It also offers a reminder of celebrations to come, of being sweaty in a packed room while wearing something amusingly undignified. Suffice it to say that I’ve used it for birthday cakes for the last four years, it’s IMMENSELY forgiving to being moulded into all sorts of different shaped pans, is moist and flavourful and much loved by adults and children alike (to the extent that year on year people tell me they hope I’m making the same cake).

It’s another good example of a rich-looking costume built from humble materials: the skirt tiers are made of crepe paper (Asher claims you can sew it onto lining fabric with a machine; I’m skeptical). Martha and William were very good at spotting things such as gargoyles, and Martha expecially enjoyed solving the mostly word-based puzzles. It made me miss costume parties; I would love to have a social gathering,” Pleskova says of her acquisition. The walk was circular, about four miles in length, and very enjoyable, as long as you dodged the nettles. Yes, we took a leisurely five and a bit hours to reach London’s Victoria Coach Station by National Express.Poet Alina Pleskova stumbled across a copy of the ’80s classic Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress on a lockdown “sanity walk”, and her Twitter post about the find went viral. Because William couldn’t find anything here in Quirky Misfits, he chose a Pokémon magazine in the Co-op next door.

The binding suffers moderate loosening due to age and wear, but remains secure and in-tact; the pages are clean and unmarked. Every trip to the local library, I’d end up pulling it off the shelf, marvelling at the costumes and dreaming of the day I’d be tall and beautiful enough to dress like an elegant palm tree (below). Wilson takes the reader on an entertaining journey through the commitments made – both financially and imaginatively – by those adopting the guise of fictive and fairy-tale characters, historical figures, animals, puns, seasons, celebrities, inanimate objects and more. If that wasn’t enough, Alina is also the founding member of the Cheburashka Collective (loving that name! After Jenny and the children left Northenden, Liesel and I walked home, trying to decide where to eat.So, that was another fun day, and in the evening, we slumped in front of the final stage of the Tour of Britain bike race. One visitor was especially welcome, he hung around for quite a long time, digging the tunes, but not, as far as I could here, joining in. Actually, the 41-gun salute in Hyde Park was more to mark the accession of King Charles to the British crown. As the coach pulled into Norton Canes Services on the M6 toll, we saw some deer and I just about caught one.

Asher can rationalise the book’s current appeal, partly due to growing eco-consciousness – to a contemporary reader, the book is oddly on the pulse with a political message of recycle, reuse and save. After the interval, Jessica emerged having changed outfit, and performed Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz a cappella while walking amongst the audience. The weekly walks organised by Thrive Manchester were all very popular this week, with almost record-breaking attendances. Martha and William were quite interested in the plants, but mainly, they enjoyed sitting down to draw pictures.Jonas enjoys writing articles ranging from serious topics like politics and social issues to more lighthearted things like art, pop culture, and nature. In the afternoon, I visited the Wythenshawe Radio studio from where I co-presented a ‘live’ show with Sarah-Jane. Can’t see them flying around, but sometimes catch sight of one on your skin when you feel a sharp sting.

Although dress up can offer an amusingly topsy-turvy anarchy when it comes to the upending of class and gender, it has also been the vehicle for reinforcing those same categories. More recent infamous fancy dress parties include the Chelsea Arts Club Ball, run yearly since the club’s founding in 1891 and inspired by the surreal fancy dress parties some artists began holding in their studios in the 1880s; and the Rothschild Surrealist ball of 1972, attended by Salvador Dalí and Audrey Hepburn (in a hat resembling a birdcage). They are very adventurous but sometimes, when they’re close to the edge of a sharp drop, over the edge, so to speak, at least one of us will tell them to stop running, to step back, and generally stop giving us heart attacks. Jane Asher is a well known British actress, which is probably how she got famous people such as Donald Pleasance and Terry Jones to pose for her, although I doubt the late, great Terry Jones would have needed much persuasion!The gardeners have been busy around Victoria Monument but interestingly, very few people were outside Buckingham Palace. We should have gone by public transport, but when it’s a choice between an 18-minute drive and an awkward bus and train journey that can take over an hour, what are you going to do? It’s unfair to fault the book for fidelity to the facts, but with a topic as rich and silly as this, one occasionally wishes for a little more in the way of play. We waited on a path for a family to take some pictures, and as we passed them, I prepared to take a photo of my own. Well, I try to do the right thing, but try as I might, I could not find any other signs nor instructions.