The bestselling author of Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo! and dozens of other marvellous children's books is a longstanding supporter of shedworking, as he explains in the BBC video above."I've always had a shed" he reveals.
"I wake up before 6am, listen to the radio for a bit and then take a cup of coffee down to the shed, which is where I write," he explained in a nice article for The Daily Telegraph at the weekend. "At that time of day there is no one around. At about lunchtime my motor runs out. I have a can of soup and at 1pm I go to sleep – I mean actually get undressed and go to bed. I might do a bit more in the afternoon. I’m like a dripping tap. I don’t do very much at one time but I do it seven days a week so it is constant. This is the fourth shed I have owned. I line the walls with bits of work that children have sent me, photographs of my family, cartoons and clippings from the newspaper. They’re all yellowed now, and a snail has started chewing its way up from the bottom. But I love being surrounded by this cosy panorama as I work."
The garden office does sound cosy. A feature in the Guardian a couple of years ago revealed that "covering every inch of the pin-boarded walls is the history of 35 years of a writing life that has produced more than 140 books for children, from picture books to poetry to stories. There are notes, drawings, family photos, ancient toys that have been brought to life in stories, layouts, shelves of proofs. "If I get stuck for an answer, I can just start reading the walls." -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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