Oliver Jeffers

This room is where we make food hot.

This is the room we keep our collection of chairs, and so on.

It's refreshing, explaining how our planet works to a zero-year-old.

But after the laughs, and once the magnitude that you humans know absolutely nothing settles on you, and how little you know either, explaining the whole planet becomes quite intimidating.

But I tried anyway.

As I walked around those first few weeks narrating the world as I saw it, I began to take notes of the ridiculous things I was saying.

The notes slowly morphed into a letter intended for my son once he learned to read.

And that letter became a book about the basic principles of what it is to be a human living on Earth in the 21st century.

Some things are really obvious, like the planet is made of two parts, land and sea.

Some less obvious until you think about them, like time.

Things can sometimes move slowly here on Earth.

But more often, they move quickly.

So use your time well, it'll be gone before you know it.

Or people.

People come in all different shapes, sizes and colours.

We may all look different, act different, and sound different, but don't be fooled.

We are all people.

It doesn't escape me that, of all the places in the universe, people only live on Earth, can only live on Earth.

And even then, only on some of the dry bits.

There's only a very small part of the surface of our planet that is actually habitable to human life, and squeezed in here is where all of us live.