First reading and later writing has always been an escape for me. In the notes at the back of “Fred Goes to School”, I thank Mum for “My love of books, bears and children”. All three have been very much a part of me for as long as I can remember. As for books, she started reading to me even before I can remember – often either to prepare me for or distract me from something unpleasant. She read to me in hospital; she read to me when we realized I had to go away to school, to instill in me the idea that boarding school was something really exciting – and later she read to me to take my mind off the fact that, all too soon, I was going to have to go back to school! And sometimes, she just read to me because we were tucked up in front of the fire, while the winter was doing its worst outside. From fairytales, we moved on to boarding school books, then Enid Blighton adventures. She would knit complicated patterns and read for hours, while I sat on the floor creating my own versions of the scenes she was describing, out of lego or plastersine – or whatever I had to hand.

There’s a tendency to believe that if someone’s eyesight isn’t good enough for them to appreciate pictures directly, visual images can’t matter too much to them. It isn’t true – at least, it never has been for me. I have a very visual brain – it draws cartoons, landscapes, people – you name it! It even turns non-visual information into visual images. When I’m working with sound, I think about “changing the audio landscape”, introducing “colour”, avoiding “monochrome” – even “creating a mosaic”! I see the flow of a programme as the changing scenery which rolls past a train window – and I completely confuse other sound people! When I’m writing, I think about adjectives like colours – blending them together to get the exact shade of description I’m looking for – and when I want to show more than one view point of a scene or an incident, I visualize it in terms ofcamera angles. I suppose it’s inevitable really – I come from a line of talented amateur artists – but the fact that I have “shadow vision” means this way of thinking wasn’t picked up and developed when I was a kid – I had to discover and develop it myself when I grew up.

That’s one reason I want to do a project with the kids at my old school. I want to get them thinking about pictures. More than that, I want to get them excited about pictures! Whether or not they can see them clearly – or at all – is irrelevant. What matters is that they live in a primarily visual world and the more they can understand – and better still, embrace it, the easier – and more importantly, the richer their lives will be. My mental imagery might confuse people at first, but it usually ends up opening up some interesting and exciting avenues. On the most basic level, once people know I see radio programmes as changing landscapes from train windows and books as films, they stop being afraid of words like “look” and “see” – at which point, everyone can relax and be themselves!

Over the last month or so, after three decades, Mum has started reading to me again. She’s read extracts of books aloud in the intervening years, but “Call the Midwife” by Jennifer Worth was the first full book in all that time. The author’s real talent, I think, is juxtaposing humour and pathos, serious moral issues and pure naughtiness, to create a very clear, 3D, full-colour picture (sorry! There I go again!) of her life as a young midwife, a not very religious girl (to begin with anyway), working in an East-end convent in the 50s. At first, Mum just read out the best bits –but before we knew it, she was reading the whole book. Then came “Shadows of the Workhouse”, also by Jennifer Worth – and last night we finished “The Girl in the Red Coat” by Roma Ligocka –the author’s experience of a childhood spent trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazis in Poland in WW.II and its effects on her adult life.

I know what you’re thinking – not exactly light reading! Well, no – but I can read light for myself any time I like. I could have read these for myself too, but it wouldn’t have been the same. They were three quite different books (even though the two by Jennifer Worth follow each other), but they were all better shared than read alone.

Reading, whatever the subject-matter, is still an escape – and being read to means escaping with company. I might end up being absorbed into another reality –at times a lot more grim than anything I’ve ever had to deal with – but it’s still an escape from concerns about business, money, the future etc. And there’s another element: Mum and I have always been close, but there are all the usual undercurrents that flow beneath the healthiest relationship between a mother and her adult daughter – the mutual tensions between the need for separateness and interdependence – and they’re accentuated for us because for the last several years we’ve shared a house; Mum’s house; the house I grew up in; the house she ran for years – and which now she finds it progressively harder to manage without my help. It makes for an “interesting” dynamic – a delicate power-balance – sometimes; but when we’re reading, all that is forgotten. We’re completely in harmony – just like when I was little (the way I remember it anyway). We don’t quite recreate the scenes from my childhood – but the atmosphere (for me at least), isn’t so different. these days Mum can’t knit because of her arthritis – so she reads while I wield the needles. I made a fluffy jacket for the upcoming company launch while she read the second Jennifer Worth and I made great headway with a red shrug (appropriately enough) during “The Girl in the Red Coat”. I’ve a strong feeling that whenever I wear the clothes I’ll remember the books – and if I’ come across the books, or the authors, I’ll think of the clothes. We often don’t know when we’re making memories until, a few miles down the road, we pause and look back; but when I’m knitting and Mum is reading, I’m very aware of making memories – memories which I suspect will be very important in the future …

A year or so ago, I read in India Knight’s column in the Sunday Times about how, around five years earlier, she’d shed five stone – and kept it off. One of her tips was, “Find yourself some trousers of truth”. They should, she said, be a pair which don’t fit you when you start, so that you can gauge how much you’ve shrunk by how close they come to fitting.

