Readers with school community education hub-aged tinies will be keen to find activities to entertain and instruct their nippers through the summer holidays. Surprisingly few children today take as great delight as Little Ruskin did in jumping off a box, so that splendid hobby is unlikely to occupy all their time in the coming weeks. Thus I am pleased to announce Mr Key’s Summer Holiday Cartographic Excitement Project.

The idea is that, when the weather is foul or the bliss of frolicking outdoors begins to pall, your tinies can busy themselves drawing maps of Hooting Yard. First of all, of course, they will have to be familiar with all the tales and investigations posted here, so I suggest you make them click on the “Prose” category (in the Archives) and read everything, possibly twice. Then give them paper and pencils and crayons and pots of paint and so on, and have them create a map, or maps, which accurately, or indeed inaccurately, represent the settings of the stuff they have read. They may wish to draw a detailed street map of Pointy Town, or the branch line out to O’Houlihan’s Wharf, or even something as ambitious as the entire landscape, showing Sawdust Bridge and Bodger’s Spinney and Pebblehead’s “chalet o’ prose” and Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard and the running track where fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol sprinted round and round and round under the watchful eye of Old Halob and the dingly dell hotel carpark and the bottomless viper pit and so on and so, exhaustively, forth.

That should keep them busy until summer’s end, at which point they, or you, can scan their maps and send them to Mr Key, who will display each and every one received here on the Hooting Yard website.