Dragon Territory

Monday 7 March. Irvine. Home of the dragon.

No, no, I’m not being rude about Sharon the librarian at Irvine Library. No, no. She’s great. And an AC/DC fan. No, I mean the dragon in Irvine Beach Park. It's huge and was the inspiration for DarkIsle, the brilliantly exciting novel that won the 2008 Royal Mail Awards for Children’s Books. Keith was at the award ceremony to see the author – Dawn Nelson – collect her prize. In the story this dragon is brought back to life to save a special world, one we can’t see. There’s also a great sequel – DarkIsle: Resurrection. Exciting and funny both at the same time.

Luckily the pupils we were meeting weren’t breathing fire when they arrived. Neither were their teachers, unlike mine, the notorious Mrs Ogilvy…or The Ogre as we all call her. (We once went to a school in Bishopbriggs, on the outskirts of Glasgow, where the teacher there was also called Mrs Ogilvy and the wonderful woman wore a T-shirt for my visit, across the front of which it said THE OGRE in big letters. Heh heh. Ah, what it is to have a sense of humour? (We passed the same school on the train the other day. It’s been demolished. Hopefully that didn’t have anything to do with our visit!)

Irvine Library must surely win the prize for Longest Library in the UK’. It’s not very wide, but it goes on and on and on. If you enter by the front door on Monday you don’t reach the back door until Thursday! Okay, slight exaggeration, but does seem to go on for ever…a bit like the author bloke sometimes.