‘A love letter to quiet kindness and belly laughs and noticing the people who don’t get noticed’ ~ Rob Walton in The Sunday Times*
It’s World Book Day! To celebrate, we thought you might enjoy this irreverent interview with Rob Walton, about his book Please Don’t Read the Footnotes Please, which is published this month!
The Sunday Times* award-winning interviewer Rob Walton interviews the fantastic writer Rob Walton. (Rob Walton is denoted by ‘RW’ to avoid any confusion.)
RW: So what is it? This book you’ve written? What is it? Go on, tell me. Put three Tunnock’s tea cakes in your mouth – all at once, mind – and tell me all about it.
RW: Oh it’s kind of flash fiction. Without the story arcs or resolutions or conflicts or any other of that namby-pamby literary nonsense.
RW: So it’s not flash fiction?
RW: Correct. But it is very very short stories. For children. And adults. And others.
RW: Right, so –
RW: You haven’t actually won any awards, have you?
RW: I was Boys’ Clubs of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire 1500m Walk champion two years in succession.
RW: That’s not about interviewing, is it? It’s not fifteen hundred metres of journalism, is it?
RW: Not exactly, but let’s get back to you.
RW: All right, don’t interrupt. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a love letter.
RW: A love letter?!
RW: I thought I said –
RW: It’s just not what I associate –
RW: It’s a love letter to daftness. It’s a love letter to acting the goat and playing silly beggars. To Riddings Estate and the wider Scunthorpe area. To Scunthorpe in the Loire Valley. To people who are from Scunthorpe and to people who have never heard of Scunthorpe. To people who are scared of Scunthorpe. It’s a love letter to reading and writing and having a laugh with your mates and sitting with your mum and dad and listening to a story. It’s a love letter to having silliness crash into your head and spill out onto the page. It’s a love letter to quiet kindness and belly laughs and noticing the people who don’t get noticed. It somehow turns out to be a love letter to horses, even though I’m not actually convinced they exist. Hooves? Really? That’s not a thing, is it? It’s a love letter to people like the young me who I never saw in books or on the telly. Everything I write is a love letter to my mum’s egg and chips with home-made pickled red cabbage and my dad getting the grandchildren ice cream from the garage. It’s a love letter to all the people who aren’t usually the subject of films shown on IMAX screens, or billboard advertisements. And to that child waiting in the rain at the bus stop. And the one splashing in the puddles. It’s a love letter to story walks and people having faith in each other and giving people chances and beckoning them through open doors. It’s a love letter to people who put books on top of those doors so the beckonee has a book fall on their head and we all laugh. Before checking if they’re all right and making them a cup of tea – with however many sugars they want without casting judgement. It’s a love letter to all those who write for children and want them to have books in their hands. And sometimes in their mouths. It’s a love letter to me and you. Whatever you look like and however you comb your hair.
Publisher’s note: If you leave some Tunnock’s Tea Cakes on the wall outside the ice rink in Whitley Bay ‘Rob Walton’ will sniff them out. Try it.
*That’s the Bottesford Sunday Times.
Please Don’t Read the Footnotes Please by Rob Walton will be published by The Emma Press on 20 March 2025.
Illustrated throughout by Reena Makwana.
ISBN 9781915628367/Paperback/£9.99
About the author:
Rob Walton is a writer, performer and teacher from Scunthorpe, now based in Whitley Bay, where he writes short fiction and poetry for children and adults. His debut poetry collection, This Poem Here, was published by Arachne Press in 2021. His poetry for children has been published online by Tyger Tyger and The Dirigible Balloon, and features in various print magazines and anthologies published by, among others, The Toy Press, The Emma Press, Parakeet, Bloomsbury and Macmillan.
