Today I Have Mostly Been Reading...

I bought this from one of the stores in the Leftfield at the Glastonbury Festival (could have been the War on Want store, thinking on it), and read it all in one sitting. As I was buying it, a lad came into the tent behind me and said, "I love that book! Mine's falling to bits, I've read it so much."

He was right. It is meant to be funny, but it's also meant to be passing on a serious message or 10. I found myself chuckling aloud at first, then carrying the message away with me, which means that Polyp has done his job and done it well.

All of his cartoons fall into that broad category, so easily ignored by trillions of people, as 'politics'. Thousands of people are dead... oh! I'm not interested in politics. There's another war and our own troops are dead... oh! I'm not interested in politics. There are children being sold into slavery by parents who know that's the only way to stop them from starving or being bludgeoned in the night... oh! I'm not interested in politics.

Well, I am.

If you don't buy this book, I'll buy it for you for Christmas.

Get the scene. I bought this from the Speaking Tree tent, in the Field of Avalon, at the 2004 Glastonbury Festival. A group of us sat in Cafe Avalon flicking through it, while the mud grew muddier outside.

Two days later, I meandered up to the top of the Stone Circle, with my chair, as I'd strained my Achilles tendon, and started to read it from the beginning. As the wind came down on that Saturday, I moved to shelter against one of the stones in the Swan Circle, with the atmosphere around and within me as it must have been in 1971. It was wonderful!

By the time I'd got to the 80s, I'd spent a bit more time in the Left Field and I was now back at my friend's house in Brierley Hill. The friend who introduced me to Billy Bragg and New Model Army, and has been going to the festival since the early '90s.

By the time I read through until the sanitized era of my own attendance at the Festival (I went for the first time in 2002), I was snuggled up in my sleeping bag on a friend's floor, having a cigarette and drinking cups of tea. In short, I think the world kind of altered ITSELF to ensure that I was in the right zone for every era of the Festival.

This book certainly opened my eyes. It's made me look at the Festival, not as a hippy, witchy type out on an Alice in Wonderland adventure, but as an historian. There was so much which I quite simply didn't know, even after all those years of clicking onto websites, watching it on the telly and canting with people who had been.

I would recommend this to anyone, but for those who have actually been to the Glastonbury Festival, it's a must.

Bookshop Kate has been going on and on about this book (well, five books, as the sequence is the collected books: 'Over Sea, Under Stone', 'The Dark is Rising', 'Greenwitch', 'The Grey King' and 'Silver on the Tree'), until I just gave up, bought it and proceeded to read it during my fag breaks.

I loved it! It's aimed at children again, but the complexities of the narrative and the cameos by so many Celtic and Anglo mythological characters make it a delight for adults too. There were holes the size of Bournemouth - why couldn't Merriman take the dangerous quests off the children? - but they aren't the questions that children would ask and I constantly had to slap myself one for asking them.

I did find myself falling into the story time and time again, and I stayed up until 4am to finish it after promoting it from fag break reading only into gotta finish it! reading.

Recommended for children of all ages.