I’ve only just read that Michael Rosen has been chosen as the Children’s Poet Laureate.

I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. The man has a quite Dahl-like quality to him in capturing eloquently the sort of world that children love to live in, namely a world that largely involves things like bogies, puke, dog poo and making a mess at dinner time. I was lucky enough to meet him when I was no more than about 7, and he visited my primary school in Chiswick to give us a brief talk on what poetry was. I still remember this very tall, floppy haired man with big feet arriving late, much to the relief and then delight of the assembled female teachers, and plod gleefully to the front of the gym hall where we were all sitting crossed-legged and patient. There he performed what I can only describe as ’stand up for kids’ - a mix of poems and stories that I can still remember a few of to this day. It is one of perhaps three happy memories I have from my first primary school.

Those of you who missed out on this charmingly anarchic man as part of a staple childhood diet should really try and get hold of a copy of his recent collection Carrying The Elephant, which recounts, amongst other things, the sudden death of his eighteen year old son. Having grown up reading his silly titles such as Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes, I wasn’t quite prepared for how moving this recent collection would prove to be, and it made me fall in love with his work again in a very different way, about fifteen years after I discovered it for the first time.