Just Looking

KES is a good film for any day but especially a Sunday. This film comes from the same mould as Bill Naughton’s collection of short stories called ‘The Goalkeeper’s revenge’ and other stories. The settings for all these stories are hard English working class towns and cities, like Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. These places may not be more than football teams to you now but they were (like my own hometown of Glasgow) the industrial heart of the whole United Kingdom. My own childhood was not like those you will find in KES or Bill Naughton’s short stories but I did grow up with these stories because we read them in school and watched dramas like these on the BBC.

I have, up until now, avoided this type of communication. I am an old fashioned e-mailer. I think this will be a good way for us to share ideas, to show what we have been reading, watching, writing and creating. As I write my son, Jake lies asleep on the carpet. His mum has just burnt something in the kitchen and the whole house smells of smoked potatoes, similar to pancakes that are just too burnt to eat unless you are really hungry.

The first novel I am going to recommend is ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ by Mark Haddon. Books that are popular with adults and children are rare, very rare. Adults still like books that they read when they were younger but that is different. This book is written in the first person by an autistic boy. What the writer does that is so clever is to show us everything that Christopher sees but also a lot that he doesn’t understand. This is an inventive, original and highly accessible novel, weird, interesting fun and intelligent. It is not a children’s book or an adult book, it is just pure and simply a great book.