Apparently Martin Amis's

father Kingsley was once nudged off a list of literary greats by the late, great Rosemary Sutcliff.
It does not surprise me. Rosemary Sutcliff knew how to write. Reading her books about Roman Britain is rather like being there.
Reading Cynthia Harnett is also rather like being in the Cotswolds of old or Caxton's London too.
You can almost smell the smells and feel the discomfort of these places. There are descriptions of food and you suddenly realise there are no potatoes or tomatoes in Britain at that time. The barber is also the dentist and the modern technology of the time (in this case an early printing press) threatens the employment of others.
The journeys undertaken by Barbara Leonie Picard's characters are full of the dangers and discomforts of the times. There are also the Victorian discomforts and restraints on Gillian Avery's characters. These things are an integral part of the plots. The books could not have been written without them.
I was talking to someone yesterday who said, "It must be much easier to write a children's book now than it was a few years ago."
When I asked why she said, "Well now you can give them computers and mobile phones and so on. You don't have to work out ways for them to get information and talk to one another behind the backs of adults."
To me that makes it much more difficult. I do not necessarily want my characters to have the ease of communicating by mobile 'phone. Indeed, if they can communicate in such a way there might be no need for a story at all. If they can just look up information on the internet it may spoil the story line completely.
Of course there are writers who handle mobile 'phones and computers and other modern technology as essential parts of the story. There are many detectives who use computers - and there are others who do not.
Recently there has been a rash of books set in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The person I was talking to saw this as a serious restriction on the writer's ability to plot a story.
I am not wildly keen on the writing of new "Sherlock Holmes" novels or another book about Jane Austen's "Mr Darcy" but I can understand the attraction of doing it. I can understand the attraction of returning to an earlier time.
Modern technology can restrict the plot just as much as it can enhance it. I am certain Rosemary Sutcliff wanted the freedom to explore issues that would not - for her - have been possible if she had set the books in her day and age. Other writers can handle those issues set in the computer age.
I was told "you have to keep up with the times because kids these days won't want to read about anything set in history. Remember children do not get taught history in school any more."
I do not agree. History is important. Children can find it fascinating. They do get taught some, although probably not the right sort or nearly enough.
I also think children will, just like adults, be happy with something set in another era as long as it talks to them. It is the writing that matters.

World Book Night is causing some

arguments. If you want to know more about it then please go and read Vanessa Robertson's
http://www.stateofindependents.co.uk/ here and the piece in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/10/world-book-night-branded-misguided-misjudged?commentpage=last#end-of-comments here.
You will find some comments by yours truly in the comments section of the Guardian piece but I am going to repeat them here.
When I set out on the International Literacy Year road I wanted to raise awareness of literacy issues. It is an enormous area and my personal interest was and has remained children's literacy.
It is probably far too simple-minded of me but I believe that if we teach children to read, teach them to want to read, to love reading then we may hook them on reading for life. That way we will have children who, to a large degree, will be able to educate themselves. They will not be confined to what they are given in school.
I know I was given very little of my education in school. From my very first day in school I was told not to expect to be taught too much. I was given that pile of books, put in a corner out of harm's way, and told, "Here dear, read." I read. I was lucky. I could read.
Some children arrive at school having some reading skills, others have none. Few children can already read in the sense that they are independent readers. Teaching them to read is the most important thing teachers in the early school years do. Almost everything else that happens in school is influenced by the ability to read.
This is one reason why I find World Book Night so strange. It appears to have nothing to do with children, those coming up the Reading Ladder. Why would you want to hand out novels to adults who are not hooked on reading? Looking at the list I hardly think the novels which have been chosen will encourage non-reading adults to read. They are certainly not books which are likely to hook them on reading. A well written, fast paced crime novel might - if given to a "non-reader" prior to their departure on holiday.
Now if the £9m apparently being used to support World Book Night had been given over to putting books into schools and the children's sections of libraries it might have hooked some young readers. If it had been done with the exhortation, "Buy a child you know a book" then it might have done even more. Adults, even non-reading adults, are largely aware of the importance of being able to read. They want their children to read, even if it is only so they can be sure they are getting whatever benefits the government is reluctantly handing out.
Turning children into readers has educational, social, psychological and economic benefits. That £9m could have been better spent - and it might have had positive consequences for writers, publishers and booksellers if it had been better spent.

