Hope & glory
Yet all the Tory leadership contenders claim they can magically secure Britain a better deal.
The intervention by EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier should be a wake-up call to them. Brussels will not ease its key demands just because of a change in personnel at No10.
The Conservative candidates need to stop peddling Brexit fantasies and start levelling with their party and the public about the challenges and complexities involved.
Theresa May was in part brought down by pledging a Brexit she could not deliver. The next Tory leader looks set to make the same mistake. PUBS and shops are geared up for a glorious weekend of sport – including the Champions League final, the Derby, the Cricket World Cup and the Premiership rugby final.
Let’s hope you end up toasting success rather than drowning your sorrows. Full steam ahead for fictional Sodor in the Irish Sea, home to my boyhood fave Thomas the Tank Engine. I had all the Reverend W Awdry’s Railway Series books and knew them by heart.
They are beautifully written, with gentle adventure and drama.
Cheeky Thomas was always getting up to high jinks and I loved the way he wound up Gordon, Henry and James – and, of course, The Fat Controller. Obviously, the eightyear-old me was desperate to be a steam train driver and how I wish I’d kept my set.
Oh yes, it probably helped that my mum and dad vaguely knew Rev Awdry, as he was a local vicar in East Anglia in the early 60s and based some of his characters on local trains. The character who inspired me most was the eponymous hero of The Story of Zachary Zween, by Mabel Watts.
He’s a pupil at a school with a weirdly rigid alphabetical order policy, meaning poor old Zach goes last for everything. His nemesis, obviously, is Albert Ames, who “goes first each day, because his name begins with A”, the smug little git.
But rather than being beaten down by the cruelty of life, Zachary learns to think about things differently and turns them on their head to win on his own terms.
Now that’s a lesson worth learning – plus, no matter how completely unfair life was as a kid, I could always console myself that at least I wasn’t Zachary Zween... the Theresa May of his day.
HARRY Potter continues to enchant as the boy wizard is named the most inspirational children’s book character.
His Hogwarts schoolmate Hermione Granger clearly cast a spell too, coming in at fourth. And three Roald Dahl favourites featured in the poll by bookshop The Works; Matilda was second, Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory third and the story’s Willy Wonka ninth.
And proving kids’ characters make a big impact, our writers reveal who got them hooked... For me, it has to be Josephine March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
I still get goosebumps when I think of Jo arriving home in Civil War-era New England, proudly clutching the 25 dollars that will allow her Marmee to rush to her sick father’s bedside.
Her sisters – Meg, Beth and Amy – are baffled about how she got the cash until tomboy Jo takes off her bonnet.
“Your beautiful hair! Oh Jo, how could you?!”
Plain Jo has sold her “one beauty” to a wig maker – defying mid-19th century convention for the sake of her family.
Later in the story the fiery, stubborn Jo becomes a writer. I wonder why she appealed to
me so much... I first encountered American girl detective Nancy Drew after a classmate lent me a copy of the The Sign of the Twisted Candles, aged eight. I devoured more of the paperbacks about the supersleuth, written under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The 1930s series was escapism to exotic locations with silly kidnap plots all neatly, if not a bit too predictably, tied up at the end of each story. Nancy was brave, smart and adventurous but not a tomboy. The language might be dated and a few racial stereotypes will make uncomfortable reading now but I think Nancy appealed as she was my first dose of a character-building you-go-girl gumption – who could also powder her nose and drive off in her trademark blue convertible.