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       Flight of Dragons

      As far as I know, my Dad has never read a book in his life. While I grew up reading everything I could get my tiny hands on, he was always there looking after the vegetables and herbs growing in the garden, playing guitar, or watching films. All stuff that I could sit near him doing while I was reading.

      Him not being interested in books didn’t matter to me, for as much excitement as I could get from reading a story, I could get ten times that from my Dad and his storytelling.

      He didn’t read to us at bedtime. Instead, he’d make up some bizarre story. Often these stories would be heavily dependent on things like science and history, but he scrapped all that shit to make them brilliant. Any finer points that we wanted information on he’d just make some more shit up and tell us so matter-of-factly that I believed everything he said.

      His stories were fucking ace. There was one about a voice powered car, which ended up with the car and driver going over a cliff because he forgot the code word for ‘stop’. There was one about how the giraffe got to have such a long neck (he got his head caught in a tree and ran round and round which stretched it out), and once he came and woke us up in the middle of the night to take us outside and show us how the daisies closed their petals inwards which he told us was to keep the pollen warm until the sun came back out. When he lit a match and the petals opened it blew my fucking mind.

      He’d tape films off the telly and let me believe that they were real. Two examples stick out to me here, once with Laputa: Castle in The Sky where, when I told him I thought I might be Lusheeta, Toel Ul (true ruler) of the Castle Laputa in the Sky, he agreed. And when by some weird coincidence my Grandma gave me a necklace with a glassy blue stone on it and I fastened it around my neck truly believing that it was Sheeta’s levitation stone, he watched as I climbed up into a little tree to jump out and see if I’d float. Over and over again. And when I didn’t, he said that Grandma had obviously got the wrong stone, and we put it away somewhere safe, just in case all it was waiting for was me to learn the special spells to awaken its magical powers.

      The second one was a bit more special, because it was magic.

      He’d recorded a film off the telly called The Flight of Dragons. He was really excited about it so Dad, my brother and I all sat down to watch it.

      If you haven’t seen it, and I understand that not that many people have, it is about a guy called Peter Dickinson who makes up a board game with characters that he has crafted based on what he knows about fantasy. There are four wizards who represent different shit, a bunch of dragons, a princess, a knight, and all of that kind of gubbins. He ends up in the game with the characters he’s created and at the end fights the evil red wizard Omadon by using science against Omadon’s magic. It is fucking amazing.

      In the film Peter is writing a book about dragons, he’s fucking fascinated by them, but he doesn’t know where the book is going or if he’s good enough to finish it, but when he goes into the game and lives amongst the characters he’s made, Carolinus the green wizard takes him to his library of unfinished books, where Peter’s book The Flight of Dragons is nestling in amongst classic and well known and loved books of today.

      So we watched this film and my brother and I were hooked. We watched it almost every day for fucking ages, and I used to ask my Dad questions about it. The only question that I really wanted an answer to, though, was whether that book that this animated character Peter Dickinson had written was real or not.

      Dad didn’t know, and told me that. He said that he wasn’t sure whether it could be real or if it was even finished, because we didn’t see the inside of the book in the film, did we, Carolinus had snapped it shut before we got chance.

      Oh well, I could just continue to watch the film and to think about dragons. Maybe one day I could even write a book about dragons myself.

      Months later I was rummaging through the shelves in the spare bedroom to pass the time and hidden away, on the second layer of the double layer of books on the shelves I found it.

      I ran through to Dad, who was outside in the greenhouse and thrust it in his face.

      ‘Dad! Look! We’ve got it! He did finish it!’ Dad put down his watering can and looked puzzled.

      ‘Where did you find that?’ he asked.

      ‘On the shelves! It was hidden on the shelves!’

      He took it in his hands and turned it over and told me that he it wasn’t his. And it wasn’t Mum’s or my brother’s either, it must be there by magic.

      He handed it back to me and told me to look after it, that someone must have put it there for me, maybe even the green wizard Carolinus himself! And then he went back to watering the tomatoes.

      For years that book was what magic meant to me. And now that I’m older and have spoken to Dad about it I know that he left it there for me, knowing that he couldn’t give it to me himself because that would ruin everything that I believed, it would take that magic away.

      And that is why although my Dad has never read a book in his life,

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