Katie Fforde sent me an interesting

"tweet" yesterday in which she observed that technology was taking away opportunities to talk to people. She pointed out that, in England, you could buy train tickets on line and that you can now do your own check out at the supermarket.
There is at least one supermarket here in Adelaide where you can check out the items yourself. I have been there. I went through the checkout with a person. I had to. I had old-fashioned money in my hand to pay for a $1.99 purchase. (It cost me $2.00 of course.)
When I did the usual larger Thursday supermarkert shop yesterday and asked for a home delivery I passed my ID over to the student who works there on Thursdays. She wrote all the necessary information down and we then proceeded to talk about the essay she had asked me to read. As I left I heard the person behind me asking her what she was studying.
The boy who delivered the order is doing some sort of computer programming. He was having problems with essay writing last year. I pulled a few essays to pieces for him because one of the other students who works part-time had suggested to him that he approached me.
I am not the only one who does this. There are several people who will give these students a helping hand. They do not see their lecturers or tutors as much as they used to. The supermarket has a policy of employing students part-time. It is a good idea. It gives the students much needed part-time work and work experience. For the most part they are intelligent and able and they get valuable experience in mixing with a much wider variety of people. It gives the students human contact and the opportunity to learn "people skills".
If the supermarket went self-checkout some people would be delighted. They are the sort who rush in and rush out and have no desire to talk to anyone.
Others, such as the elderly, would be completely lost. It would not just be the technology that would cause them to be lost but the lack of human contact.
I have recently been responsible for one elderly woman in this district while her daughter has been away. The community bus picks her up on Thursdays and takes her to the shopping centre. Apart from that she is not mobile enough to go anywhere except by taxi. I called in about three on Tuesday and she said, "How nice to see you dear. You know I don't think I haven't spoken to anyone since Saturday. I found myself talking to the television set. Ridiculous. I am looking forward to Thursday."
She was quite cheerful about it but I sensed that, underneath the cheerfulness, she craved some human contact.
I have come across that sort of problem with the elderly before. It is why some of them eventually head for a nursing home. They want daily contact. It is comforting. It makes them feel safe and secure. They do not really want to live in an institution but it is preferable to living entirely alone.
Katie Fforde's "tweet" therefore alarmed me. I realised how true it is. There are people who, like me, work from home. They have little or no contact with other people during the working day. They convince themselves that they have "no time", that they are constantly "busy". They may believe they have large circles of "friends" but they really know very little about these people. They watch television in the evenings and then head to the pub at the end of the week. There they meet more casual acquaintances whom they call "friends. They will tell you that they do "talk to people". Yes they do but they do less of it than they used to.
They talk but they do not communicate.

