I spent the weekend after the British EU referendum at our house in Ireland, on the southern side of the border. I'd hoped to avoid discussing the vote entirely but it was all anyone wanted to talk about. Here's a snapshot of some of those conversations. You may notice a common theme emerging.

In The Post Office
S: You're welcome home, Brian.
Me: Thanks very much.
S: So what do you think of the referendum?
Me: I'm horrified.
S: Well I think yous have made an awful hames of it. I do, really.
Me: You're right there.
S: I'll tell you this much - any of them that has a few shillings in their pockets now will have a lot less to jangle next week. And aren't they the same eejits that voted for it?
Me: They are, indeed.
S: I'm not a conservative thinker, Brian, but I thought your man, Cameron, did a bully job. I can’t believe you turned him down. But what was wrong with the Labour fellow? Sure he was a total wash out.
Me: He was that.
S: Completely useless, so he was. I'd say he bears a big responsibility for the result.
Me: I'd say so, too.

In The Bar
T: Well, what do you make of this Brexit?
Me: It's a nightmare.
T: A nightmare is right. Will we have the border back again, do you think? All them customs posts and everyone smuggling butter and tea and the lord knows what?
Me: I hope not.
T: Have yous all gone mad or what?
Me: Looks like it.
T: I'll tell you what that man Corbyn was a dead loss.
Me: He was.
T: Sure he might as well have stayed in bed.

Outside The Church
M: What in God's name has got into you all?
Me: The referendum, you mean?
M: The referendum, of course.
Me: It's a disaster.
M: It's worse than that. I can tell you now, Brian, your father would have had something to say about this.
Me: He would have been disgusted.
M: Disgusted is right. What I want to know is this: what was the matter with the Labour party? Me: I couldn't tell you.
M: They disappeared off the map entirely.
Me: They did.
M: Well, yous are on your own now. And good luck to you.

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Those who have not been following the UK political scene avidly may be surprised to learn that analysts have made a remarkable discovery about racism. There are, indeed there always have been, two distinct kinds of racism: Bad Racism (the well-known kind) and Good Racism (the recently-discovered kind). Confused? No need to be. Here are some handy tips to help you understand and deal with the two kinds of Racism.

First, how do you go about telling the difference? Well, it's quite simple. Bad Racism is racism that is perpetrated by your enemies; Good Racism is racism that is perpetrated by your friends, or by any of the following.

• People who used to be your friends but have gone a bit mad
• People who you mistakenly believed were your friends but who were always a bit horrible when you weren't looking
• Up-and-coming people it might be worth keeping in with
• People who are on the way down but are not yet out

Obviously, being associated with any kind of racism, good or bad, is not desirable from a public relations point of view. So there are a number of strategies you can adopt to try to minimize the negative effects on your public profile. Here are a few suggestions.

• Stick your head in a bucket of sand
• Stand on your dignity
• Try to turn it into a joke
• Insist that comments have been taken out of context
• Point out some Bad Racism and shout very loudly about it

Alternatively, you could suggest that it was all part of a conspiracy. This usually works. It's best to make the conspiracy big. Really big. World-wide, in fact. And make the conspirators rich - bankers, financiers, that sort of thing. Make them powerful, influential and grasping. Oh no, wait a minute, scrub that strategy. I think it's been used already.

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"When I grow up," observes Zoe, "I will be a mummy and Theo will be a daddy". I consider pointing out that it is not quite so simple, that there are adults who cannot have children, adults who decide not to have children, adults who do not actually make a decision but because they don't meet the right person or because of circumstances - work, finances, health, whatever - just don't end up having children. However, she is only three and we are approaching the nightmare of municipal planning that is Lewisham Roundabout so I just say, "Right."

"Mummies have handbags," Zoe continues, "but daddies don't have handbags."

I glance at my man-bag lying on the passenger seat and decide this has gone far enough. (It is always the small things we focus on, the assaults upon personal vanity rather than the those against principle.) "I have a handbag," I point out.

Zoe revises her formula. "Mummies and grandpas have handbags," she decides.

I am tempted to continue the discussion but people are hooting their horns behind me so I just say, "Right" again and we set off across the roundabout, a little girl with firm opinions and an old man with a handbag.

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I have been reading the poetry of Po Chu-i, a minor government official living in China at the end of the eighth, beginning of the ninth century. This is one of my favourites. He wrote it after being packed off to be the governor of Pa district, where he knew no-one. He had to leave his family behind and it was clearly a lonely time for him.

