Zoe and her devoted dog Beans. Illustration: Mick Inkpen

The story of The Magic Hoop is one of the Zoe and Beans series.

It is a lovely book and has delightful illustrations that any child could see what they are meant to be.

The story is about a girl called Zoe and her dog Beans. They are good friends and have lots of fun together.

Zoe is a very different character to Beans. She is happy and always excited. Beans, on the other hand, is lazy and quite shy.

One day Zoe finds a hoop. They find out together that the hoop is a magic hoop. Read the book to find out what happens next.

I really like the fact that this book is written by a father and daughter. I think that it is a very inspiring thing to do with your parent.

Impressed: Róisín and Séamus Glancy

I read this book to my younger brother Séamus, who is aged four. He enjoyed it very much and gave it a score of 13 out of ten.

I liked it too and think it would be good for both boys and girls aged 3-6 years. It made me laugh and it was very compulsive. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

I live with my family in Clapton very close to The Bookbox book shop. Last year I won The Bookbox’s story writing competition and was presented with my prize by a famous author.

My favourite author is Jacqueline Wilson and I adore her books to bits. I have two brothers, Fionn and Séamus.

–

Chloe Inkpen is a local author who creates her children’s book series Zoe and Beans in her studios in Hackney. Chloe works on it alongside her father, Mick Inkpen, the famous creator of Kipper and Wibbly Pig.

Don't worry: be happy

In the end, even pop psychology flows from Freud. It was the father of psychoanalysis who so eloquently described how our forebears banded together in the service of that most primitive of industries, agriculture. They diverted their energies away from satisfying primeval instincts and ploughed them into a project: civilisation.

Fast forward thousands of years and many of us are employed in office jobs, but the psychological mechanisms at work are no less powerful. They can crush our creativity and corrode individuality.

Or as Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School puts it in his foreword to longtime Stoke Newington resident Henry Stewart’s book The Happy Manifesto: “The vast majority of workplaces are stultifyingly dull. The physical surroundings are drab. Many jobs are designed to be as repetitive and soulless as possible. Fear is endemic. Many bosses, as Stanford’s Bob Sutton would say, are assholes.”

Happy Manifesto author Henry Stewart. Photograph: Miriam Stewart

Mr Stewart, an entrepreneur and the chair of governors at Stoke Newington School, passionately believes it doesn’t have to be like this. Not only that, he insists companies can boost their productivity by being pliant to their employees’ wishes and removing obstacles that hamper their enjoyment at work: “Imagine a workplace where people are energised and motivated by being in control of the work they do,” he says. “Imagine they are trusted and given freedom.”

His book contains many useful, practical suggestions for heads of organisations, many drawn from his own experience as chief executive of the training company Happy Ltd, which he founded as Happy Computers in his back room in Hackney in 1988. The company now trains 20,000 people a year and has been widely commended both for the way it treats its personnel and for its work in the community.

Stewart dislikes excess rules. His manifesto calls for a less intrusive form of management. Managers, he says, often get in the way. Their desire to have ‘sign off’ on decisions, however well intentioned, can damage workers’ self-esteem. Give people the tools to make decisions themselves, and information such as the budget for a project, and they will find solutions just as effectively as more senior staff.

Another thing that gets Stewart’s goat is the unbending stance most companies take towards staff working specific hours. Who says the company’s routine will suit everyone? And if it doesn’t, are some people working less effectively than they might otherwise?

Stewart gives the example one of his employees who would always roll in for work exhausted on a Monday morning after going clubbing the previous night. Instead of giving the young scenester a slap on the wrist for letting his social life damage his effectiveness and rigidly insisting that he show up for work at precisely the same time as his more sober colleagues, Stewart agreed to the reveller working a shorter day on Monday by arriving later and making up the hours on other days when he was less tired. If only all bosses were this accommodating!

The importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is another theme of the book, and Stewart insists that companies’ involvement in communities should make a genuine difference.

He recalls giving a talk at a conference about CSR: “As I looked around the room, I saw companies which I knew treated their staff badly,” he writes. “I saw companies whose core product was bad for people and bad for the environment. And I saw one company who spent far more on advertising the good work they did than on the good work itself. I am reminded of a cartoon in a UK newspaper which showed a huge mining company despoiling the earth, but their protective helmets were made from recycled plastic.”

