Pop by Matt Carr

Matt Carr’s humour certainly shines in his books and in his guest blog for us today around popcorn, a dreaded song and food!

‘Food Glorious Food!’ Is a song which always sends shudders down my spine. The reason for this is a traumatic one. When I was about eight or nine, my mum was in a local amateur dramatics group and they did ‘Robin Hood and the Babes in the Wood’ as a panto type thing. The kid who was supposed to be one of the babes in the wood dropped out at the last minute and my mum roped me into doing it. I REALLY didn’t want to do it because at that time I was easily embarrassed and hated doing anything that might make me a teasable target! (which is quite bizarre as now I dress as a toilet roll in public!)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Aged nine, on stage in a damp hall in front of about two hundred people and I’m wearing tights and in the front row are all my sniggering mates and I have to sing ‘Food Glorious Food’ with a girl. Suffice to say that I was bright red and barely uttered a word. I couldn’t wait to get off stage. It has haunted me ever since!

Sorry about that… I’d better make this blog post relevant to food and books! I’m not sure where the idea of my latest book POP! came from as I don’t really like Popcorn that much. I always think I end up eating too much of it and feel a bit full of air. I think must have just POPPED into my head and it was the graphicness of popcorn … the stripey red and white box, the yellow corn that appealed to me, plus the fact that they have such a dramatic metamorphosis.

Also, after some pretty difficult illustration books I thought that illustrating popcorn would be easy. How wrong I was. You see I set out to have ten individual popcorns all with names and all different yet similar and I have to say I got so confused while illustrating them it drove me to distraction. I was so glad when the artwork was finished, and I didn’t have to distinguish between Dave the popcorn and Clare the popcorn anymore!

Food does pop up in my books. Spyder’s mission was to save a birthday cake and Armstrong the Rocketmole took a dehydrated sandwich into space. I also once wrote a picture book about a lemon who got wrongly labelled as a melon in a supermarket and had to find his way back along the aisle to his friends. Along the way though he made new friends and found that although they were all different, they were all fruit and veg. Quite profound really in these tumultuous, divided and sometimes frightening times.

Sorry about that. Got a bit deep (fried!). Anyway, I’ll try and lighten it up to finish. Even though it is a drink and not food I always put a cup of tea into my books as I love a cup of tea (Yorkshire is my favourite). The only time I haven’t is in Rhinocort Rules! Where I did originally have Ron drinking a cup of tea…but we took it out because it looked a bit odd (as if a rhinoceros painted up to look like a unicorn isn’t odd enough!)