The Secret Seven

So I was trying to guess.

The really famous artists who've been invited to do Secret Seven, some of them have like really signature styles, like Anthony Burrell, for example.

You could tell which sleeve designs were his.

Yeah, it was really great.

absolutely.

I was just meeting a designer pal today and I was just talking about how this desk behind me is my sort of sketchy, creative, messy desk.

and i'm like more and more i want to like start things over there and not start things over here at the kind of digital side of things but yeah and that's that's part of the fun is it with secret seven inches just like not knowing who the artist is and uh yeah just taking it on face value yeah so does it can you actually reveal your artwork then once the exhibition closes is that the deal

You can reveal the artwork once the winning bidder has received the design because it's revealed to them first.

And so you would just read books again and again and again.

So I remember reading The Secret Seven and The Famous Five just several times because you just get those favourites.

But another one of my favourites was the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series.

Wonderful.

I blame Edith Blyton.

I mean, if you think about Secret Seven and Famous Five, where were the parents then? Where were the parents? Yes.

I know.

It's gone back for decades.

take you back to a farming village in Yorkshire in the 1960s when children were rather like chickens we were free range we were a gang of seven to ten year olds five boys and two girls I was nine my seven year old sister nicknamed Singe for reasons that will shortly become apparent had been foisted upon me by our mother Wherever I went, Singe had to go too.

Our gang was somewhere between Enid Blyton's Secret 7 and the Peaky Blinders.

Our headquarters was an old hen hut.

We cleaned it out, hung sacking over the windows for secrecy, and we met there every day after we'd finished our chores.

That's great.

But like, you know, when you do some of that, even like we've read loads of Famous Five and Secret Seven and all that.

And like they get into proper scrapes.

It's like, you know, there's guns and stuff.

They read all of Enid Blyton.

They read all of, you know, Secret Seven, all of Wizard of Oz, whatever.

But as you go through that, you start to get, this is getting a little samey.

I'm a little bit over this.

Well, right up until I was about 15, yes, I did.

Then, as I got a little bit older, well, I did all the usual, Famous Five, Secret Seven.

What Katie Did Next was my absolute favourite.

I adored that book.