His slim volume ends with a call to arms, a kind of “Bosses of the world, unite!”, and the hope that more companies will learn from major corporations such as John Lewis, WL Gore and Google, which Stewart says put the happiness of their workers at the heart of what they do.

But Stewart’s is a brave new world and one suspects that for too many workers Sunday night will continue to be a time of great foreboding.

The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart is published by Happy, priced £9.99.

Histories of Cable Street, published by Five Leaves

Unemployment is high and proposed cuts are causing deep rifts in a government also struggling to maintain the value of the pound abroad. As familiar as it might sound, the year is 1936. Against a backdrop of Depression, hunger marches and rising fascism on the Continent a number of fascist organisations pop up in Britain.

Amongst those playing to popular prejudice and blaming the country’s ills on immigrants and Jewish people, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are particularly virulent. Emulating the fascist organisation Mosley had encountered in Italy, right down to their blackshirt uniform, the BUF’s activities were often violent.

During the summer of 1936, tensions rose as BUF activities increased and news that they were planning on marching through the East End in October was greeted with alarm. Sixty percent of Jews in London lived in the East and the march was a deliberate provocation, calculated to cause maximum confrontation and disruption.

After pleas for the march to be officially banned fell flat, the blackshirts assembled on 4 October, ready to march through Stepney.  Anti-fascists rallied, uniting under the battle cry ¡No Pasaran! – they shall not pass, adopted from Spain’s own fight against fascism.

Despite the six thousand police attempting to clear the route, the anti-fascists stood strong, blocking the way. The only route left was through Cable Street, barricaded by protestors who chanted, blockaded the street with whatever they could find and fought running battles with the police. Eventually the BUF were forced back and the march dispersed to great jubilation.

The Battle of Cable Street, 1936 provides a thorough overview of the events. Born of a desire that this important piece of East London history is not forgotten, it was put together by the Cable Street Group and its reissue marks the 75th anniversary of the battle.

With black and white photographs and extracts from interviews with participants and witnesses it has been thoughtfully put together, capturing the heat and energy of the battle through the words of those who were there.

Everything Happens in Cable Street is an examination of the other stories the street has to tell, before and after its famous battle.  A fascinating collection of local characters and places emerge from the pages of this well-researched book by long-term resident Roger Mills.

October Day follows the event of 4 October through the eyes of seven different people.  Written by Frank Griffin, an eye-witness to the events, it offers a vivid insight into the people, the events and the politics.

These three very different books form an excellent record of an important historical event.  Alive with defiance and solidarity, they make for essential reading, particularly by those who have begun to forget.

Everything Happens in Cable Street, by Roger Mills, October Day: A Novel of the Battle of Cable Street, by Frank Griffin and The Battle of Cable Street, by The Cable Street Group are all published by Five Leaves.

Railtracks by John Berger and Anne Michaels: railways, love and loss

They may be sleek, clean temples of modernity, but airports aren’t a patch on train stations.

Where is the romance in what are essentially tightly controlled and hypersecure out-of-town shopping centres attached to runways?

Evocative reminiscences and meditations on the smell of coal at train platforms, of separations and reunions, are expressed in passages full of subtle cadences in this concise volume by the acclaimed novelist and commentator John Berger and the novelist Anne Michaels, which serves as a reminder of the beauty of our grandest transport interchanges.

These include the King’s Cross railwaylands – an industrial wasteland where you can still see “wires like ganglia hanging from the coarse brains of cement”.

Published in Hackney, the book reads like a less ornate version of something by Iain Sinclair.

The sometimes elegiac prose is finely written with a light touch, and it swirls around London treasures including the Hardy Tree in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, which was incidentally once the site of a pagan Temple of Mithra.

Stations, unlike airports, are surrounded and suffused with memories of this kind. They are “the shunting-yards of history”.

Take Washington DC’s most famous train station, from which many soldiers departed to travel on to fight in Europe in the war.

