The new Jane Brocket book will be out in July (very conveniently for me to be able to pay at the UK price when I'm over there). It's called Ripping Things to Do: The Best Games and Ideas From Children's Books. And I just know, somehow, that I will be more successful at trying out these games and ideas than I've so far been at testing the recipes. (But then, who wants to bake when it's 40 degrees outside? Now it's chilly and I'm wearing jumpers maybe I'll get round to baking a cake. Easter holiday project with Gabe.)

As a family, we regularly play a game I came across in a Famous Five book. We call it 'The Animal Game', but I don't know if Enid Blyton called it that. It was in a book I no longer have - I think it was Five on a Secret Trail, but I could be wrong. It involved going through the alphabet and naming animals until you ran out and then moved on to the next letter. This is a family favourite on long drives. Occasionally we vary it to other things, like Australian cities/towns.

As a kid, the Five Find-Outer type club I was in had a Hallowe'en party for grown-ups to raise money for charity and we used one or two games from Exploits of the Chalet Girls. Other than that, I can only recall things like Snap-Cork in The Rat-a-Tat Mystery, Impertinent Questions in The Chalet School and the Island, and of course all the various tricks played in the books ... I wonder if any of them will make their way into the book?

Some people, though ... They just have this knack of spotting something that has "bestseller" written all over it. With all my love of kidlit, why did I not think of doing this? Why did no-one on my flist think of doing this? I'm sure that somewhere on one of the forums/lists, there's been at least one thread on games from the books and food from the books that we'll all have contributed to at some stage ... And the idea was staring us in the face and just passed us by!