Morning:
9°c
Forget Hogwarts, old children's tales are the best read. So say Children's Laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen. Each of them has chosen their seven "favourite ever" reads and JK Rowling doesn't make the cut. Sacrilege? Or sound judgment? The latter, I would contend.
Instead Morpurgo has nominated Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, as one of his top titles. Not only is it great entertainment but the book showed him how to write with "huge descriptive power and pace". "Jim Hawkins was the first character in a book I identified with totally: I was Jim Hawkins," says Morpurgo. "I lived Treasure Island as I read it. And I loved it; still do."
But just as youth is wasted on the young, so too is Treasure Island. Like Alice in Wonderland, it suffers the stigma of being a children's book and yet in my view it is best appreciated by adults.
It is one of the most exciting and vivid novels I have read in my lifetime. And I only caught up with it a couple of years ago. Shame on me. Its opening sentence lasts a whole paragraph, lulling you into its fictional pasture with beautifully rhythmic prose.
Amazingly, RLS wrote the book in 15 days. Thanks goodness he didn't call his masterpiece Sea Cook, as he originally intended - it's not quite so evocative. Gladstone stayed up until 2am to finishTreasure Island. So will you if you haven't read it already.
• I live in the same 'hood as Dave Cameron and I am lucky enough to have a roof terrace but until now I have refused to countenance putting a windmill atop my flat.
It won't earn its money back, it will do little for the environment and it will offend the neighbours. Growing plants on the roof is more eco and neighbour-friendly.
Or so I thought until I started growing a wisteria. It still stubbornly refuses to flower: seven years on and not a hint of blossom. Wisteria, you have been warned: it's you or a windmill.
• Last week I did my bit for culinary protectionism. I lunched at the Ritz, that most iconic of British hotels (well, one of the few still left under British ownership with a British chef) made famous by Julia Roberts, below, in Notting Hill.
We ate outside in the sunshine on St George's Day and the menu was, appropriately enough, roast beef and sticky toffee pudding.
Next month the hotel opens its first al fresco bar, which looks set to be a hot new venue for Londoners this summer.
Believe me, there is nothing more satisfying than sitting outdoors in this oasis of opulent calm as you hear the hubbub around you. With or without a toffee pudding.
