Episode 31 - Hold On To Your Hats (A Hat Full of Sky and Millie’s Marvellous Hat) with guest cohost Dave Pickering

Content note: our chapter book touches on bullying, mortality and euthanasia. In discussing it, we also talk about dementia, and how Terry Pratchett dealt with it in his books for children.

This is an episode all about magical, virtual, invisible hats as worn by a pair of powerful girls. And for the first time, we have a guest host! Many thanks to Dave Pickering for stepping into Matt's wonderful shoes.

Our chapter book is A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett. It is the second of the Tiffany books, and it's the one where she leaves home and starts to learn witching. We talk about coming of age stories, mean girls, self-respect and how bad thoughts don't make you a bad person.

Our picture book is Satoshi Kitamura's Millie's Marvellous Hat! It's a charming story about imagination and self-expression, and our discussion of it contains a large portion of bickering about what makes a hat a hat. Brim or brimless? Ribbon or no ribbon? Dave brings their experience as an early years library outreach worker as well as their past as a hat-wearer to bear, and shares some ideas about how you could bring this story to life for a group of under-5s.

See all of Laura Ellen Anderson's new covers for the Tiffany sequence here: http://www.pickledink.com/blog/terry-pratchett-covers-laura-ellen-anderson

You can watch Pratchett's documentary about living with Alzheimer's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmejLjxFmCQ&ab_channel=TheDocumentaryChannel112

And watch Satoshi Kitamura tell a kamishibai version of his book Hat Tricks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtPm7B9_Ri0&ab_channel=BookTrust

Dave and their work can be found here: http://davepickeringstoryteller.co.uk/

We especially recommend their podcast Down to a Sunless Sea here: http://downtoasunlesspod.com/

And if you want to argue with them about hats, you can catch them on twitter @goosefat101

If you enjoyed this Pratt-chat, we also talked about The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents in our episode about Fairytale Retellings: https://eventhetrunchbull.podbean.com/e/episode-14-fairytale-retellings-pattans-pumpkin-and-the-amazing-maurice-and-his-educated-rodents/

And you can hear Dave's first appearance on the show in our episode about dementia: https://eventhetrunchbull.podbean.com/e/episode-12-dementia-moominvalley-in-november-and-the-remember-balloons/

What A Wonderful Day is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Shane Ivers of silvermansound.com