I was just listening to a wonderful programme* on Radio 4 about my grate hero Nigel Molesworth (and of course his nemesis fotherington-tomas, the star of this icon). One of the interviewees, the poet Wendy Cope, said that Molesworth had influenced the way she spoke and wrote, and that's definitely true of me and indeed my entire family. When I was away in Irish-language summer college (the annual rite of passage for middle class Irish teenagers), my dad wrote a series of amazingly funny stories in the molesworth style, purporting to be my adventures in the gaeltacht - these stories continued when I was away for the summer during my college years, and are still some of the funniest things I've ever read.

The funniest things I've ever read, however, are the Molesworth books themselves, and if you've never read The Compleet Molesworth, then you should do so immediately. There are very few things which could reduce me to tears of laughter when I was nine and which can have exactly the same effect on me nearly twenty years later, but that book is one of them. I must have read it a hundred times, and it never gets stale. In fact, I'm off to re-read it now...

*Note: the readings of the books in this show can't achieve the same effect as the written version, not least because the reader was a rather whiny small boy, so don't let that put you off.