I’ve been writing songs for years. Ages ago, when I lived in London, I was in a band. First we were called The Whole World, then we were called Calvin.

 I once made an album - you couldn’t buy it in the shops, only from me, but I thought it was pretty good. So did Cross Rhythms Magazine, who gave it 9 stars out of 10 and said

"This is classy singer-songwriter stuff - high quality production [with] spare instrumentation. The lyrics [are] poetry... Definitely an album to listen to when you feel mellow, it's late, and there's a glass of something in your hand. Lovely stuff."

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I made another CD when they tried to shut down our local hospitals. I wrote 3 songs and recorded them with some fantastic musicians. The brilliant Ruth Royall added a fourth.

(They didn’t close the hospitals in the end. I think we helped. I hope so.)

The Stroud News & Journal called it "A delightfully infectious CD... an excellent record."

I used to go out and play my own songs to audiences quite often. I still do the occasional gig.

I usually do a song or two as part of my sessions on school visits. I’m not doing much else with them at the moment but I’d like to. I’m hoping to do another album some time in the next couple of years - maybe one aimed at school audiences this time. I’ll let you know.

This is one of my best musical memories - me jamming with the fantastic Eddi Reader, one of my musical heroes.

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Here’s a video I made for An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, the co-operative blog I contribute to. We held what we think was the world’s first online children’s literature festival, and I wrote this song for it.

All the books shown in the video were written by someone who contributed to the festival or who has helped in some way to develop or run the blog.

Oh, and here’s a video I made with my family. It’s about Ed Vaizey. He used to be the government minister who was responsible for supervising library services in England. In my opinion, he did a pretty rubbish job of it, and the people who came after him have been no better.