Writing for children

is not "easier than writing for adults". Writing well for children is much, much more difficult. There is a discussion going on over on "An Awfully Big Blog Adventure" (Martin Amis: A response from a children's author - Lucy Coats). It makes good reading, very good reading.
(There were many things that bothered me about the Amis piece, especially the comment by Amis "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book." There is so much wrong with that statement. It is highly insulting to any number of people, including myself. Why did the BBC actually let that comment go through? I hope someone on BBC Ouch! picks it up and does something about it. I feel tempted to write to the man myself but he might think I am writing him a fan letter.)
My father is a retired school principal. He has always believed that the younger the child the more skilled the teaching needs to be. He has always said that the best and most skilled teachers need to be available in the earliest years of schooling. It has always puzzled him that these teachers have often been paid the least.
He holds exactly the same opinion about writing. He read English at university and, if anything, it sharpened his love of children's literature. Even now he will read the occasional children's book because, at 88, "there is still much to be learnt from any good literature".
That may well be why my father is still so open minded and tolerant about so many things. He likes new ideas. He will "chew them over". He spits some out. He swallows others.
I know adults who have not read a book since they left school and were no longer compelled to read anything. I know others who do read but would never dream of reading a children's book. I know still others who would only consider reading a picture book to a child.
There are very few adults I know, even teachers, who actually read children's fiction. The very suggestion that they should is met with puzzlement. Why would an adult want to read something written for a child?
The idea that there might be outstandingly good writing in a book for children and that the writing should be relished for its own sake is something with which they cannot come to terms. All too often their ideas about children's books come from what is popular rather than what is well written. The winner of the Carnegie Medal is not likely to catch their eye, nor are many other well written books. They will not even see a review in a newspaper - and how many adults actually read the book reviews? By no means everyone reads those.
Perhaps what is needed is much better marketing. Perhaps we all need to take the business of writing for children and reading what is written for children a great deal more seriously than we do. Adults might actually learn something.

There is a story in

our state newspaper this morning about a one-eyed driver who has had eleven accidents. One of those accidents resulted in the death of another person. Despite that he has been allowed to keep his licence to drive. Admittedly it has now been restricted to driving during daylight hours and he is, at last, back on a probationary licence but he still has his licence. His occupation is, unbelievably, that of a courier-van driver.
Now I have problems with this. As someone else with a disability I am all for people with disabilities "doing things" if they can. I do not think people should be restricted simply because they have a disability. That is obviously wrong but there may be times when, for the good of everyone, you need to restrict your activities or ask someone else for assistance.
I remember another person of my acquaintance with severe eye-sight problems. Even after he had been declared legally "blind" he continued to ride a motor-bike. I rather suspect he was riding without a licence. In the end one of his children, on a visit from interstate, found out and removed the motorbike. Fortunately he did it before his father actually had a serious accident and killed someone. It caused a severe rift between father and child.
Another friend of mine with a very severe speech impediment due to cerebral palsy was invited to accept an important award on one occasion. It necessitated the giving of a speech as well. He knew full well that he was not going to be understood so he did the sensible thing. He accepted the award, thanked the audience and then got his wife to read what he had written. His aim was to have the audience hear what he had to say. Some disabled members of the audience were strongly disapproving of this. They said he should have delivered the speech himself and made people listen harder. I disagree and I am not even going to be respectful about the way in which I do it.
I know this attitude once lost me a job. I was asked at an interview whether I thought a person with a "severe visual impairment" should be accepted as a soldier-in-training. I said "no" and, among other reasons, pointed out that such a person could put his or her fellow soldiers at risk. It was apparently the wrong answer. I was supposed to say yes. I still think no was the responsible answer.
There are limits and my friend who accepted the award knew his limits. I hope I know my limits and that, while I still want to explore the boundaries, I will not fall over the cliff by taking unnecessary risks. That puts other people at risk too. They may need to rescue me. It may prevent another person with a disability exploring their boundaries. I have to be responsible not just to myself but to other people as well.
I think all of life might be a bit like that - for everyone.