I took money and bought flowering trees
And planted them out on the bank to the east of the Keep.
I simply bought whatever had most blooms,
Not caring whether peach, apricot, or plum.
A hundred fruits, all mixed up together;
A thousand branches, flowering in due rotation.
Each has its season coming early or late;
But to all alike the fertile soil is kind.
The red flowers hang like a heavy mist;
The white flowers gleam like a fall of snow.
The wandering bees cannot bear to leave them;
The sweet birds also come there to roost.
In front there flows an ever-running stream;
Beneath there is built a little flat terrace.
Sometimes I sweep the flagstones of the terrace;
Sometimes, in the wind, I raise my cup and drink.
The flower-branches screen my head from the sun;
The flower-buds fall down into my lap.
Alone drinking, alone singing my songs,
I do not notice that the moon is level with the steps.
The people of Pa do not care for flowers;
All the spring no one has come to look.
But their Governor General, alone with his cup of wine,
Sits till evening and will not move from the place!

Po Chu-i
(from Chinese Poems, translated by Arthur Waley
©The Arthur Waley Estate)

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My five year old grandson was running around the house last week with his four year old cousin shouting out, "Activate booster-packs!" at regular intervals and then, from time to time, "Activate Kadinskis!"

After a while I stopped him and asked, "What's a Kandiski?" He held up an object he had made from Duplo. It looked a bit like a long gun but even more like a scale model of the Heron Tower in Central London. Then he rushed off again.

A little while later, after persistent questioning by myself and his mother, it emerged that his class at school had been studying various modern artists and he was in a group that was looking at pictures by Kandinsky.

Education seems to be a bit like that these days. In an effort to improve standards that is reminiscent of Stalin's infamous Five Year Plans, curriculum guidelines are constantly being revised to include all sorts of improbable topics: bel canto opera for reception class, quantum mechanics for seven year olds. The teachers do their best to make it work but sometimes the children just end up running around activating Kadinskis.

As I watched those Kadinskis being activated it occurred to me that I shouldn't complain. This is exactly what I have been doing all my life - getting hold of half-understood scraps of knowledge and turning them into stories for my own amusement. It's why I became a writer, not an academic. It's so much more fun than learning.

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I'm sorry if this doesn't accord with fashionable liberal sentiment but I thought those cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo were an unnecessary and offensive provocation. The thing is this: Islam is much more than a religion. It's a matter of identity.

I can't help but remember my parents who came over to England from Ireland in the middle of the twentieth century and encountered widespread hostility. (And they looked exactly like the rest of the population.) My mother described encountering signs in lodging houses that read 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.' So they sought refuge in the only place that welcomed them: their religion.

I recall, also, how when that religion was attacked by someone like the Ulster Unionist politician and notable rabble rouser, Ian Paisley, who would sometimes appear on the TV news mocking the Pope, calling him 'Red Socks' and various other silly names, they were very upset, not because they worshipped the Pope but because they felt it as another blow to their dignity.

Religion is very personal to a lot of people and it's about a lot more than just a belief in the supernatural. It's also about community and about trying to find a place for yourself in the world. That's not always easy, particularly when you are poor or when you find yourself in a mainstream culture that seems to look down on you, to regard you as a second-class citizen, or perhaps not even a citizen at all.

None of this means that you should go around attacking people, obviously. But I find this huge media circus involving all sorts of dubious people suddenly standing up for free speech very uncomfortable. Moreover, I strongly suspect that being an Arab in France means being considered an outsider and I don't think the cartoons were hugely different from outright racism by a privileged middle-class intellectual elite.

I do not believe the right to free speech is absolute. Yes, that's what I said. I do not believe the right to free speech is absolute. For example, I don't think you should go round being homophobic, misogynistic or racist. Because it's bad manners and because those groups have been marginalised in the past. Similarly, I don't think you should go round Arab-baiting, even if unspeakable things are being done in the name of Islam.

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I've always had a problem knowing what day of the week it is. I'm not talking about just being a bit absent-minded. I really have experienced considerable difficulty with this all my life.

It was an absolute nightmare when I was at school because you were liable to get beaten if you failed to hand in your homework on the day it was due. Even now, I regularly have to get my wife to tell me what day it is. Anxiety about this is something that often features in my dreams. However, the dream I had two nights ago was something else.

I found myself in a city I did not recognise and yet I knew exactly where I was going: I was going to see the wife of my cousin. I entered a house by the back door and in the kitchen were a young woman and a girl about four years old. They were both extremely alike with the same jet black hair and there was something subtly unusual about their features, though I could not say what.

The woman greeted me and I thought at first that her accent was Irish but after a while I began to doubt this. I felt quite sure I had never met her before yet she seemed to know me well enough.

She introduced her daughter and I talked to the little girl for some time. I remember nothing of our conversation except that she seemed far too intelligent for her years.

Then the woman told me I should stop worrying about the days of the week. Those were not the real days, she said, and the reason I could not fix them in my mind was simply that the shadow of the true days lay underneath them.

After saying this, she told me I should go now because her husband would be home soon and he would not like to find her talking to me. I knew then that she was no relation of mine.

