She should have tried the Eggs Benedict

As part of her Sunday Times series on ‘Living with the Homeless’ in 1979 Tanya Tilbury-Whiffle spent the weekend in a traveller’s caravan.  ‘It was absolutely shocking!’ revealed the celebrated romantic novelist, children's writer, biographer, historian, poet, painter, potter, sculptor, columnist, wit, wine expert, TV celebrity, gardener, composer, librettist, agony aunt, goodwill ambassador, peace envoy, vegetarian, animal campaigner and award-winning interior designer, ‘the coffee was cold and there wasn’t even a decent croissant. I just don’t know how these poor people manage!’

Please wait to be seated

Fanny and Dudley Hovis pose for pictures to promote Dudley’s book ‘Errol Flynn’s Ghost Invaded my Wife’  Fanny says that the ghost - pictured here sitting on the footstool - arrived shortly after she fell and cracked her head in the kitchen and now follows her everywhere. They eat, sleep and bathe together. ‘Since he arrived in the house he’s turned our lives upside down,’ said Dudley, who now has to sleep in the spare bedroom.  They are currently seeking a publisher.

He simply lost his appetite

After the phenomenal success of his BBC TV shows ‘Finger Food 

for the Over Forties’ and ‘Simple Snacks for Seniors’  ten-year-old 

wunderkind Macaulay Minge wrote a series of best-selling cookery

 books, a blockbuster novel, two volumes of poetry and a food column

 for the Guardian, before announcing his early retirement. 

“Writing is a young man’s game. If you haven’t made it by the time

you’re fifteen you should probably find a different career,”

 he told the Author, before asking him what he did for a living.  

A spin down Memory Lane

A rare photograph of ‘The Freewheelers’ aka Gladys Snorter, Bunty Pilchard, Elsie Potter and Alice Peak Freen, relaxing in the saddle after winning the Lucy Taffeta Cup - that most coveted Poetry Marathon Prize - for writing 500 stanzas of romantic light verse in under two hours at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1953.  

another five hundred . . .

The Author's invitation to read from his own collected poems

at the Truculent Polecat gastro-pub during the Edinburgh Festival 

is abruptly withdrawn again this year when fantastically funny TV

 celebrity, comic and star of the smash hit game show"You Gotta Laff'

Travis Smelter (above) is persuaded by the pub's landlord to read 

from his best-selling sequel to 'Five Hundred Favourite Fart Jokes"

and he spent weeks making that costume . . .

The police were called to a 'suspected hostage situation'

when veteran performance poet Derwent Fiddler caused

panic at the Edinburgh Festival by attempting to involve

young members of the audience in his 'Monty the Cannibal Mouse'

event.  "If it's not Harry bloody Potter they're not interested!" 

he grumbled as he was separated from the screaming infant. 

He plans to retire before his next birthday . . .

The Author is introduced to Eric Duncan-Macaroon the latest

twelve-year-old enfant terrible of modern English fiction

 and author of the best-selling autobiography 'The Early Years -

Confessions of a Troubled Twelve-Year-Old' soon to be made into

an award-winning BBC mini-series about a troubled twelve-year-old

and his struggle to write his own life story.