The new cycle hire scheme in London will officially begin next Friday, July 30. I think it’s great to encourage cycling as it is a wonderful form of inner-city transport: environmentally friendly, healthy, convenient, quick and cheap. But unless there is investment in the necessary infrastructure for bikes in London, this city will not radically transform itself into a cycle-friendly city straight away.

The car (and other 4-wheeled motorised transport) remains king in London while bicycles and pedestrians have to tought it out in the margins of the roads, leading to countless daily confrontations between members of these two groups and risk of injury to both from motorised vehicles.

Surely a good integrated transport planning regime would protect cyclists from cars and pedestrians from cars and bicycles. However, even the new so-called ‘Cycling Superhighways‘ provide only very limited protection — there is a painted lane but no physical barrier between bikes and cars. I have always felt that a more radical solution is necessary to separate the two types of traffic and so prevent more people from being killed on the road.

Cycling has become more and more popular in the last decade and with the new cycle hire scheme I anticipate that numbers will rise at an even greater rate. I hope that this increase in the numbers of cyclists will create more pressure to radically and imaginatively overhaul London’s road system (e.g. ‘cycle lanes in the sky — see pic below) to at last make it more friendly for non-motorised transport and less friendly for cars.

J M Barrie was an occasional amateur film-maker. One of his films, shot in 1923, is called The Yellow Week at Stanway, and an excerpt from it (featuring cricket) has now been posted on the Amazon page for my book Peter Pan’s First XI.

The footage shows a team of Nico Llewelyn Davies’s friends playing cricket at the Stanway ground in Gloucestershire. Barrie spent much of his summer at Stanway House throughout the 1920s and it was only a few miles away from Broadway (across the border in Worcestershire) where the Allahakbarries challenged a team of artists for three summers between 1897 and 1899.

As far as I know this is the only place on the internet where it is possible to watch any of this film. It is possible to watch the whole thing by physically going to the BFI on London’s South Bank and there is more information on the film on the BFI’s own website, including a full synopsis.

There is a great review of the 1940 Chronicle project in Campaign magazine this week.

Here are the choice bits:

By Leon Jaume, executive creative director, WCRS:

‘In an otherwise ordinary week, we are lucky enough to end with a real star. It is 70 summers since the Battle of Britain raged above and the RAF Benevolent Fund is marking the occasion by trying to put us in the shoes of the people who live and fought through the war. It does this in two ways. One is an online version of a newspaper reporting real events each day as if we were in 1940. The other, bolder, strand to the campaign is inventing characters with specific roles in the Battle of Britain (plane mechanic, flying officer, nurse and so on, who Tweet daily as the battle unfolds and with whom you can engage. It’s one of the most powerful and least expected uses of social media I’ve yet seen. It’s also brave, ambitious and moving, and I love them for doing it.’

And by Tony Quinn, head of planning, JWT:

‘I’ve left the best until last. RAF Benevolent Fund. Loved it. Well planned, well thought out, a mine (oops) of rich and highly emotive content. I felt both moved and uplifted. I shed a tear and raised a smile all at once. It was like reading Sebastian Faulks but without the guff.’

I have been keeping a low profile for the past 12 weeks as I have been writing all the content for the project I referred to in my last post: www.1940chronicle.com. It’s one of the biggest and most demanding projects I’ve ever worked on: 90,000 words of historically accurate content in a very short research-and-write period. But of course the very fact it’s so demanding is part of what has made it so brilliant to do. Here is the ‘teaser trailer’ for the story:

This is a storytelling project which follows ‘in real time’ five fictional characters living through the Battle of Britain from June 21 to September 17. At the heart of it all is the Chronicle newspaper which breaks real news stories every day as though they were happening now: in effect June to September 2010 has become June to September 1940.

Each of the characters tell their own story through diary entries (blogs) once a week and via tweets every day. It is somewhere between a digital soap opera and a history lesson, a meeting of a social media novel and an historical re-enactment.

Let me introduce you to the characters. They are George, a Hurricane pilot, Jane, his wife who is also an RDF (radar) operator in the WAAF, Frank, an engineer, Alexander Rhodes, chief war correspondent for the Chronicle, and Mary, who is a nurse at East Grinstead Hospital assisting a remarkable plastic surgeon treating burns victims.

