Before we begin, I have a HUGE announcement to make.

Strike up the band!

Early Sunday morning, fuelled to the max with caffeine1 and determination, I finally conquered Nemesis Hill, also known locally as Mag’s Bank. It’s one of those hills that when you first encounter it on a bike, it strikes fear into your little hammering heart. First time I tried to climb it, I was overtaken by a helpful woman who suggested that I just took it niiiiice and slowwwwww and then proceeded to disappear over the curve of the earth at considerable speed. Needless to say, I took it so slowly, I fell off. Next time, I inveigled my brother to keep me company and the same thing happened. He sailed over the event horizon and I fell off. Next time, I psyched myself up, attacked it at speed and…died in a ditch. It’s been on my mind ever since. The hill, not the ditch.

However, what I realised was that the only thing stopping me climbing that damn hill was what was going on between my ears. Namely, that self-sabotaging voice that kicks in just when the going gets brutal:

Why are you putting yourself through this pain? You don’t have to do this. Besides, now is not a good time, the planets are in opposition, your chakras are out of alignment, it’s been quite a week/month/year, life and you’re tired…you’re exhausted… and just think how comfortable that ditch would be if you just let yourself relaaaaaax and gently topple sideways…

It was absolutely pointless to be sitting at home, wishing I’d tried harder, or wishing that I was in possession of the requisite steely determination to climb that hill or wishing I could turn a deaf ear to my inner voice of doom. Sooner or later, I was going to have to turn my wishes into actions and make them come true.

So, on Sunday, while I didn’t exactly smash it, I did it without stopping, and that provided the biggest endorphin rush imaginable. YAY! Go, me!

Anyhoo. That was my big news over the weekend.

So in the spirit of wishes coming true, here is a picture book I made a very, very long time ago, about what happens when you keep wishing for something better, when what you already have is as near perfect as possible.

Little Bear and the Wishfish concerns three bears who lived in the little ursine paradise of the Papaña River Valley2.

Many years ago ( thirty, to be precise) I lived close to the Papaña River in a small cottage on a Lammermuir hill farm. The location was cold, draughty and turned into an approximation of Passchendaele every winter. Mud? Oh, boy. Snow? Yes indeed. Blizzards and snowdrifts metres deep. But in the summer, it could be heaven on earth. Due to thermal inversions, the low-lying landscape below the farm would be utterly swallowed in haar ( sea mist), leaving only random hilltops and the odd tree poking up into the clear blue skies above the blanket of misty white. It was like living in a kingdom of clouds. It was as near perfect as possible.

Needless to say, when it rained, we wished it would snow, when it snowed, we wished it would be hot and sunny and when it was hot and sunny, we moaned about being too hot. Which is basically the entire plot of Little Bear and the Wishfish. Before we dive into the books and the illustrations, allow me to introduce my very own Wishfish.

My Ill Trickit Trow was gifted to me to keep internet trolls at bay. Or one specific troll, but the least said about that, the better. And being a dyed-in-the-wool yarnista, the presence of a knitted good-luck talisman brings me considerable joy.

However, I digress. Little Bear and the Wishfish was written and illustrated long, long ago. It’s long out of print, but it remains one of the few books I still love presenting with classes/hordes/audiences of restive and twitchy Smalls. It just works.

Not all picture books work for groups of Smalls corralled together at meet the author events. By ‘work’, I mean ‘prove to be sufficiently gripping to hold the scattered attention of even the most disruptive of Smalls in a public setting’.3 Usually, Smalls with the most limited of attention spans sit up front and pitch in their ten cent’s worth with a singular determination to be heard, if not understood. I have realised that the combination of such distracted Smalls with menopausal brain-foggy authors tends to spell D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R and many subsequent hours of self-flagellation on the author’s part.

These days, I do very few events with large groups, mainly because the majority of my books work best when shared with an individual Small snuggled up close by. Sharing a story with all the time in the world to explore the details in the illustrations and the space and privacy to answer the Big Questions that the text has unearthed. Not attempting large-scale crowd control where rather than reading and showing illustrations from your latest book, you end up basically doing stand-up in front of the toughest audience you’ll ever encounter, with a dodgy mike and tech that always lets you down. Not the same thing at all.

Thirty years ago, when Little Bear and the Wishfish came out, we didn’t have Powerpoints or laptops or the ability to sling a picture book’s worth of images onto a USB stick. Back then, I’d either bring the physical artwork to the event ( risky, given that the artwork was watercolour and when Smalls say ‘Let me see’, in actual fact they mean ‘Let me run my sticky fingers over your artwork, depositing bodily fluids en route.’

After a few near-misses, I’d leave the artwork at home and instead, would talk and illustrate on a flip chart at the same time. Which was difficult, to say the least. The restive Smalls ( at the front) would encourage me to draw faster, or draw better or demand to be allowed to demonstrate their superior skills with a broad nib marker. Which I was happy to allow them to do.

However, for Little Bear and the Wishfish, there was one image that was so hideous, so shocking and which so perfectly demonstrated the dangers of getting what you wish for that I had to show it, not tell it. Brace yourselves…

I can still remember what it felt like to paint this monstrosity. And how much I enjoyed doing so. There are times where I take myself by surprise, and this was certainly one of them. However, let’s have some context first: the Bears have a perfect life with their every desire catered for by a benign ecosystem.

When it rained, they fished, when it snowed, they hunted and when it was sunny they made like sloths and hung out in the ‘hood, working on their tans. As the omniscient author noted, ‘Life was just peachy.’

Looking back to those earlier, innocent days, I have to agree. Certain aspects of life were totally peachy. No internet ( at least not for your average mortal), a fully-operational NHS ( at least up here in the Papaña River Valley) and we hadn’t really wrapped our heads around the existential dangers of unbridled oil consumption. And yet… I’m sure that like the Bears, I complained. What about? What on earth could I have found to moan about, back then?

For one thing, the weather. It was always either too wet, too cold or too hot.

Understandably, the small gods of weather-making (who, for reasons I can’t recall, I’d chosen to illustrate as gilded putti) grew heartily hacked off with such ingratitude. They’d put considerable effort into making perfect climatic conditions for the furtherance of the biosphere, and here were a bunch of furry ingrates giving it large about the weather. Didn’t they realise they were living in a Goldilocks zone?

So the weathermakers ( the raindancer, sunblazer and snowmaker) decided to teach those Bears a lesson they’d never forget. Uh, oh.

Hurricanes? Tornadoes? Wildfires? Droughts? Floods? Famines? Methane burps? Runaway catastrophic climate heating?

Not yet. Don’t rush me. All of this comes in the fullness of time ( alas) and is the subject of a later book which we’ll get into when I’m feeling apocalyptic, but for now, let’s keep it light, shall we? The weather makers catch a fish, endow it with powers and release it back into the Papaña near the Bear’s low-rise cave.

With predictable results. Waking up to mist, Big Bear wishes the weather would do something definite like…uh…snow.

When Big Bear complains that it’s too cold and wishes it would be hot and sunny, his wish is granted. In spades.

But it isn’t until Big Bear says

that we see ( OMG, my eyes) the full extent of the horror, the horror. Which is swiftly compounded by Medium Bear’s wish for external thermal regulation.

and finally, Little Bear chips in with, ‘I wish you two would stop moaning and leave me alone,’

Poor Little Bear. Poor Big Bear and Medium Bear too. Poor all of us, in fact. So blinded by our wants and desires and wishes for things to be better, that we fail to appreciate the many miraculous small events taking place around us, all of the time. Until they’re gone.

However, this is a picture book, and I’m not in the business of giving children nightmares ( at least I hope not) so I can report that after several near-misses at one final wish facilitated by a fed-up-to-the-gills Wishfish, Little Bear squeaks out

‘I wish I lived in a cave

by a river

with Big Bear and Medium Bear…

and weather that snowed sometimes,

rained occasionally

and was sunny more often than not.’

And thus, the Bears are returned to their factory settings and they all live happily ever after.

In other news, my agent and I are working on a very exciting book pitch. I finished artwork for the cover of an EP by Irish band Polar Bolero4 ( love that name, obviously) and I’m rewriting the text for my next picture book and feeling quite fired up about it all. Life may not be 100% peachy but it’s pretty fruitful for this weird year of 2025. May you all thrive and prosper and conquer your hills, geological and otherwise.