself in here too, by the way. It's me who put the teapot in the fridge when I was distracted.

Having the ideas for this story took a few minutes, spread over twelve months. The 6,000 words or so that make up the 22 short chapters of Billy and the Seagulls took about a year to write, working two days a weeks for four or five hours a day as I tried to make the ideas into something that worked, and waited for the work itself to produce new ideas. And that's why I never really answer that question about ideas, because the question seems to imply that you have the idea and write it down and, hey presto, there's a book. 

What I can say is that, if you don't commit to doing the work, you are most unlikely to have the ideas you need to finish the book. And, amazingly after more than 20 years, should you want to read Billy and the Seagulls you can still buy it as a Kindle book.

Unusual Results by Steve Way

 Happy New Year Everyone! I wish you a successful and creative 2025!

As my Blog Day and The New Year approached, far too quickly for me to think of anything sensible to say as usual, I wondered if I could produce any words of wisdom to impart to spark off the new year and inspire you to even greater artistic achievements.

Realising I couldn't… I thought instead I’d share one of my stories with you instead.

As I’d been born abroad and because my parents weren’t interested in football, I was ignorant of the ‘beautiful game’ until I was ten years old. When I finally came across it, I was entranced. One feature that embraced the world of football that I loved was the reading of the results on the telly at around 4.45 on a Saturday. I found the rhythm of the reporter’s voice comforting in that it was soothingly predictable and yet slightly different each week, like a narrative poem that was never quite the same. What absorbed me most were some of the intriguing names of the teams. To a ten-year-old, they didn’t sound like the logical names of football teams. ‘Wolverhampton Wanderers’. Surely the last thing you want to do in a football match is just wander about? ‘Sheffield Wednesday’. Why Wednesday? Why not Tuesday or Thursday, or more logically Saturday? I couldn’t understand why Ham should need a geographical appellation, or cooked meat be involved in the first place. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the district of East Ham existed to counterbalance West Ham. (Though do they have a football team?)

The Scottish team names were the most elaborate and gloriously inexplicable though. ‘Heart of Midlothian’, ‘Queen of the South’. The former sounds like the title of a traditional ballad, the latter the title of a romantic historical novel. Is a ‘Partick thistle’ a particular variety of a plant?

Anyhow, it was this love of the football results that inspired this story. I hope you like it.

Unusual Results. By Steve Way

The poor queen's nerves were strained to the limit so much of the time that some of her courtiers thought they might spring apart with a loud twang like an overtightened violin string, certainly she was beginning to look much older than her young age.

        The delicate gifts Queen Petunia and her husband King Popple received from other kings and queens were all placed on top of the mantelpiece over the fire in the throne room. There was only one problem. The mantelpiece was very old and frail. The slightest knock could make it shake in an unpredictable way and one of the valuable ornaments they had received from other kingdoms would fall off. Even a loud noise, like a door banging in the distance, could get the mantelpiece shaking and items falling.

        Unfortunately, because the king had eaten some magic jelly the wizard had made, which was supposed to make him sing better but hadn’t, he was now suffering the unfortunate side effects. The king had become too distracted to order the repair of the mantelpiece or to realise that if one of their pieces of china broke it would bring some disaster upon the kingdom. This was because all the gifts were imbued with magic and if they were broken the magic would be released in very unpredictable ways. Instead, because of the effect of the unfortunate jelly, the king just sat on his throne all day making up football results or reading them out once the Royal Newspaper arrived on Saturday evening.

        You might think that the queen could quite easily order the mantelpiece to be repaired. She did. But unfortunately, the king and queen ruled a kingdom where the king and the queen had to give the orders in duplicate. Normally that was a very sensible arrangement because it was less likely that either of them could issue a daft order because the other one would disagree with them. Now though it was a problem because every time the queen commanded the chamberlain, "I order the royal carpenters to repair that mantelpiece!" The king would say something like, "Swindon Town 5 Manchester United 1,” which although very sensible in its own way was no use to anybody now.

        Every now and then the queen would try giving the order again, in the desperate hope that the king might say something sensible this time, but it never worked. He just responded with another football result.

        Once when the cook had accidentally knocked over all the saucepans in the kitchen, which made such a racket it shook the whole castle, the queen had had to do a dive halfway across the throne room, like a goalkeeper, to catch a pottery figure before it smashed on the floor.