My trousers of truth are a favourite old pair of jeans, which button up rather than zip. I’ve had them for about fifteen years. Back in 1994, they were really comfortable, but for more years than I care to admit since then, I haven’t been able to do the buttons up – not if I’ve had any plans to breathe anyway. The last time I tried them on, a few weeks ago, I could pull the two edges of the opening together – but if I forced the buttons into the buttonholes, there was no way I was going to be able to sit down. This morning when I put them on, they fitted exactly as they did when I was twenty-six.

Spurred on by that, I decided I would get back on the scales after all. Believe it or not, she now reckons I’ve lost the weight she said I put on last week, plus a pound. Great news! – but I Can’t help thinking that’s as unlikely as putting the weight on in the first place – not least because, on Wednesday afternoon, I attacked the chocolate biscuits, as I put it on my Facebook page, “in revenge for tiredness and frustration”. In future, I think I’ll take Paul McKennagh’s advice – “Forget to remember and remember to forget to weigh yourself for weeks at a time …” I think I’m better off trusting the trousers!

Kathy was so right when she said, back at the beginning, that publishing this way was “like giving birth”. She said the same thing on Saturday evening, on my Facebook page, in response to my running commentary on the progress (or lack of it) of the last stage of “labour”.

“Just picking up the new version of the book from Elaine. It’s copying across from
the server as I write … Now, can I still remember how to upload to Lulu …”
03 April at 19:14 •

“Just updated the blog … and the book is still copying! It’s a BIG file.”
03 April at 19:39

“New pages successfully copied and uploaded. Not so lucky with the cover – the file
that was perfectly adequate first time around suddenly isn’t right – so I’m back
to waiting – while it uploads again!”
04 April at 20:15 •

“Bad news from Lulu. “We’ve encountered a problem. We’re sorry We encountered an unrecoverable error. If you are unable to complete the publishing process, please contact support.” Not exactly the message I wanted!”
04 April at 20:40

(That was putting it mildly – had horrible visions of having to start the whole process all over again! Then I had another idea).

“Trying something else – copying the cover to my machine again, then uploading, rather
than trying to upload directly from Elaine’s server. All far too techy for a Saturday
night!”
04 April at 20:47

Cracked it! Just got a much better message: “Congratulations! You’ve published Fred
Goes to School”. It’s nearly as good second time around as it was first!
04 April at 21:03

“Just bought a copy of the new version of the book – at least I hope it’s the new version!”
05 April at 14:02

I’m not sure if the previous version is automatically over-written by the new one, so I wasn’t at all sure I’d put the right one in my virtual basket – until it arrived this morning. Ok, so the average adult may not be able to work out what the drawings are – and still less whether they’re in the right place or not – but as I said when the first version came through, the kids will know. It’s been worth the wait – and all the hassle – to get it right for their sakes.

I wasn’t going to weigh myself this morning. I was going to leave it until next week; but having worked so hard this week, I thought, “why not? Why not give my confidence another little boost? Even if it’s only a pound …” To my complete shock, it was actually a pound and a half – in the wrong direction! That’s bad enough when I know why, but on this occasion I have no idea what went wrong. The first temptation, of course, is to blame the scales. Mine talk – a female voice which I think is meant to be friendly but which this morning seemed to me to have a strong undercurrent of barely suppressed glee! When I step on, she says, “Hello,” – as though she’s genuinely pleased about being stood on! – and when she goes back in the box, she says, “Goodbye”. As for the bit in between, normally if I step on two or three times, just to be sure, she gives me two or three readings – but not today. Today, I tried three times and could only persuade her to come down four ounces. It’s very tempting to blame her – but I was quite happy to accept her verdict last week, so I can’t really complain this week if she wouldn’t say what I wanted to hear. Well, I can complain – but it won’t do me any good! I’ll just have to attack this As I try to any other setback (more often than not it works) – let off steam, go and kick something (preferably something that can’t kick back) and have another go.

