Chalk for Cheese: Volume 1

About Ossie Hopkins

Ossie Hopkins read Literature at Durham and then taught English and rock climbing in a seventies comprehensive. He progressed to management - apprentice to the chief education officer proofreading. Just when you thought you were learning to write along came the big blue pencil. A Master's at Manchester helped the career but not the writing.As deputy director with Birmingham LEA he produced plenty of sound-bites for the dailies Central TV and Pebble Mill but somehow never got round to 'real' writing.Later he became throttlebottom-in-chief at Ribble Valley Council. My but it was cold up there. And lonely. Maybe if we turned things upside down... Now we can see how many people we're there to support. So leadership is just like teaching - helping people grow. Must get round to writing some of this down. Whoops! Palace revolution! Ossie leaves the same way he arrived: fired with enthusiasm!Still one door closes... And here's a brand new international institute for customer service looking for advocacy in the public sector. Further corridors-of-power to tramp but again more PowerPoint than authorship!At last... The opportunity! Supporting his son's haulage business with eighteen-hour days on the road Ossie can no longer avoid the challenge of that first book in the series...