Berger writes: “For so many, Union Station is the place where fathers, brothers, sons, husbands were last alive. And, among all the partings, it is said, were lovers who had no place else to go, who came simply to join the anonymity of the crowd, so they could kiss with inconspicuous passion among the throngs crowding the platforms and the great hall, their public display swallowed up by the intense emotion all around them.”

With photographs by Czech artist Tereza Stehlíková, this sensitively written work, which contains not a word too many, will make you yearn to embark on a long return journey by train.

Railtracks
By John Berger and Anne Michaels, photographs by Tereza Stehlíková
Published by Go Together Press
Price £9.99
ISBN: 9780955767616

Animal magic: The Animalympics

The Animalympics by Hackney-based writer Julia Griffin and illustrator Hendrik Wittkopf is a wonderfully spun rhyming tale, inside the pages of a colourfully imagined children’s picture book.

Set in London, the story follows a group of animals who are fed up with the stinky pollution and rubbish of the city. In the hope of bettering the place, and with good old Fox at the helm, they plan to do “something big. A party! A feast! A sporting shindig!”

This can mean only one thing – the Animalympics.

The Queen, brilliantly realised by Wittkopf with a towering crown falling down over her eyes (and legs rather squat from the weight of it), is apprehensive that such an event could cause more congestion in her capital city. But Fox, being the sly old thing that he is, sends out a message to all the world’s creatures: “Please come to our Games. They’ll be fast, wild and free. London’s the top place for a creature to be.” (Environmentalists may snigger).

And so, disregarding ‘queenie’, a series of fantastically imagined sporting events take place, from Vole Vaulting outside the Tate Modern to ‘scratching and grooming’ down Savile Row. With its many recognisable landmarks and quips about dog poo and traffic, the layers of humour in this book will please both a young and mature readership.

However, this is not to be mistaken for one of those annoying children’s books that are really aimed at adults. It draws from the classics, such as Dr Seuss and other books in rhyme, and any possible grown-up subtexts remain subtle.

Wittkopf’s colourful collage-style illustrations of hamsters running loops on the London Eye bring the surreal and bizarre to life. His scratchy line-drawn creatures evoke the work of Quentin Blake, with a psychedelic undertone.

If there is a moral for everyone here, it is that nature often knows best. And for those of us a little older and bored by the glut of rather serious Olympic-related literature, The Animalympics offers both a droll and entertaining breather.

Julia Griffin and Hendrik Wittkopf will be at The Book Box, Chatsworth Road E5 on 21 January 2012.

The Animalympics
By Julia Griffin and Hendrik Wittkopf
Publisher: Clapton Commons 2011
£7.99

School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education by Melissa Benn

We all had labels at school. Maths geek. Good with your hands. Sports star. Creative. The dumb kid? The smart one? The rich kid? Poor?  I often look back on the assumptions a made about myself as a child and think how absurd they were. Lofty aspirations yet to enter the picture, my eleven year old self dreamt of becoming a teenage supermarket cashier whose mum let her smoke and chew gum.

It now seems absurd to classify ourselves, and allow our peers to classify us, at such a young age. But in her new book School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education Melissa Benn provides some retroactive comfort in suggesting that these childhood labeling rituals aren’t just playground politics. Rather, they are rooted in the very structure of British education.

Benn illustrates a long history of classifying children in stages. Unfortunately the first one is birth, when a family’s financial status dictates a child’s prospects of being educated at a top fee-paying school — or not. Let’s face it, even if the state system were entirely egalitarian, it would still have this huge disparity to contend with.

But without needing to address the comparatively simple question of haves and have-nots, Benn tells us that the state education system has always been, whether we noticed it or not, a political minefield.

Built upon what Benn describes as a ‘pyramid of provision’, the system uses exam results and league tables to ‘cream-skim’ the top students early on for better-funded state schools, like the early grammars and more recently, the new academies and free schools which set their own admissions policies, using what Benn calls ‘soft-focus selection’ to edit their intake.

With these structures, Benn argues, Britain has invited a version of ‘educational apartheid’ that, like the global economy, diverts resources to where it sees most potential, and challenges the rest to catch up.