“Mr P Sykes (Assistant Headteacher)
Dorton House School …

“31st March 2009

“Dear Mr Sykes

“Re: Fred’s Friends – Inspiring Children.

“I am an ex-pupil of Dorton House (1973/79). Thirty years on, I have had a career in law and am now the founder and director of a company providing multimedia business information.

“Fred’s Friends is a children’s charity which I am in the process of establishing. The tag line, “Inspiring Children”, is true on two levels:
Firstly, the aims are:
1 – to inspire children to discover and fulfill their potential through creative projects;
2 – to provide opportunities for apparently different groups of children to learn about each other from each other; and
Secondly, the children I had the privilege of working with on what became the pilot project last year truly inspired me. They brought “Fred Bear” (a little character I had invented twenty years earlier) to life and they rekindled my ambition to set up the charity – an idea which first occurred to me in 2002.

“At the root of the aims is my belief, born of experience, that the most disabling condition known to humankind has nothing to do with physical, mental, sensory or social limitations – it is in fact lack of self-confidence.

“Alongside my professional career, I have worked for many years with children of all abilities, in a range of voluntary roles – most recently, as a governor of Ghyllgrove Infant School, here in Basildon. Within our school community, we have particular literacy issues, especially among the boys – because reading and writing simply do not feature in their home lives. I have always been a keen reader and an aspiring author, so in 2007, I floated the idea of encouraging our Year2 children to work with me on the writing and illustration of a book. We decided to base the story around healthy eating, something to which the school is very committed. We planned the project over six weeks (Jan’ to March ’08), believing the children would get bored if we tried to carry on much longer. In the event, it ran for six months – and by the end, last July, the class was just as keen as they had been at the beginning. The book has just been published, using an online self-publishing service and we are now planning a party this July, at which my twenty-six co-authors & illustrators and I will officially launch it. The book was a real team effort – what thrilled our Headteacher and the Year2 class teacher was that even the most intractable non-writers picked up their pens and got involved.

“We also took a considerable amount of dvd footage, which we aim to turn into a film over the summer.

The Ghyllgrove project enabled me to realize several personal dreams – and it has revived another. In my last couple of years at Dorton House (before I moved on to Chorleywood), I enjoyed helping out with the infants (the beginning of my voluntary career?!). As an adult, I have thought many times of coming back at some point to work with the children, but the opportunity has not arisen – until now. I have the beginnings of an idea for another project, with your pupils of a similar age to the Ghyllgrove class, which I would very much like to discuss with you. Also, our Head is keen to explore the possibility of forging links between her school and yours – which ties in very closely with the charity’s second aim. I wonder whether we could arrange a meeting, at which I could show you the book (and maybe some of the film footage) and talk through a potential collaboration? If I may, I shall call you in a few days to see whether this might be possible. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me. Finally, there is more information about the Ghyllgrove project and the resulting charity – including Fred Bear’s biography – on my blog:
http://fredsfriends.wordpress.com.

“Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to speaking to you in the near future.

“Yours sincerely
Sherie L Griffiths LL.B”

Then, right in the middle of the six-month window I’d opened for myself, there was Christmas. I come over all Mumsy around Christmas and start cooking (the compulsion to get into the kitchen and make food from scratch usually wears off in the new year – but not this year). Aside from Christmas puddings, which I’ve made since around 2004, this time I rediscovered my ability to make pastry (I hadn’t done it since I was twelve), so took on the making of the mince pies, as well as doing the bulk of the cooking for lunch on Christmas Day – and obviously I couldn’t expect anyone else to eat my food unless I was prepared to join them (well, that’s my excuse – and I’m sticking to it!).

To be honest, Everything I’ve said so far has been an excuse – the simple fact is, I lost discipline – lost sight of my ultimate goal. Now, though, with spring in the air (well, it was last week!), the book in print and the launch in the planning – plus a new exercise bike-cum-cross-trainer – my resolve is back. I’ve lost three pounds in the last fortnight and am aiming for at least another half a stone before my company launch, on 11th May. So if you agreed to sponsor me, prepare to part with your cash – and if you didn’t, great news – there’s still time!

When I missed my original deadline, I was tempted to believe the whole plan was a failure; but then I thought again: one of the things I try to impress upon the kids I work with is that to screw up is ok – to give up isn’t. If you keep trying, you’ll get better – and eventually you’ll achieve. … So I have to practice what I preach, don’t I?

