Report by Hugo Webster, Year 7
“What to you is an adventure?”…..
“Going out of your comfort zone and going somewhere you have never been before,” someone said. A challenging question that certainly stuck in my mind. It was Allan Boroughs who asked this during his visit on the 9th of March. Allan visited Charters to talk to us about his books Ironheart and Bloodstone.
Allan explained, that for him, the best way to write an adventure book is to actually go on an adventure. He then told us about his trip to Siberia and how on a cold day it’s about -45 oc. I think the funniest part of the story was when he was on a train to the middle of Siberia, he woke up in the night to visit the toilet and his hand froze to the toilet door handle! He was stuck there for about two hours until the train conductor and a group of hysterical Russians came along at about seven o’clock in the morning with a jug of hot water to melt the ice trapping his hand. After he came out of the toilet, a woman told him that he was lucky they had warm water because if they hadn’t someone would’ve had to wee on his hand! He told us about this by reading an extract from his first book Ironheart.
After Allan’s Siberia story he told us about how he came up with one of his characters for Bloodstone, his second book. His son didn’t have a costume for a party so then they made a costume. The costume for Sid (Professor Moon’s airship pilot) was brilliant! The costume looked like something a world war one pilot would wear minus the hat and jetpack - he looked like someone out of a Sci-fi film. He read part of Bloodstone were Atlantis is filling with lava and the only way to escape is by India (the main character) and Sid jet packing out of the volcano – exciting stuff. Returning to the question about adventure, a couple of people said the rainforest, someone said South America, but I said I’d go to Alaska – the isolation in that vast wilderness would be an adventure on it’s own, that would stay with me for life.
Allan talked meteors and how one (about 100 kilometres wide) once hit the Earth. The air couldn’t get out of the way quick enough so it exploded mid-air and all the surrounding trees were blown over as if they were “praying”. From this colossal event not one single person was injured as the “reindeer riders” had moved away by the time of the explosion. We don’t know how they knew about the meteor because it would have been millions of miles away.
All too soon the hour of absolute fun was over and we had to go back to lessons. At second break, I went back to the hall and met this amazing author who signed my two books.
