David Almond

The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.

Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum."I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school.""A school, my lady?""Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"I said nothing."What colour's a blackbird?" she said."Black""Typical!

Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers."Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.

The season of evil," I echoed. "Protect your soul.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.

I don__ want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I__l be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it__ possible to be. I__ growing and I don__ know how to grow. I__ living but I haven__ started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it__ like I__ not here in the world at all and I simply don__ exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome?

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back.

I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.

In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.