How would you build

a house in an area prone to flooding, or cyclones or bushfires or severe snowstorms? How would you supply power to them?
I have been pondering this of late, not because I plan to build a house but because it seems to me that other people should be thinking about these things.
There was, at last, one letter in this morning's paper about the possible wisdom of putting power lines underground instead of having them strung on poles overhead. Now that seems like a very sensible idea. I can only assume that it was assumed to be cheaper to put them overhead rather than underground. That would seem to be a false economy now that so many of them need replacing. True you cannot get to them underground in a flood - but it seems you cannot get to them overground either.
Bushfires have started because of overheard power lines. That seems like another good reason. Then there is the issue of what South Australians call "stobie" poles. These are the concrete and steel poles used to carry the power lines - designed to overcome the problem with white ants eating the wooden poles. Stobie poles have been a blessing and a curse - people claim they are the cause of accidents. What they mean of course is that someone has hit one because it happens to be there.
So power is a problem but it would seem to be one that could be relatively easily solved. If we are to have a National Broadband Network then it seems that the two things should be done together. That would be too logical.
The other problem however seems to be the way we build houses. My father wonders constantly at the number of new houses built without eaves. He asked a builder about this and was told that "this is what people want". In our climate it would seem sensible to at least have eaves. It would surely be cooler in summer? There are also basics like insulation and perhaps double glazing.
These things also assume that we go on building houses as we have been, with angular walls and a slanting roof. They are not cyclone proof or flood proof and they do little to combat the heat of summer.
So I have been wondering if we should build houses a different shape altogether? What if we built houses in the shape of an umbrella but without the handle or a mushroom without the stalk? Imagine a curved surface over which the force of a cyclone flows rather than a flat wall which it hits. Would it work?
I do not know enough about physics. I know nothing about architecture or design but I keep wondering whether we could design very different houses and learn to live comfortably in them.

Failing to save libraries will be

a false economy in the end. What is "saved" on libraries will be swallowed up in such things as "graffiti response" and "mental health services" and "early retirement due to stress and burnout". Worse still it might add to the work of the police and the law courts.
One death on the roads can cost our state around a million dollars. It sounds an enormous sum of money and I can see some people saying "you must be wrong" but, by the time you count in all the chaos, the confusion, the police time, the forensic time, the coroner's time, the time given by the other emergency services involved etc etc, it soon adds up. That does not even begin to include the emotional and financial impact on the family of the victim - who may also be victims themselves.
Nobody knows how many people choose to kill themselves by driving full speed into a tree. It happens.
Avoiding just one of those deaths by increasing library expenditure is surely worth it. Of course the problem is that you cannot actually say to the government, "If you spend a million here then
Jo or Josie Bloggs will not commit suicide and will become a taxpaying citizen." It simply does not work like that. It is quite possible that Jo or Josie may not use the library themselves - but the flow on effect will be such that they benefit.
And, of course, public libraries do cater for the mentally ill, the mentally unstable, the unemployed, the lonely and for people of all income levels and from every conceivable background. Even other libraries assist in this way. Our Guild library caters for this range of people too. The only differences between that library and the big public one are membership of the group and an interest in a much narrower range of topics - oh and perhaps availability as opening hours are, inevitably, rather limited. Still, it caters for a very diverse group of people and that matters.
Libraries are great levellers. In the television series, "Keeping Up Appearances" one of the characters, Onslow, is portrayed as rough, uncouth, badly dressed (usually in a workman's singlet) and generally low-class. He has good qualities however, one is a certain kindness and another is that he reads. At one point he is shown as reading a book on nuclear physics. Unlikely though this may seem I have also seen just such a real life character, a gardener with the local council, reading a similar book as he ate his lunch and saying enthusiastically to the person next to him, "Hey, listen to this. It says here..." He then proceeded to read a portion. The book was a library book.
Without a library I doubt he would have been reading the book. He could just have sat there, as so many of the supermarket employees do, and just stared into space smoking yet another cigarette.
What people choose to do of course is up to them. I happen to believe that reading is better than staring into space and smoking cigarettes. If libraries are not there however it is less likely that some people will read. Not everyone has the money to spend on books. If I had to rely on my own finances to read then I would read far less than I do. I would like to buy all the books I read and then perhaps pass on those I did not wish to keep. The reality however is that I cannot afford to do that. Most people cannot afford to do that. That is why we need libraries and why authors must be paid according to library borrowings as well as other sales.
Other people would never buy a book at all and that would mean they would never read. The television set, once bought, costs a few cents or pence for hours of "entertainment". The book is not going to be cost effective for the individual.
For society however books may well be the most cost effective means of caring for the community - and governments have to be made to understand that.