Our very first book! If we live to be a hundred and manage another fifty books in that time, our love for My Friend Alan will never fade. There’s something about your first time I think. It started life way back in 2020 when Poppy was 4 and still at nursery. She’s always been mad about dinosaurs. Dinosaur books, dinosaur lamps, dinosaur toys, dinosaur bones, you name it - if it fits inside the house and went extinct 65 million years ago, we’ve probably got it around here somewhere. She has one particular cuddly dinosaur, one of those big fellas with the long necks and the little heads (Diplodocus? Brontosaurus? Hard-to-tell-asaurus!). His name is Alan and Poppy never went anywhere without him. Here they are together.

Poppy would always come home from nursery with her arms full of stuff - her little blue school bag with the cute owl on it, a brand new picture or 3 (with the paint still slightly wet!) and of course, old Alan himself. One day she came home clutching something slightly out of the ordinary, an empty shoebox. It was accompanied by a letter asking us nicely if we could fill it with anything we could spare – old toys, toiletries, games etc, so that it could be passed on to someone who’d really benefit from it. I suppose it was probably then that the little acorn that grew into My Friend Alan was planted.

I’d thought about writing a children’s picture book for a while, reading them nightly to Poppy as I was. All I was lacking was the right story (well, any story!). And then it hit me. Why not write about doing something nice, something just like this, a story that shows the kind of difference you can make on an individual basis, however big or small you happen to be? For full emotional impact, I wanted it to be something very kind, but ultimately very difficult to do, a story that involved an element of letting go. I got to thinking about what my own daughter would find difficult to let go of and the answer was right there in her arms. Alan.

Now all I needed was some characters, a young child and their mother...well I didn’t have to look far for inspiration! Annie was (and still is) forever doing crafty things with Poppy, painting, gluing and papier-mâchéing like it was going out of fashion. If anyone could knock up a nicely decorated shoebox for Alan, it was Annie!

I spent a week or so pulling it all together, bringing the story to life. It was great fun imagining Alan’s journey to Malawi and the sort of things he might get up to there. It was also actually pretty affecting, charting my own daughter’s maturing emotions as she comes to terms with saying a tough goodbye.

The warm hug they share at the end of the story is the same feeling I get whenever I think of My Friend Alan, its origins and how its eventually ended up, a lovely fuzzy glow of happiness that’ll never dim.

And as for Poppy and Alan, they remain the best of friends to this day. Many other old buddies have come and gone, but never the big fellow with the long neck and the little head!