My very first successes were in writing children’s stories for BBC Scotland’s late lamented Nickety Nackety on radio. I wrote scripts for the schools programmes on Radio Scotland as well as for BBC Northern Ireland – Search Inside, Hopscotch, One Potato, Two Potato and Hurley Burley, all sadly now gone.

I was commissioned to write four picture books and two activity books based on Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll and featuring stills from the very first TV series about them made in Czechoslovakia. A very international collaboration!

I’ve lost count of the number of children’s stories I’ve written for comics, magazines, anthologies and the like, but there’s an awful lot of them.

I’ve collected some of the stories and poems I’ve written for children in a book, A Drop of Rainbow Magic which will be published shortly. It’s a book with a difference – the children draw the pictures to go with them. And the cover has been designed by Maisie, one of my young friends.