As Time Passes

"It’s wild, isn’t it? It addresses the concept of time for kids. But instead of showing clocks and hours and minutes, it talks about different things that you can observe changing over time. Like, “Fringes cover your eyes, because they grow. And, how eyes slowly get used to the dark.” It captures that sense of growing and changing, mostly from a child’s point of view. Yes. Reading it makes you think about things differently. That sense that you get when you realise things have changed—your hair’s grown, or you’ve worked out how to do something that you didn’t know how to do a week ago. It’s very much about change and growing up but told in a very immediate and tactile way. I love the image-making. It’s very smart, full of daring colour contrasts, and bold. I find it intriguing. I’m looking at the page now where it says, “Computers. All computers get slower.” This is about the real experience of children. I feel quite strongly that what we ought to be doing in children’s books is exploring what life is like for real children these days, which does mean screens and mobile phones. It means all sorts of things that we didn’t think about 30 years ago. And part of what people should be doing in picture books is helping children negotiate all these new technologies. “I feel quite strongly that what we ought to be doing in children’s books is exploring what life is like for real children these days, which does mean screens and mobile phones.” This book is a combination of some really smart modern graphics, and a well-observed text about change and what it feels like. It’s relevant. It’s exciting to see something that different from the mainstream—there’s so often a tendency to just distract everybody with farmyard animals. If you look at the number of picture books about farmyard animals, it’s huge, whereas the number of books about mobile phones and computers is tiny. But for real children there’s an awful lot more screens than there are farmyard animals. I’m not at all the first to say this, but there is also a need for picture books aimed at older children—not just for the five year old to help them learn to read, but to help older children explore more complex experiences. I’m particularly thinking about social media. I’d love to get somebody to commission me for this."