Always remember: it’s the worry you haven’t even thought to worry about that should worry you the most. That’s what Ruby Redfort would say. I have got her Survival Handbook – it’s crammed with useful information like How to Deal with Alien Life Forms: give them the slip and run like crazy. It’s all about getting out of tricky situations – and although it is unlikely that I will find myself in a swamp with an alligator, who can say that I won’t?  

I have quite a few worries of my own. i.e. Worry no.8: what to do when someone is boring you to nearly utter death: give them the slip and run like crazy. However, lately I’ve been having bigger worries, like Worry no.3: change – and how it comes along when you least expect it. Unfortunately it’s not always possible to give change the slip and run like crazy.

Lauren Child is absolutely hardly ever usually a worrier. And she definitely does not wake up all the time at 4 o’clock in the morning wondering if her next Clarice Bean book will ever be finished. And if she ever does, she usually always phones her publisher and gets her to worry about it instead.

When I was eleven years old my best friend left my hometown and moved a hundred miles to a place I had never heard of. I was devastated. For a while we wrote letters back and forth; she told me about the unfriendly girls at her school, the spiteful teachers, the falling-apart house she was now living in, dusty and grim; and I felt better. But as time went on she started to write good things; she would mention someone who might perhaps be a friend (Emily I think her name was), or describe her renovated bedroom, (it had Laura Ashley wallpaper). Even her horrid school sounded better, and I became increasingly uneasy. It dawned on me: she was moving on. 

This is such a vivid memory for me that I decided to use it as the theme for this third Clarice Bean story. Clarice is reading Ruby Redfort’s survival guide which has a list of worst worries, the worst being the worry you haven’t even thought to worry about. Clarice Bean spends the first half of the book worrying about what this worry might be, it turns out to be losing her best friend.