        "Well done, your majesty!" cheered the chamberlain.

        "That was close!" replied the queen, not catching her breath.

        "Preston Town 4 Leeds United 0," said the king.

        "When will the side-effects of this blasted jelly of yours wear off?" the queen asked the wizard.

        "III-don't-know-your-maaajesty!" the wizard sang in reply.  For some curious reason the jelly, which he’d eaten at the same time as the king, had made him able to sing beautifully. But now he could only sing and not speak. "III'mmm-wo-working-onnn-it! N-N-No-lu-luck-yeet."

        "I can't order the china to be put safely elsewhere because poor Popple wouldn’t order that as well and I can't order a reward to be offered to cure the king because he'd even have to agree to that order too." wailed the queen. "I don't think I could stand it if another thing breaks."

        So far only two very small and relatively insignificant gifts had fallen off and broken. One had been a tiny thimble from the rulers of a very tiny kingdom who couldn't afford anything bigger. It had fallen off when a gust of wind had blown in when the chamberlain had opened the window to let some fresh air into the tense atmosphere of the throne room. As soon as it smashed, the magic the thimble released turned everyone’s ears purple and a kind of purply wax dripped out of them slowly all day, every day, from then on. 

    The other gift had been tiny pottery hedgehog which had been a part of a set of hedgehogs that got increasingly bigger, which had been presents from the rulers of the third kingdom on the left past the nearest mountain, who happened to be hedgehogs. The pottery present had fallen off when one of the pages who had a cold sneezed. It was such a violent sneeze that it had set the mantelpiece rocking and the largest hedgehog had moved and bumped into the next hedgehog and moved it and so on down the line of neighbouring hedgehog figurines. As soon as the tiny hedgehog's broken spikes shot off into a hundred different directions, all the children under the age of five in the kingdom started thinking they were cows and spent all day mooing and standing about in fields eating plants until their fifth birthday.

        "If those two tiny ornaments contained enough magic to cause that much damage,” moaned the queen as she wiped her ears for the twentieth time that morning. "Goodness knows what would happen if one of the larger ornaments got smashed."

        Just then the chamberlain had an idea!

        "It's a long shot,” said the queen, after he’d explained it to her. "But it just might work…"

        The queen and the chamberlain made up some imaginary football results as though they were in a newspaper, hoping that the king would read them out. Luckily, he read out their fictitious results, as if he were reading from Saturday’s newspaper, as well as continuing to make up his own results.

To begin with they’d used the names of authentic football teams but gradually they’d introduced a few daft words into the list, to see if he’d notice, which might mean that their plan would work.

They were relieved and hopeful when at one point the king read out these results,

        "Southampton Town 3 Sausage Roll 1,

        Tranmere Rovers 2 Dirty Socks 6

        Toilet Roll 4 Bristol City 1.”

        As the king clearly hadn’t noticed the daft words, in the next list they passed him they wrote this “result” in between the others,

        "Cure King 1 Reward Given 1."

        "I also order a reward to be given for the king to be cured!"  declared the queen as soon as the king had read out that “result” and so at last the pages were able to dash off around the kingdom offering a reward for the curing the king. 

Next the queen and the chamberlain wrote,

        "New Mantelpiece 4 The Fireplace 1."

        "I also order a new mantelpiece to be made for the fireplace!" commanded the queen as soon as the king had read out this new “result” and so finally the royal carpenters were able to start making a new mantelpiece in the royal workshops. 

Following that success, the queen and the chamberlain wrote,

        "Move China to Safe Place 2 Protect it from Damage 0"

        "I also order the china to be moved to a safe place while the new mantelpiece is being made!" ordered the queen. At last, the maids could carefully take the china gifts off the rickety old mantelpiece and put them in a glass cupboard, safely out of harm’s way until the new mantelpiece had been completed.

 

~~~

 

Two weeks later everything seemed a lot brighter, not only because it was now a glorious summer. The queen looked a lot more relaxed and standing on a gorgeously carved and constructed mantelpiece stood the china gifts, all looking perfectly safe.

        "Thank goodness for that,” said the queen. "Things are so much better now."

        "That's right your majesty; you look so much better..." replied the chamberlain.

        "Carlisle United 1 Bolton Wanderers 1,” said the king.

        "We do still have one or two problems though..." the chamberlain pointed out.

        "Yes, you're right," agreed the queen wiping the purple wax from her ears for the thirtieth time that morning. "Not one person has come forward to even try to cure the king and even that won't solve the problem of these blasted purple ears... and are the poor children still mooing?"

        "I'm afraid they are, your majesty,” replied the chamberlain.   

        The chamberlain and the queen couldn't help looking at the wizard. The poor man had attempted to invent two potions to rid the citizens of the kingdom of their productive purple ears and to cure the children of their mooing. As you would expect, as a safety precaution this round, he’d initially tried the ear potion out on himself and the anti-mooing potion out on his four-year-old son. The wizard now had two enormous ears that looked exactly like dartboards and his son was now totally convinced that he was a piano and kept telling everyone that he needed tuning.

        "Any new ideas, wizard?" asked the queen.

        The wizard just stood silently where he was, lost in his own inventive thoughts.

        "He can't hear with those ears, your majesty,” explained the chamberlain.

        The queen wrote "Any new ideas?" on a piece of paper instead, which she passed to the wizard.

        "I-I-I-mi-mi-ght-be-onn-t-t-to-somee-thinggg” wrote the wizard. He even had to write as though he was singing.

        "Hmmm,” hmmed the queen and the chamberlain. Neither of them very sure whether it was a good thing if the wizard thought he was onto something or not.

        "Aston Villa 3 Nottingham Forest 2,” said the king.

        Just then the chamberlain had another brilliant idea.

        Once again, the queen was guardedly optimistic about the chamberlain’s plan and she and the chamberlain began making up what looked like the sports pages of the newspaper. Not only did the pretend pages include tables of football results, which the kind read eagerly, they also created reports about other sports as well as football, such as cricket and tennis, to make their work look more authentic. Their reports had headlines like, "Wonderful Wilberforce gets ready for Wimbledon” and "Amazing Abdul picked for England in the Test". The king didn't read the reports - he only read out the football results of course - but it seemed to the queen and the chamberlain as if he scanned the headlines.

        When they thought he was ready they handed him another pretend sports page which had just one enormous headline. It boldly declared "FOOTBALL SEASON OVER!"

The king gazed at the headline for a few moments, then looked over to the queen and said, "Thank goodness that's finished."

After that he was completely normal again and couldn't believe he'd just spent over a month just making up or reading out football scores. In fact, for years afterwards he would still ask members of the court if he'd really done so. He thought it was some kind of elaborate joke that everyone had played on him and that one day he'd get someone to admit it, which of course he never did.

        "Well done!"  said the queen to the chamberlain.

        "Yes... well done... apparently...” said the king to the chamberlain, following on from his wife’s cue, particularly after she’s pointed jabbed him pointedly in the ribs with her elbow. "Ugh! What's all this..." continued the king as he wiped some thick purple wax from his ear. While he'd been ill, or confused, or whatever he was, one of the courtiers had regularly wiped his ears with a cloth for him.

        The queen and the chamberlain explained the two problems that still faced the people in the kingdom. Just as they'd finished explaining the problems... you've guessed it... the chamberlain had yet another brilliant idea.

        It turned out that the chamberlain’s idea was a way of turning the disadvantages the people of the kingdom were suffering into advantages until the wizard finally invented a potion that removed them. The chamberlain suggested that everyone wear special earrings shaped like tiny buckets, which collected the purple wax as it dribbled out of peoples’ ears during the day. The wax was then collected to make candles to light everyone’s houses at night and so the kingdom saved a fortune in electricity.

As all the children under five years old were standing about in fields mooing all day, the chamberlain pointed out that it was impossible for them to get lost, something under-fives are usually really good at doing, particularly when in large crowds or shops and especially at the worst and most worrying moments. Also, as they all thought they were cows it was no problem getting the children to eat their greens, something many children are notoriously resistant to doing, despite all the incredible benefits. When the children were finally five and stopped thinking they were cows, at least they were safe and very healthy, even though they couldn't read.  Interestingly, it turned out because they'd eaten so healthily in their first five years the children learned to read really quickly plus all the children claimed they'd had great fun being cows all day, outside in the fresh air.

        Eventually the wizard did find an antidote to the purple wax-producing ears and the cow-children and finally he got his normal ears back and his son stopped thinking he was a piano, though he refused to play one ever after.

       

        THE END.