A moment later I found myself out in the street once more, and a moment after that I awoke. Lying in my bed, recalling the dream, I was immediately filled with the conviction that the woman I had spoken to was a fairy.

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We spent last week at our house in Leitrim. I needed a break from looking after grandchildren, helping people write novels and trying to find time to write my own. I'd spent a week in which I found myself constantly having to explain about narrative focus to people who seemed never to have thought of it before.

Leitrim was as magnificent as ever. Autumn was raging around the countryside, driving the rain before it and tossing great handfuls of leaves into the air. Once we reached our house I spent most of my time sitting beside a roaring fire, reading, with a cup of tea and a buttered scone at my elbow. On the opposite chair sat my wife, similarly occupied. The only sound was the crackling of the logs as the fire slowly devoured them.

We went to bed early each evening and slept late. Nights in Leitrim are as dark as at any time in the history of the world. And they are entirely silent. Going to sleep felt like embarking on some great sea voyage.

Sometimes I would wake from confused dreams in the the small hours and it felt as though our ship had put into port to take on more supplies. Up on deck the crew were busy loading and unloading but there was nothing for me to concern myself with. Satisfied that all was as it should be, I would tumble back into sleep once more.

On the Sunday we went to the little town of Strandhill on the Sligo coast and walked out along the dunes, watching as the great grey sheet of the sea constantly unmade itself. Far out to sea a little group of surfers were dancing across the cold white foam with extraordinary skill. Now that's narrative focus, I thought to myself.

Too late we saw the the squally clouds racing across the sky towards us. We turned for home but were soaked to the skin long before we got back.

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Yesterday, I had to go into hospital for an operation to repair an inguinal hernia. Today is one of the days my wife and I look after our grandchildren. My daughter emailed me to say that she had explained to two year old Noah that they wouldn't be going to grandma and grandpa's today because grandpa was poorly.

Naturally, Noah wanted to know why. With admirable matter-of-factness my daughter told him that my 'guts were coming out' and I 'needed an operation to put them back in again'. He replied, 'Oh, is that grandpa's hernia?' He had been hearing with interest about this hernia for some weeks. (He is completely fascinated by the workings of the human body.) When my daughter confirmed that this was indeed, the much-discussed hernia he wanted to know whether Grandma also had a hernia and was most disappointed to learn that she didn't.

I can clearly recall how I spent all of my childhood and young adult years in a furious battle to be seen as an individual, someone with his own distinct identity who would be taken seriously as a person. Now I find I am delighted to be regarded as part of a 'set', like one of a couple of senior dolls with matching repairable hernias.

For me, being a grandparent means existing in a state of barely-subdued ecstasy and not even being cut open with a knife and then used as an example in an Early Years biology lesson can diminish that.

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I spent last week in Ireland at our family house in Leitrim. The drive down from Belfast was wonderful, the gorse blazing away on the hillsides, the hedgerows frothing with cow parsley. Then we left the main road and made our way across the border via a road like a green tunnel, through the little village of Kiltyclogher where you could safely lie down in the middle of the road without worrying about the traffic, up the hill to Straduffy, where there is no TV, no landline, only intermittent mobile reception and no internet, and where each morning and evening a hare comes lolloping around the house, grazing on the snow-in-summer that grows beside the path.

Our days and nights were silent except for the birdsong, the bewildered cries of sheep and cattle in nearby fields and the frenzied buzzing of bees in the sycamores. On occasions we wandered down around the broken stones of the old house where my father was born, following the stream that runs through our land in a series of waterfalls. On all sides the bluebells were running riot and here and there orchids peeped shyly from the grass.

It was a blissful few days until, towards the end of our stay, I was obliged to drive into Sligo town on an errand. I like Sligo with its old grey stone buildings and its ridiculous over-supply of bookshops, but it still felt like a betrayal of something to venture back into the busy world we had so briefly and willingly left behind.

As I was leaving, my business conducted, my attention was caught by a man in his late forties standing outside the supermarket. He was smartly dressed but in a strangely unfashionable way, so that he looked as if he had somehow materialized from the early nineteen sixties. There was an unreadable look on his face: anxiety and hopefulness, eagerness and embarrassment, innocence and guile. I couldn't place it.

As I watched, he approached a woman in her twenties who was coming out of the supermarket pushing a trolley. 'Do you go to Dublin?' he abruptly asked. She looked at him in confusion. 'No, I don't,' she said. 'Why do you ask?'

'I just thought, you know, you looked like you might,' he mumbled, crestfallen. Then the eagerness returned to his expression. 'Where are you from?'

'Round here,' the woman said, but she was beginning to edge away from him.

People are friendly in the West of Ireland. It's very common for someone you don't know to speak to you in the street but I realised, at about the same time as the young woman, that the smartly-dressed-but-strangely-old-fashioned man was not just being friendly. He was either slightly unhinged or, more probably, 'going to Dublin' was a euphemism, for what exactly, I leave to your imagination.