But what of education as a human right? There’s no question of Benn’s stance — she is a staunch advocate for comprehensive education, an often-muddied term which for Benn means non-selective, all-ability schools, run by a local authority, implemented on a national level.

The current ‘new schools revolution’ pushing forward free schools and academies promises more choices, Benn explains, but at what cost to the quality of learning? Well, that depends on how you measure a good education. But now that an opportunistic third party has visited the front lines promising peace, the official definition of good education, warns Benn, will be subject to the free market, and all its volatility.

Unsurprisingly, then, the book is sharply angled against the expansion of academies and free schools, which are central-government controlled and often funded by private companies or charities.  Benn acknowledges that many sponsored academies produce excellent results (though perhaps through an overly results-driven system). The question Benn asks us to consider involves the bigger picture; if schools are not accountable to the local authority, how can we ensure they have the community interest in mind?

And if comprehensive education continues to dissolve, Benn predicts a “landscape of branded diversity” will emerge, and “the fast pace of technology, and the temptation to cut costs, will increase standardised, centralised learning methods.”

All parents want a top school for their children, which in the current climate requires exhaustive research of the buffet of options available, from faith schools selecting on religious criteria to free schools specialising in, say, Latin, and everything in between, with only the expanding market of education chains staying ahead of the game, ready to supply, and profit from their invitation to join in the conversation via the materials they provide.  This, Benn makes clear, is the most significant development of our generation.

Choice is good, but Benn’s real question is, who’s doing the choosing?

School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education by Melissa Benn
Published by Verso
ISBN: 9781844677368
RRP £12.99

Related:

Interview: author Melissa Benn on her new book, School Wars

Tim Gee, one of a number of protestors pressing world leaders to deliver the Millennium Development Goals last year (2010). Photograph: © Justin Tallis

Earlier this month protesters tried to occupy London’s Stock Exchange following a sit-in on Westminster Bridge. After Britain’s biggest riots for a generation and increasing anger over government cuts, Hackney author Tim Gee says our democracy needs a new direction.

Gee’s new book, Counterpower, catalogues the history of civil disobedience from the French Revolution to modern day.

He has been a prolific activist for ten years and was part of Climate Camp from its inception. He superglued himself to Royal Bank of Scotland last year, to protest against their funding of fossil fuel extraction, in his words “the world’s biggest environmental threat.”

For Gee, Counterpower is more a manual for action than an academic text. He says he wanted to show why some movements succeed and some movements fail.

“I wanted to write for the people that I was campaigning with about what had happened before ,but I also wanted to write something for the many people I meet who believe that campaigning doesn’t make a difference.

“I think one of the things that comes out really strongly is every successful movement has been told that they won’t make a difference, and obviously every movement does to some extent.”

He argues civil disobedience- or Counterpower with a capital ‘C’ as he terms it throughout the book- has always been an essential part of democracy: “We’re ruled by the people and there’s lots of ways people can rule other than putting a piece of paper in a box.” For him, Counterpower has more importance than ever as political parties and governments increasingly close down dialogue with the electorate and their own parties.

On the Iraq war, Gee says: “We won the argument but lost the campaign because we only used one kind of Counterpower- what I call ‘idea Counterpower’.” If the million people who protested had instead staged a sit-in, he says, the government might have taken notice.

Gee sees movements like the sit-in on Westiminster Bridge and Occupy London Stock Exchange as the dawn of a new age in Counterpower: “The Westminster sit-in wasn’t just a straightforward rally. People sat down and they asked each other ‘What are we going to do to escalate this? How are we going to work with each other against the government?’

And they decided they were going to occupy London Stock Exchange. “I think it’s true that there is a bigger movement towards civil disobedience than I’ve certainly ever seen in the time I’ve been involved. It’s certainly bigger than Climate Camp,” says Gee,

The riots, he argues, were “implicitly political” as they show how many people felt they had nothing to lose. At the heart of them, he says, was anger at police brutality and spending cuts: “I recently got hold of a cross-European study of riots matched against public spending cuts, and it was quite clear from the results that where there are big public spending cuts there are also riots, and the bigger the cuts, the bigger the riots.

“That’s why I think you have to recognise they are implicitly political, just not very constructive methods.”

