Read with your children and don’t have a TV in the bedroom!
A Talk by Gervase Phinn at The Woodside Tuesday March 30th
On Tuesday March 30th Gervase Phinn, author, retired School Inspector and raconteur visited Kenilworth and talked to an audience of just over 100 at The Woodside, Glassshouse Lane. He was here as part of a whirlwind tour of the country to launch his autobiography, “Road to the Dales: The story of a Yorkshire Lad.”
Gervase talked to the spellbound audience of his magical childhood and schooldays and regaled us with personal stories both funny and touching, happy and heartbreaking. His father read stories with him from a very early age, recited poetry and was obviously an inspiring raconteur. His mother played the piano and they were a very close-knit family. Life was not always perfect and Gervase was bullied at school, but he had some inspirational teachers who set him on the right road and taught him a love of words and learning which he has carried with him throughout a very successful career. He has a sharp ear for dialogue as anyone who has read his previous books about his work as a Schools Inspector in the Yorkshire Dales will know. He even does the voices, so we had Scots and Irish as well as Yorkshire on Tuesday evening!
When asked by a member of the audience how we can encourage in our children a love of reading, he suggested reading with your children, telling stories with them and not allowing a television in the bedroom. He described how there were sometimes pages missing from the books his father managed to get for them at home, so he made up the missing bits, and it was thus that the ending to some classics the Phinn family knew was sometimes better than the original! His Dad would also refuse to continue the story if he had promised to read only so far, so the children were left with a cliff-hanger until the next night.
The evening was arranged by Kenilworth Books as a taster for the Kenilworth Festival in May. We have organised four more “Meet the Author” events and five children’s events for the festival which runs from Saturday 8th May until Sunday 16th May .Details of all the events can be found on the Kenilworth Festival website or at www.warwickbooks.net.