It spoiled the picture for me, but it also made the picture. The serpent in paradise – it's peaceful without him but there's no story.

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I was in Ireland in November, driving down from Belfast to our house in North West Leitrim. Everywhere I looked the countryside was ablaze with colour – the yellow gorse flowers, the golden leaves of beech and maple, the skeletal orange larches, the vivid hawthorn berries and the occasional outlandish splash of purple from some imported prunus. It was a magnificent sight.

When at last I arrived, I opened the door of our house and stepped inside. The air was as cold as in a tomb. No one been there for months and in the meantime the radiators had filled with air. But we soon had a fire going and for the next few days we did little else but sit in front of it, reading books and only getting up to throw on another log.

The house stands on an isolated spot. My father grew up on that land, though not in that same house. When he left it as a young man to come to England the old house tumbled down and later on the new one was built.

He and I did not often see eye to eye and whenever I asked why I should carry out some order, my father was fond of raising his right hand and saying, 'That's the why,' meaning that I would feel the weight of that hand if I didn't do as I was told.

I was thinking of this as I wandered down a little path that leads away from the house, seeming to end up nowhere at all. The path was spread with golden leaves and when I reached the end I suddenly felt as if I stood upon the brink of that Other World of which so many stories have been told. I could almost see it trembling before me like a picture painted on silk.

All my life I have looked for such a path. As a child growing up in London I searched for it in deserted places wherever buildings conspired with their shadows And here it was at last.

'This is the why,' I said to myself and to my father too, in case he was listening.

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During July and August I teach Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Students come from all over the world and they’re mostly pretty wealthy. Last week in a tutorial we were looking at a short story one of my students had written. In places her English was a bit shaky.

‘I didn’t know what word to use here,’ she said. ‘What do you call the person who is responsible for looking after the children and does some of the cleaning in the house?’ She didn’t mean the mother.

One of the things that I like about being a writer is that it’s a very democratic business. Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily help. My first published stories were based on my own life. One of them was about working in a pie factory. Another was about labourers on a construction site. I didn’t need to do any research because I’d done it already in real life.

In the middle part of my career I wrote a series of novels with teenage girls as the protagonists. People were always saying to me, ‘Mr Keaney, how do you, a man, manage to get inside the mind of a teenage girl so successfully?’

The answer was simple. As the father of two teenage girls I was exactly the person my wealthy student was trying to describe. I cooked for them, cleaned up after them and ferried them around. I was effectively their servant. And the servant always knows exactly what’s happening in the house.

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One of my students asked whether she should describe the ordinary house in which her character lives. She could see that somewhere exotic like a fairy kingdom needed describing but the house in her story was more or less like her own childhood home and she was afraid to bore the readers with it.

Whenever I get a practical question like this, I try out the solution before offering it. It’s surprisingly easy to tell people to do something and then find you can’t do it yourself. So I looked around at my own house to see how easily it could be described.

It is some years since my children left home. In their absence the house became very neat, very tidy, very professional-looking. The walls were all painted in Farrow and Ball colours, a grandfather clock ticked comfortably in the dining room. There were flowers in a vase on the bureau.

Then the grandchildren arrived. Very soon there were crayon marks on all those white-with-a-hint-of-posh walls, hand prints on the windows, face-prints on the mirrors. Alcoves where reading lamps had stood were now stuffed with garishly-coloured plastic toys, wooden bricks poked out from under sofas. Children’s beakers littered the sink.

The house could very easily be described, I realised, though it would not necessarily make the kind of picture I had aspired to when I had imagined the calm waters occupied by those happy individuals whose children have reached maturity and are at last able to arrange their own affairs.

I stood in my living room recalling the way our youngest grandchild had repeatedly puked up her milk in her first few months and I knew exactly what I would tell my student – that every carpet has its own stains, that even the hieroglyphs that decorate the Egyptian pyramids do not have a richer story to tell than the crayon on the walls of my hallway, and that, however familiar it might seem to you, there is no such thing as an ordinary house.

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At this time of year I do a certain amount of teaching. One of the things that always strikes me is the preconceptions that people bring to the courses. As one student put it when I asked him why he was there, ”Creative writing is a form of writing that has no restrictions and that’s exactly what I’m looking for – no restrictions.” Unfortuately for him, that’s not what I’m teaching. I’m only interested in writing for an audience so, actually, the restrictions are what it’s all about.

So much nonsense seems to be believed about writing. On a social web site designed for aspiring writers I recently saw this post that really summed it all up: “Writing is not what I do. A writer is what I am. Share if you agree.” Frankly, that’s ridiculous. If you don’t write, you’re not a writer – period. Being a writer isn’t some sort of abstract state, like being a saint.

