Stephen Herrick

And there's more shows booked after that that may well cancel as well, of course.

Oh, and me missing out on the joy of performing for them.

I love my job and I feel really stuck here in my study now, I'm afraid.

Absolutely.

So my year is normally divided into three sections.

Between October and January, I write a book, a fiction novel or verse novel for children or teenagers.

For six months, I visit schools.

And for three months, I ride my bicycle around Europe until I fall off.

and write a book about that.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

But you can see that coronavirus has basically stopped nine months of my year from taking place.

So having just spent three months in my study from October to January writing a book, I'm now back in my study writing another book.

because I've got no option.

At the moment, I'm reading a book called All Together Now, One Man's Walk in Search of His Father and the Lost England by Mike Carter.

And it retraces a jobs march that was partly organized by his father and took place in 1981 at the height of Thatcherism.

And this man, Mike, is retracing those steps in 2016, just before the Brexit vote.

So he's kind of trying to find his father on the walk, but also trying to get a sense of the country that he's walking through.

I mentioned that I was in the middle of writing a young adult fiction novel, so I tend to read as far away from those sorts of books as possible when I'm writing.

Plagiarism is not nice, so I avoid that.

I've always enjoyed Mike Carter.