Answers

1. True!  Actually it's more than 1,000. I've lost count. Over 250 of them are included in my book The Poetry Chest and you'll find poems of mine in lots of poetry anthologies by people such as Brian Moses, Paul Cookson and Roger Stevens.
2. False!  I've never been allowed to do the illustrations for my books, because I can't draw. Soo the publishers get brilliant artists like Korky Paul and Tony Ross to illustrate them.
3. False!  I did break a toilet window but there wasn't anyone sitting inside.
4. True!  When I was a student, I spent three months in Canada during the summer. A friend and I spent a month working as firefighters in the forest near a town called Hope in British Columbia.
5. False!  My childhood heroes were the Carlisle United team that drew with Arsenal in the FA Cup. But I was never good enough to get a trial with the club.
6. False!  I quite often get stuck for a rhyme. So I've got a rhyming dictionary which I use to help me. Sometimes I have to reorder the words in a line to get a different word at the end of a line or even rewrite the line completely.
7. True!  Louis, my grandson, thinks that some of my poems are weird, like My Auntie Dot's a Coffee Pot and I Made a Robot Out of Doughnuts.
8. True!  As a young child I was afraid of water. It was only when I was twelve that one of my teachers was able to coax me to learn. But I really like swimming now, especially in the sea.
9. True!  Both my nephews, Crawford and Duncan, are doctors and Crawford is married to another doctor, Nicky.
10. False!  If I start singing, everyone leaves the room. And you didn't really think there was a band called The Blurts did you?