In my experience writing is like raising children. There’s lots of work to do and a lot of boundaries to set if you want to get the job done properly. Of course, if you choose to bring your children up without any rules then that’s entirely up to you. Just don’t bring them anywhere near me while you’re doing it.

At the moment one of my grandchildren is being potty-trained. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s not being potty-trained. His mother is beside herself at the lack of progress. I’m a little more philosophical about it. She would say that’s because I only look after him for two days a week and, of course that’s true. But it’s also true that this is not my first time clearing up poo. I spent a lot of years doing it. And fifty per cent of that poo was hers. So I’ve seen poo come and I’ve seen it go and I think my grandson will get his act together in his own time.

I was reflecting on this as I lay awake in the early hours of this morning (something I have in common with my grandchildren is that we both wake up too early.) I was feeling very pleased with myself, applauding my ability to look at the matter objectively, when suddenly a terrible thought struck me. Maybe the person who posted that comment on the site was right. Maybe it’s not what you do that counts, maybe it’s how you define yourself. So perhaps poo is not what I clear up, after all. Perhaps it’s what I am.

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I have had no less than five emails in the last two days from different commercial organisations to inform me that ‘the most anticipated book of the year’ is now available for purchase. They’re talking, of course, about Dan Brown’s Inferno.

Now, as a matter of fact, I would rather gnaw off my own arm than read one of Dan Brown’s books. There’s more than one reason for this. For a start, having grown up a Catholic, been educated by Jesuits, and known people in Opus Dei, I find the premises of his works utterly ludicrous. For another, his prose continually strikes me as clunky as this piece in the Telegraph illustrates

But the man shifts product! It cannot be denied. He sells more books in five minutes than I will sell in my lifetime. So is this just sour grapes on my part? Maybe, but I think there’s to it than that. It reminds me of a time when I was very young and my mother took me to a nearby park in which there was a garden for the blind. As we were walking through this garden I told my mother that I couldn't understand the point of it because the blind wouldn't be able to see the flowers. My mother laughed. 'The point is all the lovely smells,' she said.

I didn't reply because I couldn't smell anything at all. As I eventually came to understand some years later, I have almost no sense of smell. (Indeed, I once woke up to find my duvet on fire but it wasn't the smell that had woken me up; it was thirst.)

I think I'm missing some sense when I read, also, and probably when I write whereas Dan Brown has that sense in spades. So when I try to read something like The Da Vinci Code I only get an overwhelming feeling of frustration because I can't smell the part of it that's likeable. I can only smell the bit that's terrible. I'm always trying to smell the bit that's likeable. I know it's there but I can never catch even the faintest whiff.

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I have been teaching some classes in Writing For Children recently and one of the things I keep noticing is how many people bring a great deal of sentimentality about children along to the class. It’s one of the first things I try to get them to jettison.

Sentimentality is a very natural emotional response. I’m a sentimental man myself. For weeks after my younger daughter went off to university and the house was left empty by day except for me and my computer, I was to be found wandering from room to room, picking up random objects that belonged to her and staring at them with tear-filled eyes as though I had just received a telegram from the front line to say that she was missing in action.

And these days I am a figure of fun in the family for the way my grandchildren have me twisted around their little fingers. When he can’t get his own way, the older one performs a fake crying act that everyone else just laughs at but that somehow wins me over, even though I know perfectly well it’s phoney.

But my sentimentality is of absolutely no use to me as a writer because children’s literature is about the child’s experience; and that means not looking at your child characters but seeing the world through their eyes.

Children are not sentimental. What they are most concerned with is power. Entirely understandably, because they have none. They don’t wake up and think, ‘I wonder what I should do today.’ They get told they’re going to nursery or they’re being taken to the supermarket or (if they’re lucky) they’re going to the park. That’s why they spend so much time trying to subvert the adult agenda. If they’re being difficult it’s nearly always an attempt to wrest some sort of control from the grown-ups.

The stark truth is that however much you love them, there’s a little bit of Mussolini inside every child. So forget the sentimentality. You are writing for Il Duce. Just make sure it's good.

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Once upon a time, if I were at a party, someone might say, ‘So what do you do for a living?’ and I would say, ‘I’m a writer.’ They would look very interested and say, ‘Really? What sort of thing do you write?’ to which I would reply. ‘Children’s books.’ Whereupon they would immediately look disappointed and change the subject.

This reaction changed completely after the success of J K Rowling. Nowadays everyone always wants to know everything about the business and, above all, how they can get published. I am constantly coming into contact with people who are consumed by the desire to be a successful children’s writer.

What surprises me is how few of these people have actually read any children’s books since their own childhood. I’ve taught courses on writing for children only to find that ninety per cent of the students, who have usually paid substantial fees to be there, have scarcely read anything except the first Harry Potter title and one or two of the Narnia series. So what is going on here?