He sees the aftermath of the riots as a time for people to try to change the current system, which concentrates power with a small political elite. Counterpower, he says, is part of the solution: “Society needs to be organised, and in order to be reorganised it has to be disorganised. The question is, where we go from here?”

The danger he sees is that the government will use the riots to justify further infringements of people’s civil liberties, as in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory.

As an example, he refers to some high profile and arguably disproportionate prison sentences handed out to riot-offenders. He adds though, that people can hardly be surprised: “I mean, of course people complain about that, but just complaining about it isn’t enough. If we want society to go in a different direction we’ve got to do something about it.”

Tim Gee will make a number of appearances to talk about Counterpower, including one at Pogo Café on Wednesday 7 December.

Further information about Counterpower from New Internationalist.

Landfall author Helen Gordon. Photograph: Nick Tucker

Landfall is a dark and comic portrayal of a young woman’s search for meaning in the face of loss and emotional detachment. Alice Robinson embarks on a journey from the concrete warehouses and vodka-fuelled nights of life in east London, back to the time-warp suburbia of her childhood and finally to a wild and formidable coastline where she confronts the notions of England as an island, of loneliness and of being on the edge.

Alice is a thirty-something art critic and editor of Meta magazine (insert Granta if you will), living in a warehouse unit of the Hackney Wick variety. She drinks in recognisable Shoreditch pubs and has endless undefined affairs with men she barely knows or doesn’t really like.

After a disastrous appearance on a cultural affairs radio show and with the magazine facing closure due to economic pressure, Alice finds herself jobless. She retreats, somewhat reluctantly, to the suburbs where she grew up, to look after the family home whilst her parents embark on a round-the-world trip.

This unaltered place of her childhood evokes memories of her sister Janey who disappeared from a park when they were teenagers, never to be seen again. Amongst her mother’s chintzy ornaments and the hollow quietness of the semi-urban landscape Alice realises that her life, and the writing that she has become well-regarded for, has lost all meaning. Her young American cousin Emily is forced upon her by a recently-remarried aunt and the two drift around in states of detached self-involvement.

After months of declining commissions from editors in the city, Alice agrees to interview the elusive and revered artist Karin Ericsson. This job takes her to the Sussex coast where Ericsson resides in a dilapidated wooden doll’s house. Alice reaches the very precipice of the island and her own emotional stalemate.

Gordon begins with a comically wry depiction of contemporary east London and its inhabitants: “Callum was one of those men of a certain haircut, who gravitated to the east of the city”, and the physical landscape, its “unprettified canals and blockish concrete industrial units” make for a brutal backdrop. But in places the descriptions are so localised, so very much now, that it’s both comfortingly relevant and at times a hindrance from full immersion in the narrative.

The variations in pace and language nicely reflect Alice’s emotional and geographical circumstances – from the slow amble through her suburban surroundings to the climactic tension of a hot July on the Sussex coast. A motley crew of peripheral characters, from the loping ex-boyfriend of Alice’s long-lost teenage sister, a now divorced car salesman, to the hyper health-conscious Californian cousin, make for other interesting examples of loneliness.

Gordon, who was an associate editor at Granta magazine and hails from the suburb of Croydon, creates a narrative built on layers of emotional loss and lack, written in sharp, often droll, prose that takes us through the multiple landscapes of contemporary England.

Landfall is published this month by Penguin
ISBN: 9780141969664
RRP: £12.99

Emeka Egbounu, youth worker and author. Photograph: Ena Miller

Interview: Hackney writer and gang intervention worker Emeka Egbuonu on his new book, Consequences

The sun was shining and the streets were quiet when I walked through Hackney’s De Beauvoir Estate. I didn’t need a map to find the Crib.

Amongst the high-rise flats, a little building covered in bright graffiti stood out and said ‘I’m here.’

The Crib Youth Project is where 20 something year old Emeka Egbounu has been coming since the age of 15. Now a community and anti-gang youth worker, he spends his days and nights trying to guide youngsters so they don’t make mistakes they can’t fix.

