I was very fortunate as a child that I grew up in the town of New Ross. It's only a small town, dwarfed by two of it's neighbours, and yet it has very decent facilities; an excellent town park, a swimming pool, and best of all a well stocked library.

Indeed, when I'm filling out forms which ask where I was educated, I almost always stick in the address of our Library after the names of my primary and secondary schools.

I don't remember individual stand alone books that I read there, but I do have very fond memories of the following series ;

• The Run with the Wind Series : "Run With The Wind", "Run Swift, Run Free" etc. I have no idea what the series was actually called, but the real fans won't have forgotten Old Sage Brush, Hop-along & co.
• Charlotte's Web - When I see Pork I think of Wilbur.
• The Chronicles of Narnia - a.k.a. The "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" series. Who amongst us didn't cry when Aslan died on the Stone Table?
• The Three Investigators - What do those question marks stand for?
• Biggles
• The Hardy Boys - a booklist.
• Nancy Drew - discussion group, the works.
• Just William
• All the Weetabix 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.
  • These books were available seperately in shops, but they were also available as a special offer with Weetabix, which is how I started reading them.
  • They were fairly varied. Trying to find your way home from a planecrash, or being transported backt to Sherwood Forrest, or fighting the ghosts of dead Indians and Cowboys etc.
• Confusion However, when I was younger still I read a series of 'books' whose name now escapes me. But here's what I do remember...
  • In shape they were about the height and length of a standard school copybook, but their width was less.
  • Each book in the series had a different colour cover, but many of them were sorta brown / green / yellow type things, ie. nothing garish.
  • The pages consisted of both pictures and text.
  • IIRC the cover if you were to open it flat, and look at both sides looked like this... There was a little ( 2-3 inch )strip, which was probably about 3/4 down and which ran along both the front and back covers and which showed one continuous, long picture.
  • I've refered to them so far as forming a series, but AFAIK they actually formed a series of series. ie. each book you got had identifiers associated with it. Series A, book 4 etc.
  • Unfortunately I don't remember the entire plot, but I do remember that it featured two boys, neighbours, who were caught up in some sort of weird magic plot.
  • I do remember several scenes / books.
    1. The lads lived opposite each other, and when they wanted to signal to each other at night they had two torches each of which could produce different coloured light. So, they'd shine Red-Red-Blue or whatever, for each message.
    2. There was this sort of moor place. The boys went there and saw these standing stones, looking much like our Ogham stones. Anyway, one of them got turned into such a stone, and had to stay like that for years 'till he was rescued. In fact, all of those standing stones were in fact people.
    3. At one stage they had to get help or somthing, and so they went to the top of a cliff and lit a big signal fire and waited there all night for help to come.
• If anyone remembers these books, could they please mail me and put me out of my mysery ?

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