It seems to me that people are seduced by the glamour that has somehow attached itself to children’s writing. This is laughable since if you were to be a fly on the wall at a meeting of children’s writers you would witness a singularly unglamorous bunch of people. For the most part we aren’t young or sexy or well-dressed. We are people with holes in our sweaters, people in need of a decent haircut.

So where does this illusion of glamour come from? I think it arises from two sources: firstly, there is the glitter of wealth; secondly there is mystery of creative fulfilment.

The notion that writing children’s books might be a way to get rich quick is, as anyone who knows anything about publishing will tell you, entirely ridiculous. The truth is that only a very small proportion of children’s writers even make a living out of their work.

The promise of creative fulfilment is a more substantial attraction and it’s undeniable that fulfilment is to be found in practising any art from. But you have to ask yourself this question: why children’s books? If you’re not already reading them then possibly that’s an indication you’re not really interested in this field and you won’t get fulfilment from trying to succeed at something that doesn’t interest you.

I am a children’s writer because childhood is the place where I reside most naturally. I watch as the youngest of my grandchildren begins to learn to crawl. I see her rocking back and forth on her hands and knees, practising the movements that will soon allow her to move across the room and I find myself propelled back into my own childhood, recalling the way the paving stones rolled away before me as I sat in the push-chair.

Or I do some drawing with my older grandchildren and out of the corner of my eye I see the tall, shadowy figure of a nun standing over me, regarding my clumsy efforts with disdain. I know what she thinks of me. She thinks that I am a boy and, a such, an entirely undesirable object. Worse than that, I am a vain, talkative boy who imagines he is clever and does not listen to what he is told. This understanding renders the drawing that had pleased me so much a moment ago, nothing but a worthless scribble.

I want to reassure that boy. I want to tell him that one day this woman’s disdain will not matter so much; but even as I stand beside him and whisper, I know that he cannot hear me.

For me, therefore, writing is not primarily about money or about creative fulfilment. It is a story being told to a child who no longer exists.

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Looking after my grandchildren is sharpening my understanding of story structure. The current craze around here is Hide And Seek. It works best when I hide and they seek because they’re terrible at hiding. Another adult has to help them find a hiding place but they can’t stay put in it for longer than a few seconds.

So most of the time they seek and I stand behind the door or crouch behind a chair. (I don't have to hide very well - they're not much good at seeking either.) Then I suddenly spring out and roar like a lion. This is the bit they love best. They know the roar is coming, they know I’ll be the one roaring but it still scares them silly.

It seems to me that the same principle is at work in that dependable genre of fiction, the thriller. It's just Hide And Seek for adults without actually having to get out of your seat. I’ve just finished reading Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson and it’s as fine an example of spine-tingling story-telling as you could look for. The architecture of the plot depends on that old literary chestnut, amnesia. In this case a trauma has left the protagonist unable to form long term memories. So she wakes up every morning with no idea who the man in bed next to her is and has to learn her life story anew each day. But it’s more complicated than that, of course, because the life story she is being told is neither complete nor accurate.

It’s a terrific piece of writing, all the more impressive because it’s a debut. It always cheers me up when someone writes a novel that is beautifully crafted. It reminds me that stories are meant to be enjoyed not endured. I’m not saying I learnt anything new about myself from reading it, or about other people for that matter. It taught be nothing at all about the meaning of life. But it did keep me awake until the small hours desperate to find out what would happen next, waiting for the villain to spring from his hiding place and roar.

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The other day somebody asked me to look at his manuscript. But when I agreed, he got anxious about showing it to me, worrying that I might steal his work. I was insulted, of course, because it's as if he'd invited me into his house and then asked, as I stood on the threshold, 'You won't steal anything, will you? However, I wasn't particularly surprised. It happens a lot.

I don't know any author who writes for money. I don't mean that we don't all like getting paid. I'm as good at spending money as the next man or woman and I'm always pleased to see royalties being deposited in my bank account. Nevertheless, I don't do it for the money. I write because I'm compelled to, and that's true of every author I know.

If I were to examine my compulsion more closely, I could point to a whole series of drivers located almost exclusively in my childhood. I could say that I write to make sense of who I have become and how that happened, and that this is true even when my stories appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with me.

I could add that I'm fifty nine years old, I look after my grandchildren two days a week, and the other four days are a furious scramble to fit everything else in. But the older I get, the more urgent the need to unravel the tangled ball of string that is my inner world.

That's why I'm not interested in stealing anyone else's narratives. I have my own obsessions. If I don't write them down they keep me awake at night. In fact, they keep me awake at night even when I do write them down. So there's no need to chase after me crying, "Stop thief!" My pockets are empty. It's my head that's full.

Image http://www.nwkniterati.com

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When I was at school my favourite activity was writing stories but we were often given very uninspiring titles to work with. One that has stuck in my mind, down through the years is An Unfortunate Accident Is Narrowly Averted. It made me groan at the time but thinking about it now, I have to admit that it does sum up the plot of an awful lot of novels.