The project has been commissioned by the RAF Benevolent Fund (RAFBF) who are keen to raise awareness of their work and to get younger audiences involved in what they do. Digital agency Reading Room have worked closely with RAFBF and me to achieve what so far has been a very successful result. Soon after the campaign was launched, Stephen Fry sent out a tweet about it, which created a massive spike in the viewing audience:

stephenfry Fabulous real time blogging of Battle of Britain. You can relive 1940 day by day. A must. http://1940chronicle.com

The numbers, I believe, have continued to hold up well. This in part is due to some good press coverage in the Independent, Media Week, the Daily Mail and others. I hope that more and more people catch up on the story and follow it to its dramatic conclusion in September, just after Battle of Britain day on September 15.

Working on the project has made me think very hard about other possibilities for digital storytelling. I’m attending a Future Book event tomorrow evening to chat with some fellow practitioners of how stories can be told through digital media. I plan to post a report on that event, assuming there’s something interesting to report.

In the meantime: visit www.1940chronicle.com.

I am currently spending most of my waking life in 1940. I dream in black & white. I am working on a fascinating writing project for the RAFBF, conceived and designed by digital agency Reading Room.

I am so busy with this all-consuming project at the moment that I haven’t time to blog or do anything else much except write — more than 40,000 words in the last month, in fact.

I hope to finish at the beginning of July, when I will begin to resume, I hope, a more normal life, with a far more modest daily word count.

But for the time being, I am flying in Hurricanes, avoiding barrage balloons, smoking woodbines, buying food with my ration book and growing potatoes in the garden, and writing about all of it.

I will return to the present only when my own summer Battle of Britain is over.

One of J. M. Barrie’s ‘hints to his team from their captain’ was that: ‘No batsman is allowed to choose his own bowler. You needn’t think it.’ The same applies to authors and critics.

My book Peter Pan’s First XI has been reviewed three times in the past week in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times. It’s been a mixed bag. The Irish Times review, by John S Doyle, was exceptionally positive. Doyle concluded by writing that:

‘This engaging book scrutinises its many subjects well, but with a kind eye. The author is obviously himself passionate about cricket, and explains enough of the pleasures of the game to pass on some of that passion to the reader . . . ’

The reviews in the Financial Times and the Guardian were a combination of the good and the not-so-good. Stephen Moss in the Guardian wrote that ‘the book is deeply suggestive, without ever exhausting any of its numerous themes.’ And that it is ‘a chancy cameo, then, rather than a dutifully compiled double-hundred; an innings more suited to village cricket than a Test match. Which, in its way, is not inappropriate for a book about this most unlikely of cricket teams.’

Unfortunately Moss makes a careless mistake when he reports J. M. Barrie writing of Jerome K. Jerome, that ‘he was a great cricketer, at heart.’ The description is actually Jerome writing about Barrie which is a little bit embarrassing when Moss uses it as an example of ‘Barrie’s wonderfully dry observations’ though it does rather sound like something that Barrie might write, it’s true.

And I believe he is both mistaken and also rather disingenuous in his review when he accuses me of using a ‘kitchen sink approach to history’. He lists what he sees as the offending examples here:

‘Thus, towards the end of the book, we get Milne joining the team in 1910 as the “last member” of the Allahakbarries (cue six pages on his literary career), a politician member of the team being beaten up by Suffragettes, a sensational innings in a first-class match in 1911 by a Nottinghamshire player who has nothing to do with the Allahakbarries, the death of Scott on his expedition to the South Pole in 1912, and the almost contemporaneous sinking of the Titanic (perhaps included because one of those killed was an artist who had played against the Allahakbarries).’

Moss implies that these examples have been plucked from the annals of history as some kind of ‘pre-war best hits’ selection but in fact they are all directly connected with J. M. Barrie and his cricket team, the subject of my book after all, with the sole exception of the 1911 innings (one of the most remarkable knocks in cricketing history about which an entire book was written by John Arlott). He fails to mention in the review that Scott was one of Barrie’s greatest friends or that Frank Millet, the artist who went down in the Titanic, was a key member of the Broadway side that the Allahakbarries played against between 1897 and 1899. It is these remarkable connections which make this such a compelling story; without them it would indeed be a kitchen sink approach to history, with them ‘Barrie’s haphazard team [becomes] a prism through which to view the wider pre-war period’ according to The Sunday Times’ literary editor Andrew Holgate, whose review of my book really seems to ‘get it’.

