Transworld, 1988

     There is an unwritten rule in children's books that the amount of work needed to write the book is inversely proportional to its length. These four took a very long time indeed. We had to arrange the pages ('phone', 'slide', 'biscuit', 'crayons'...) so that there was some kind of unspoken narrative. We had to make all the dinosaurs look three years old. We had to remove the dinosaurs' legs because they looked too sexual. We had to remove all the purple dinosaurs for fear of litigation from the creators of Barney the Purple Dinosaur...
     When the books were published I hadn't yet learnt that you have to take several copies of your first edition and lock them underground in a fire-proof, lead-lined box. I gave endless sets of these books away and, as a result, I no longer own a complete set of the UK first editions (hence the title 'On Vacation' - these are the US 'translations').