At least it suggested a happy ending. I've always preferred writing stories that ended with out blood on the carpet and with all the cast still intact. The trouble is, stories often refuse to turn out this way because the characters insist on making up their own minds about what they do. No matter how you struggle to keep them from harm, they simply will not cooperate.

This is as true in life as it is in books. I have some really good friends who seem to spend enormous amounts of energy sabotaging their own contentment. One or two of them even realise they do it; they just can't seem to help themselves.

My grandson has recently begun fictionalising his world. He will look up brightly and say, 'Let's go to the park, said Mummy' or 'Let's go to the café and have some hot chocolate, said Daddy'.

It's not just his mother and father who feature in these optimistic little vignettes. His four month old sister might suggest that they go to the library or his Grandpa (me) might suddenly suggest that he has a biscuit. There is absolutely no limit to the happy endings of these micro stories.

More than anything else my wish for him, and for my other grandchildren, is that this is the way it stays, that he will always be the hero of stories that end happily – even if it can't be hot chocolate and biscuits all the way through.

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I have been in Ireland for a week, in North West Leitrim to be precise, in the house my father built on the land on which he grew up. It's a modern house standing on a hill and on a clear day commanding a view of three counties but it is dominated by the fallen stones of the old house further down the hill and the memories that they hold.

The leaves were turning and everywhere the countryside was coloured gold and umber. As usual at this time of year, flocks of fieldfares wheeled across the sky in search of berries, settling here and there on tall fir trees and chattering noisily among themselves before suddenly erupting again in ragged solidarity.

I spent much of my time watching the clouds marching across the sky in innumerable variations of grey tinged with cream, rose and purple. However, all the while I could feel a tug at the index finger of my right hand. Normally I spend two days a week looking after my grandchildren and it is this finger that the middle child takes hold of whenever he wants something. 'Come!' he commands with all the confidence of eighteen months. And I follow him to the toy chest or to the kitchen cupboard where the biscuits are kept.

I was supposed to be on holiday this week but instead I simply felt bereft. I kept imagining what my grandchildren might be doing. Would they wonder where I was this week? Or would they, in my absence, forget my existence entirely?

Outside the land was very wet. Trees dripped. Leaves clogged and mashed underfoot. The sound of running water was everywhere. I thought about the generations of people who had struggled to make a living from this boggy, stony ground and how unbelievably easy my life would seem to them by comparison. I doubt whether they would recognise anything I do as work.

But they would recognise the tug at my finger.

photo: Kenneth Allen

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I'm always getting asked to look at manuscripts by people who have written a story for children and are looking for advice before sending their work off to an agent. Unfortunately, a lot of people accompany their manuscripts with statements that drastically undermine their chances of being taken seriously by an editor. So in case anyone reading this has been thinking of submitting a manuscript professionally for the first time, here are three things it's really not worth saying if you want to become a children's writer.

First there's the Quality Time Delusion. This is when the author confidently states, that she/he has read this story to her/his own children and they absolutely loved it. Now on the face of it, this sounds like a ringing endorsement from the target audience. So how could it be anything but a good idea?

Actually, what you're really saying when you make this assertion is that your child enjoyed the extra attention they got from being part of mummy's or daddy's project. They liked having their opinions taken seriously. They got caught up in their parent's dream about becoming an author and it excited them. The truth is that your child's enthusiasm is no guarantee of anything except that you spent some quality time with them and they liked it.

Next there's the Children Of All Ages Blunder. In this one the author glibly asserts that the story is intended for all children from the age of six to sixty, or some similarly hackneyed phrase.

Frankly, this is a stupid thing to say. A five year old lives in a different world to an eight year old, a ten year old lives in a different world to a thirteen year old. The idea that your story might work for all of them is an admission firstly that you don't know anything about the market for children's books, which is highly segmented, and secondly that you don't know much about children.

Finally there's the hoary old chestnut of the Friend Who's Done Some Illustrations to go with the story. Take it from me, unless your friend is an experienced professional illustrator of children's books, never include his or her drawings with your manuscript.

This is because even though authors see writing as an art, to publishers it's a business and, like every business, it involves an element of risk. An unknown author represents a risk to a publisher. An unknown author combined with an unknown illustrator doubles that risk.

So don't even include that art-work on the grounds that you think it will give the editor an idea of the kind of book you have in mind. The only idea it will give them is that they should put your manuscript on the rejection pile right away.

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I have been up since three o'clock this morning looking after my very excited and slightly apprehensive grandson while his mother went, with her husband, to the hospital to have a baby. Consequently this blog post may not be my finest piece of prose. However, it is with immense pleasure that I can announce to the world the birth of my third grand child, and my first grand daughter. I know that medical experts will tell you that new born babies can't smile but I swear she smiled at me.

Now it is six thirty in the evening and in a little while a builder is going to knock at my door and I will have to talk coherently to him about the work that we want done on our house. Also, I see from my emails, which I've only just had a chance to glance at, that my Mexican publisher has been experiencing problems making payments to my account. Oh, and a portfolio of work has arrived from one of the students at the summer school I have been teaching for the last couple of months.

All of this perfectly illustrates one of the points I was trying to get across at that summer school. It's a publishing myth that I have called the fallacy of the dedicated agent and it goes like this: the publishing world is full of agents who are constantly on the lookout for exciting new manuscripts by promising new writers.

In fact, agents, being human beings with complicated lives, have a great many other things on their minds. They may be worrying about whether their daughter's labour will go well, or they may be rejoicing that it has. They may be trying to remember the key points they need to make clear to their builder, or they may be trying to get hold of their bank to find out why their money isn't appearing in their account. They may simply be wondering whether there is anything even vaguely edible in their kitchen that they might somehow be able to conjure into a meal tonight.

Whatever it is that is filling those agents' heads, it probably leaves very little space for all those manuscripts that keep arriving in their postbags. That is why, if you want to get their attention, you had better be good. You had better be very bloody good indeed.

Because if you're not then they are just going to sit at their desk with a silly expression on their face, gazing at a photo of their newest grandchild, thinking over and over again, 'Isn't she beautiful!'

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I have been working on setting with my students. It's something that some of them have trouble with, particularly when the setting is a part of the contemporary built environment. Somehow if the story is taking place somewhere we're not used to, like an ancient forest, then it's easy; but if it's a shopping mall people assume there's no need for any description.

Some years ago I wanted to write a scene in which two teenagers were having their first date. The girl was epileptic and as a consequence her parents were over-protective. She hadn't told them about this date and she was worried that she might be seen by someone she knew. She was also worried about what the boy would think of her, worried that she wouldn't know what to say to him, worried that if he found out she was epileptic he would be horrified, and worried that she might have a seizure right there in the café.

So there was plenty to focus on. Nevertheless, when I read the scene through it seemed insubstantial. I realised that there was hardly any setting. I'd based the venue on the Haagen Dazs café in London's Leicester Square. So I decided to make a special trip there, for research purposes you understand, not just to pig out on ice cream.

The place was crowded when I arrived and I took the only free seat. To my left was a very smartly dressed young Asian couple and they were snogging. Actually, snogging is not a strong enough word for what they were doing. Utterly oblivious to their surroundings, they were practically eating each other.

On my right, were two young Arab women wearing burkahs. One of them had a shoe box full of home-made flash cards with Arabic words written on them. One by one she was taking the cards out of the box and showing them to her companion who was frowning earnestly as she struggled to pronounce them correctly.

In the twenty minutes I was there a whole procession of characters came in off the street - glowering Goths, noisy tourists, harassed looking parents with over-excited children, even a couple of police officers with a weakness for whipped cream and macadamia nuts.

When I went home and rewrote the scene I put in everything I had seen and this time, of course, there was far too much detail. I had to strip a lot of it out at the next draft but I kept the Asian snoggers and the two young Arab women because they were a gift and because I could never have made them up.

So that's what I've been trying to tell my students. Setting isn't just architecture; it's everything that's going on around your characters.

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One of my students isn't very keen on dialogue. She writes beautiful vignettes composed of crystalline imagery and carefully observed detail. But absolutely no dialogue. Since it's obvious that she already knows how to do this trick and since she's come to Cambridge to learn something new, I set her a writing assignment with the instruction to include a decent chunk of dialogue.

She comes to our next session with another beautifully turned vignette. 'Hmm,' I say, after we have read it aloud. 'Tell me, what do you like about this piece of writing?' She picks out a piece of carefully observed detail. 'Yes, I can see how pleasing that is,' I agree. 'And what do you think is missing?' She's not sure. 'What about dialogue?' She points to a few lines of dialogue. 'Let's look at these, shall we?' I write them up on the board. Then I remove all the he saids and she saids. 'Okay, now what is it?' I ask.

It's a poem.

That's how the week starts. It ends with me looking after my grandchildren who are one and two years old. One of our regular outings is to the railway station to watch the trains which they are both very enthusiastic about. Each time a train arrives in the station, or rushes through without stopping, the older of the two turns to me and demands, 'More choo choo trains!'

'There will be more choo choo trains,' I tell him. And for the present he is satisfied. But at last there comes a time when I have had enough of standing there watching my grandchildren watching the trains. 'Time to go home,' I announce. Faces fall. Enthusiasm turns sour. But we cannot stay there forever.

The truth is that there is always a time when you must say bye bye to the choo choo trains even if they are beautifully composed with carefully observed detail and crystalline imagery.

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