Stephen Moss, it seems, did not, but of course he is entitled to his view, however much I might disagree with it. If authors could choose their critics after all, we’d be hitting metaphorical boundaries all day long. And where’s the fun in that?

Oh, hang on a minute . . .

I’ve spent the last few days in Kirriemuir, east Scotland, birthplace of J. M. Barrie, whose cricketing exploits I have chronicled in my book Peter Pan’s First XI. Kirriemuir was celebrating the 150th anniversary of Barrie’s birth with a number of events.

I gave a brief, impromtu talk to the Strathmore Speaker’s Club at North Muir Hall, whose members seemed such good storytellers that I wondered whether Barrie was as extraordinary as I had previously thought, or whether he was in fact just the most famous and spectacularly successful incarnation of his home town’s talent for weaving narratives.

I did a talk and signing at Kirriemuir library, two signings at Whatley’s Books, one at the camera obscura and cricket pavillion that Barrie bequeathed to the town in 1930, and one at Barrie’s birthplace, where I sat at Barrie’s old desk. I also did a reading from my book and shared a stage with three poets: Douglas Lipton, Tim (not-Brooke!) Taylor and Robert Ramsay. It was a busy few days.

And I somehow found time to get up to the hills where I did a walk from Glen Clova up to Loch Brandy and around, where snow still lay, most spectacularly in a gully that had a long white streak of snow cut into three parts, stretching down toward the dark waters of the loch (picture below). I hitched a lift back with a ranger who worked up in the hills who offered me my first taste of small-town fame - ‘I stopped because I saw your picture in the paper’, he said. On Saturday night, around midnight, as I stood at the bar in a pub in ordering a pair of drinks another man stood next to me and also told me that he too had seen my picture in the paper. ‘You looked bulimic’, he said to me, somewhat enigmatically, like a line from a Pinter play. ‘But I think your book sounds interesting.’ He got his drink and took a sip and looked at me, very stony-faced. ‘You looked like you were about to vomit.’

Storytelling was not limited to the speakers’ club. One man attempted to relate to me the entire story of Homer’s Odyssey in the bar of the Thrums Hotel. Dave Torrie, an ex-editor of the Dandy comic and a keen cricketer who played for Kirriemuir for many years, told me the story of Ian Hamilton’s heist of the stone of destiny from Westminster Abbey, as well as many other funny stories.

I’d like to thank everyone who helped to make my visit to Kirriemuir a success, and in particular John and Kay Dorward, Lis Hill and Sandra and David Affleck.

And finally I also recommend the great cafe called 88 degrees in Kirriemuir, run by Philip and Johanna, that serves some of the best and most reasonably-priced food of its kind that I’ve eaten anywhere.

Back in London I was surprised to be greeted by queues of people in my living room waiting for a signed copy (see picture). What a welcome home!

I’m heading to Kirriemuir on Wednesday, May 12, the town where J. M. Barrie was born on May 9, 150 years ago, in 1860. It seems like the most fitting place to be for the official publication of my book Peter Pan’s First XI, the story of J. M. Barrie’s curious cricket team the Allahakbarries.

I’m very excited about the trip. I will be participating in a number of events, a programme of which you can view here, and will be attending others such as “Speaking of Barrie”, an evening of talks, readings and fun at the Strathmore Speakers Club.

So far it’s been a decent week, helped by a good review in The Sunday Times written by Andrew Holgate, which made Monday morning all the more bearable. Today I signed books at Hatchard’s Bookshop in Piccadilly, helped, appropriately enough, by a lovely chap called Barry.

I’ll be blogging again from Kirriemuir to provide updates on what has been happening in a small town between the North Sea and the mighty Cairngorms over the next few days. I’ve been told that there may even be some cricket . . .  I’m packing my gloves.

I noticed a very interesting article today on how ‘two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside [the UK's] borders’.

A report by Engineering the Future argues that this is an unsustainable approach to water usage.

This piece was in The Sunday Times yesterday: