| My hair colour: | Formerly black, now greying rapidly. | |
| My eye colour: | Brown, with a nice network of burst blood vessels (too much staring at a computer screen). | |
| My shoe size: | 8 (UK). | |
| My star sign: | Aquarius. | |
| My favourite book when child: | Hard to say... there were so many! Deeply influenced by THE HOBBIT (read to my class during my last year at primary school) and LORD OF THE RINGS, as well as TREASURE ISLAND... | |
| My favourite fictional character: | Also hard to say... there are so many! Pip in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Holden Caulfield in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, Frodo in THE LORD OF THE RINGS (plus a bit of hero worship of Aragorn and Gandalf, of course), Philip Marlowe, Claudius in Robert Graves's I, CLAUDIUS, Mr Tom in GOODNIGHT MR TOM, Marcus in Rosemary Sutcliff's THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH... recent characters I like a lot are most of Jacqueline Wilson's heroines (especially Star and Dolphin in THE ILLUSTRATED MUM), and Angus in Morris Gleitzman's brilliant BUMFACE... I'd better stop here or I might go on for a long time! | |
| Books that inspired me to become a writer: | I read huge amounts as a
child... thanks to the public library system. I lived with my mum in
Anerley Road, SE20, and the library was over the road, so I used to
spend a lot of time there... I went through phases. I read loads of
historical fiction - Henry Treece, Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff...
and that led naturally to SF... Wells, Wyndham, John Christopher (who I
met and interviewed years later), plus the Americans, Heinlein, Pohl,
Kornbluth etc... then (this was in in the 60s), people like Ballard,
Aldiss, Moorcock... but by then I'd also got into Hemingway, Steinbeck,
Kerouac and the Beats, poetry of all sorts... Several other influences were very important (I'll come back to these later)... My formative years were the early/mid 60s, so I listened to The Beatles a lot, and as I've always said, the brilliance of their mid- period albums really did influence an essentially lonely, screwed up south London kid who spent a lot of time alone - some of those lyrics (Eleanor Rigby... In My Life... Things We Said Today) are incredibly visual, like perfect little movies... I loved the tightness of construction of those songs... Also, there was lots of other great music that I got into (The Kinks especially), loads of great TV writing, although I didn't know the names then - Galton and Simpson, Johnny Speight etc... great stuff at the pictures... it was an intellectually stimulating time, and I was lucky to be around when it happened. And one last thing... I always loved comics... US comics. Batman, Superman etc... bought at the local newsagent, collected, loved, read over and over again... |
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| My favourite author: | All-time favourite? Has to be old Bill himself... Mr Shakespeare, the bard of Avon. All-time children's faves? So many... Ahlberg, Dahl, King-Smith, Wilson, Gleitzman... also like Katherine Paterson, Rosemary Sutcliff, Robert Westall etc etc... | |
| My ideal reading position: | On a beach, under a sunshade, with a cool drink one one side and a pile of unread books on the other. | |
| My usual means of marking a place in a book: | Bookmarks, especially onegiven to me by my daughter nearly ten years ago, which is currently residing halfway through Andrew Motion's biography of Keats... | |
| My favourite time of year: | It has to be the autumn. Leaves falling, nights drawing in, early twilight, a chill in the air, scent of smoke in the streets... | |
| My favourite time of day: | When I stop working and emerge blinking into the bosom of my family... | |
| My best time for working: | I work all the time... but I suppose I'm at my most creative in the mornings. | |
| The first piece of work I was paid for was: | A poem in POETRY REVIEW. | |
| My favourite TV show: | Again, so many! Morecambe and Wise, Dad's Army, Til Death Do Us Part... more recently, The Simpsons, Frasier, The X-Files, all versions of Star Trek... plus the soaps, which I dip in and out of (East Enders and Coronation Street). Also used to like Byker a lot... | |
| My favourite song: | Loads again, I'm afraid. Things We Said Today... In My Life... The Two of Us (and a lot of other Beatles songs). High Hopes (Sinatra), September Song, Summer Time, La Pistola y El Corazon (Los Lobos), Ton Papa Est Ici (Beausoleil), Living In America (James Brown), Dock of the Bay, Midnight Hour (Wilson Pickett), plus loads of soul, Stax, reggae (Bob Marley's Get Up, Stand up, Duppy Conqueror), Hank Williams and loads of country and western (good stuff, though - not just hat acts and big hair singers). Recdently I've been listening to Nop Doubt, Fun Lovin' Criminals, new Robert Cray CD, new Pretenders CD, Will Smith... actually I'm notorious for coming home with another bag of CDs and saying... you must hear this obscure Stax/African/Cajun/Beatles compilation etc... | |
| My favourite actor: | Humphrey Bogart... James Stewart... James Cagney... early Jack Nicholson... early Clint Eastwood... Orson Welles (in The Third Man), Schwarzenegger (for proving that planks can act, but only in action/SF movies), Max von Sydow (in some Bergmans)... whoops, going on a bit here again... sorry!). | |
| The creature comfort I would most unwillingly relinquish: | No doubt about this one. Books. | |
| My favourite sweet food: | White milk chocolate buttons. | |
| My favourite savory food: | Char-grilled chicken with lemon and garlic. Lots of garlic. Actually, my wife and kids call me The Garlic King of south London, and they're always complaining of reeking of garlic after they've eaten the meals I cook. But as I always say, we don't have any problems with vampires... | |
| My typical bedtime is: | Very boring - about 10.30 to 11. (I get up early). | |
| My favourite year of childhood: | I don't really have one. I remember my childhood as being pretty tense a lot of the time, with some patches of real unhappiness. It got better towards my teens, though, and 16 wasn't bad (I went out a lot). | |
| My mousemat design: | I'm using the mat sent out by Macmillan to promote Rhiannon Lassiter's HEX (a really good book, by the way!). | |
| The tidiest place in my home is: | My sock drawer. I've just tidied it. | |
| The untidiest place in my home is: | The bookshelves above the desk where I'm writing this. They're piled about four or five feet high with tottering heaps of books... I often think that one day they'll fall on me and that will be my lot... | |
| The working tool I would least like to do without: | My brain. | |