Booktime author Ian Whybrow on the picture books that shaped him when growing up, and the books he now enjoys with his own children
They say that parents don't have conversations with their children any more. They just tell them what to do and ask for the bare minimum of information about what their offspring have been up to. Luckily, I never went short of conversation when I was small because my mother liked sharing books with me and my sisters every night. The books we revisited all the time were Barbar the Elephant ("Why has that one got circles on his bottom?") Orlando the Marmalade Cat ("But you can't spread cats on toast...") and When We Were Very Young. ("What do sergeants do apart from looking after the guards' socks when they're changing them at Buckingham Palace?)
When I read to my girls, our favourite picture-books were: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak; Mr Gumpy's Outing by John Burningham and Meal One by Ivor Cutler and Helen Oxenbury. We shared them dozens of times because of the funny, rough and outrageous bits in them that always lifted our spirits by making us smile.
