Thank you to the queen of tarts!

My mother stayed last week, and as usual spent much of her time baking. How good is that? Chocolate caramel squares, jam tarts, lemon meringue pie were all fabulous January mood lifters, and the children, as you can imagine, were literally eating out of her hand. To temper the sweet treats she also made fish pie and bolognaise, both of which she crammed with vegetables. It was a balanced diet, and I had no problem about child #3 taking in a jam tart for his nursery snack. His lovely teacher, alas, wasn’t so impressed. “It’s supposed to be a healthy snack” she confirmed, “Something like rice cakes or some dried fruit”. Fair enough, though the jam was homemade, as was the pastry. Virtually no salt, and not that much sugar; as treats go the jam tart was relatively saintly. And when I checked another nursery-recommended ‘healthy treat’ it didn’t do badly by comparison.

A go ahead! low-calorie biscuit proclaimed the fact it contains no artificial colours or flavours. So far, so like the homemade jam tart. However, what it also contains are more ingredients than you can count, including all kinds of not especially delicious sounding things like Dextrose Monohydrate and Acidity Regulators. Eat two slices and you’ll get 14g of sugar, around 15% of a child’s recommended daily allowance.

So I’m not convinced the ‘healthy’ snack is actually that good for you.

The problem seems to be that we’re all very easily swayed by packaging. As soon as a product pronounces that it’s, for example, ’sugar-free’ or ‘low fat’ we tend to switch off to its other less benign aspects. I’m not saying homemade is always synonymous with healthy, but at least it has the virtue of the baker knowing exactly what’s gone into it.

Oh hurrah. It turns out that exclusively breastfeeding a baby for the first six months of its life might not, as previously thought, protect him or her against picking up on allergies and excema. It might even increase the chances of developing them. Which won’t impress the boob-at-all-costs brigade. As soon as you announce a pregnancy, one of the first things you get is a lot of information about breastfeeding. Some of it from friends, some from healthworkers, some from charities such as the NCT. The benefits of breastfeeding to both baby and mum apparently include, but aren’t limited to, increasing IQ, protecting against breast cancer, helping lose baby weight, preventing a child becoming obese and making it less likely for a child to develop allergies and excema (see above). The literature is positive to the point of making mothers (myself included) feel guilty if they so much as introduce the occasional bottle of formula. And having sat with friends literally crying with frustration at their baby’s inability to latch on, or a low milk supply, or endless rounds of mastitis, I know it’s often far from easy. I breastfeed all four of mine for around seven months.  I didn’t have any particular problems getting started, and after the first couple of weeks found heading out with the baby was much easier without having to lug around bottles. It wasn’t an unalloyed joy, breastfeeding on freezing cold park benches is never going to be fun. But the point is, it was relatively easy for me to do or I wouldn’t have done it. Which makes me much more selfish than the mothers who spend months expressing, or who simply find breastfeeding impossible so don’t do it.

I’m not suggesting this new research means we should all give up breastfeeding. But hopefully it might mean giving mothers a more balanced view of it. Most of us have come across smug mothers who wear their nursing bras as some kind of badge of honour. And lots of us have regretted not doing more, even those who carried on for a year or more. All I really know for sure is that I can’t tell which of my friends were or weren’t breastfed. I can’t see any discernible difference in my children’s schoolfriends. And I’m really looking forward to the day when I’ll never have to wear another non-underwired, ginormous nursing bra again.

“It is as important as health and it is as important as education – it is part of both, actually”
So declared author Philip Pullman on hearing the news that the government had decided on a U-turn and were  no longer going to cut off funding to the bookgifting arm of Booktrust.

Thank goodness for that. This is a charity that is universally applauded for helping give books the importance they deserve. The nay-sayers, including Ross Clark in The Times, argue that there are plenty of books on offer in libraries and in schools, and the work of Booktrust, in part, does little more than fund ‘fat cat’ children’s authors. Clark should have done his homework. Libraries are closing at an alarming rate, and literacy in the UK is among the lowest in Europe. And ‘fat cat’ authors? With an average annual income of £5,000, most children’s authors are clearly not in it for the money. 

So while it’s not about pristine copies of books, it is about accessibility and a feeling that being given a book to call your own is something very special. Pee Po Baby, one of our Booktrust gifts, must have been read by me to the children well over fifty times. It’s a simple lift-the-flap book, helping teach the very young about colour, shape, different objects, the rituals of bedtime and bathtime, and how just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Familiarity helps reassure, and with this reassurance comes a fondness for storytelling that I believe has helped my children progress through different stages of books. Would this have happened without Booktrust? Undoubtedly. We’re not a bookish but are a booky family, and have lots of different titles in pretty much every room in our house. But for us Booktrust has reinforced the fact that being given a book is a real treat, and books are to be treated with respect and excitement.

So well done the government on being big enough to admit to being wrong. Good luck to Booktrust, an organisation which should now go on to even bigger and better things after all this publicity. And, children, are you listening carefully? Enjoy the books you’re given because sometimes they can disappear even more quickly than you can say, ‘It was the night before Christmas…’

Priceless treasure for young readers

The announcement that the Government is cutting Booktrust‘s funding by 100% is so maddening that I’m finding it hard to find the right words. Savage, devastating, short-sighted and incredibly sad, the cut (can you call it a ‘cut’? ‘Termination’ might be more correct) will have a huge affect on this charity.  Along with its other works, including administering such high-profile literary prizes as the Orange Prize for Fiction and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for young writers, Booktrust is behind Bookstart, a national program which gives a free pack of books to babies, with guidance materials for their parents or carers. The books are well chosen, the guidance tips helpful and non-patronising, and the aims, as far as I can see, totally altruistic. Who doesn’t think that literacy is fundamentally important to enable a child to build a successful future? And it’s the work of Bookstart, along with programmes for older children, Booktime and Booked Up, that will be under threat.

My older two children have been beneficiaries of Booktrust, and were very excited about their book parcels. Pee Po Baby, a lift-the-flap card book is a toddler favourite, and the oldest boy now reads it two of his younger brothers. Just before he started school, the oldest was given a ‘treasure’ box from Booktime, containing a cardboard pirate chest packed with a great selection of books and poems. We  still read them, and the chest sits on the bookshelf to this day, keeping safe some very special treasures, including a pirate map and a book of ancient pirate lore. Booktrust knows the books children like and presents them brilliantly to keep children engaged right from the beginning. As an introduction to literature their choices are non-judgemental, and the emphasis is firmly on fun as well as quality.

These books are available to everyone in the country. There is no means-testing and no tricky way to get hold of them. Children get them at school or at medical check-ups, so the number of children who own books, who might otherwise not have had the opportunity, is vast.

So what will this cut mean? It amounts to £13 million annually, a huge sum that will need to be found elsewhere if the program is to continue. At a time when literacy levels in the UK are among the lowest in Europe, and books are seen as important in less than half of UK households, the cut seems incredibly short-sighted. And call me a cynic, but isn’t sneaking news of the cut in just before Christmas a very mean trick? Children and their hard-working teachers are home for the holidays, and parents are racing around trying to make sure everything is done in time for the 25th. It’s not difficult to imagine Michael Gove et al thinking this would be the perfect time, bah humbug, to bury some bad news.

This is something we’ll report back on. If you want to follow Booktrust on Twitter, click here. In the meantime, enjoy the ‘treasure chest’ poem I’ve photographed rather badly, below.