I’d really hoped to get the book published by the end of the summer, but when it hadn’t happened by September, I knew I had to put it to one side for a while, to concentrate on the day job – the company I launched just before I finished working with the kids. The biggest event in September, where the project was concerned, was Elaine’s production of the “proof”, showing how all the text and pictures would fit together. That was a landmark moment in itself!

Through the last few months of ’08, I felt so guilty every time I thought of the kids – they must think I’d forgotten all about them and the promise I made about publishing and distributing their work. Nothing could have been further from the truth – I just couldn’t find the time to push things forward.

Not until the beginning of this year was I able to pick up the threads. Only trouble was, they were still tangled. I can’t remember now how many times I tried to upload the files to the publishing site. First, I thought I’d done everything – but nothing happened (a re-run of the last attempt back in September). Next, I got the process right – but the battery on the laptop died in the middle of the upload. Then, at last: “Your file has been successfully uploaded” popped up on my screen! Just one small issue – it was the wrong file!!! It had been so long since Elaine had emailed me a corrected version of the inside of the book (there had been a few little errors, of my making, in the proof), I’d forgotten that the pdf she’d sent me (purely for checking) was a low resolution version. A print quality one would have been too big to email.

Once that was sorted and I had the right pdf of the pages, I turned my attention to the book cover. There was an option to upload a “one-piece cover”. I had a cover file, so I went for it – only to discover this was a two-piece version. So it was back to Elaine – again – to produce it in one piece.

Finally, on Saturday 7th March, I uploaded the right pdf of the pages and the one-piece cover, and got the message, “Congratulations! You have published “Fred Goes to School!”. WHOOPEEEE!!!

The next question was, would I like to purchase a copy? Well, of course I would. So off I went to add one to my virtual shopping cart. That done, I headed for the virtual checkout, feeling triumphant, debit card clutched in trembling hand. Could this really be “it” …? All went well – until I entered my card details. “We’re sorry,” came the politely automated message, “but we don’t currently accept this type of card.” … I won’t tell you what I said at that point – BUT I’ll give you a clue – it wasn’t “WHOOPEE!” …

Finally! – finally!! – finally!!! – the next day I laid hands on a credit card and successfully bought the first copy of the elusive book.

In the event it wasn’t too elusive – it arrived two days later. It looks fantastic, except (yes, I’m afraid there’s one more “except”) we need to move the pics around, so that they fit properly with the text.

That aside, I couldn’t wait to show it to Pat, at school. We were finally able to sit down last Wednesday (18th) – and although she agreed with me about moving the pictures, she absolutely loved what she saw!

The final stage of this pilot project is a book launch, which we’re planning for 3rd July. It’s going to be big! What started as a simple plan, to bring last year’s Year 2s back from the juniors and give them a bit of a treat, has now turned into a whole school event, with media coverage, celebrity guests – the lot! So watch this space …

“Hello
“This is a shameless plea for help. I’m looking to turn pounds (lbs) into pounds (£s – a stone and a half to be precise – the first stone by Christmas (starting today).
To explain:
“As you may know, I’m in the process of setting up a children’s charity.
“Fred’s Friends” will design and deliver creative projects for primary schools, to bring the curriculum to life and help kids discover and fulfill their potential.
The pilot project produced a children’s book – the “Note to Grown-up Readers” (attached) explains more.
We’re now working on a dvd of the project.
…

“One thing every project needs is funds – and as this is my baby, I feel I ought to put my money (well, other people’s) where my mouth is.
Shedding the weight is a personal challenge, but it’s an appropriate one because the pilot project involved getting a group of kids to teach someone else, thereby learning themselves, about healthy eating.
Also, ongoing, it’s all about unlocking children’s potential –and my own potential has on occasion been locked in by unnecessary weight.
So it’s going. I don’t need it and it makes sense to recycle it into something useful.
“If you want to know more, if you have any experience of running a charity, ideas for future school projects etc, or if you can sponsor me, I’d love to hear from you.
“Any businesses or individuals who can offer sponsorship or other help will be plugged as hard as possible at every opportunity (unless of course they prefer anonymity).
For starters, thanks to
Elaine Fisher of Computer confidence – http://www.comfi.co.uk
– for getting the kids’ book fit for printing and
Joy Smalley of Paper Mountain Solutions, our first treasurer – and very generous donor. Cheers girls!
“If you’re not able to help, no problem at all. Thanks for reading.
“Sherie”.

I’ll let you know what comes of that.