The spotlight has been focused on this East London guy for a while now. And it’s now a little brighter since the recent launch of his book Consequences. The volume contains the results, findings, outpourings and personal experiences of the Consequences program of seminars Egbounu founded at the Crib in 2009.

The hope then was to equip young people with the confidence and skills to make good choices and to avoid becoming involved in gangs, or getting out of gang cycles that trap so many kids today.  The hope now is to spread the word beyond the streets of Hackney.

Consequences is not about Egbounu; instead he’s made it about everyone else.  Collaborating with poets and artists, he’s managed to bring his book to life in a way that makes it feel very real.

Lots has been written about the author, so we thought we should let him speak for himself. In an exclusive audio interview available on the Citizen’s website, he talks about his love of poetry, his fighting days at school and how one teacher changed his life.

He also talks about Agnes Sina-Inakoju – his friend and an original member of his Consequences seminars – who was randomly shot dead in a fast food restaurant last year. Her death was one of the triggers that inspired him to write the book.

In his dedication there is an illustrated picture of Agnes, and above it the last Facebook status she posted before she died: “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  That makes it hard to plan the day.”

I have a little feeling that Emeku Egbuonu lives by that lasting thought too.

Consequences: a poem written and performed by Dele Writes

Gavin James Bower. Photograph: Sophie Gray-Cowley

SB: Made in Britain is set in Burnley, but you live in Hackney. Many of the same problems of lack of prospects for young people affect the two places. Do you see parallels between the two? And what are the differences?

GJB: The parallels are pretty clear: both areas are characterised by disproportionately high poverty rates – one in four kids in the north-west of England, where I’m from, grows up living below the poverty line – and a strong working-class identity; both areas are home to significant numbers of immigrants; and both areas have seen trouble in the last decade, partly as a result of these factors.

Where I’m from’s a post-industrial town, an area that found its identity – an identity earned through generations of back-breaking hard work – taken away overnight with the exportation of industry abroad, the closure of mills and mines, and the loss of heavy as well as skilled manufacturing. This is a scar that’s yet to fade. You can feel it, and see the evidence everywhere you look – the crumbling terrace houses around what used to be mills just sitting there still waiting for the kind of redevelopment we’ve seen in cities (like Leeds and Manchester), which have since been gradually gentrified. Growing up in a place like that, there’s a sense of impatiently waiting for what comes next – and of betrayal.

SB: Burnley and Hackney have both been shaken by riots in recent years. Do you see a relationship between the aspirations of young people and outbreaks of violent unrest?

GJB: Out of all the towns affected by the race riots ten years ago, unprecedented in English history in terms of the number of arrests made, Burnley was the only one in which the official report pointed to drugs as the key factor – rather than a lack of social cohesion.

The most prevalent interpretation of the recent London riots was that they were spontaneous and opportunistic, which is what the report into the Burnley riots seemed to suggest; namely, that gangs had exploited a spontaneous outbreak of violence for their own short-sighted aims. I can’t stomach that. Riots like the ones we’ve seen in London, as well as those in the north a decade ago, are by their very nature irrational and unfocused – but that doesn’t preclude a rational explanation.

Similarly, while the riots in each case weren’t political, the causes very much were. Living in London as I’ve done for most of the last decade, and in Hackney over the last few years, there’s a very real sense of not only disenfranchisement but also resentment – especially among young people. That’s coupled by what Mark Fisher has called ‘reflexive impotence’ – the notion that, while young people are not apathetic, they do feel like they can’t do anything about their current situations. I think this should have us all very worried, as the new generation need to be our most optimistic citizens – and committed to making the world around them better.

SB: Your books suggest that the scars of riots live long. What do you think the legacy of the recent riots in Hackney will be?

GJB: I should really follow on from my previous point – about how our young people should be our most active. Truth is so many are, and there’s no greater example than the Riot Cleanup initiative that came to dominate the discourse immediately after the riots – and rightly so. That sort of bottom-up activism, localised but quick to spread via things like social networking (ironically, given the hysteria surrounding the regulation of BBM), is something young people, especially young people in Hackney, should be proud of. It’s our future.

Made in Britain by Gavin James Bower is published by Quartet Books.
ISBN: 9780704372290.