" A Second Skin begins on an osteopath's couch. 'What I do not understand,' the osteopath is saying, 'is why if you arc the optimist you claim to be you should be wearing black underpants.' It is a question to which Edward Blishen has no ready answer, being at that stage in life when the highest of hopes are quickly followed by the lowest of despairs. It's not just a matter of discovering that he's mortal a fragile machine for which no instruction booklet was ever issued. It's occupational uncertainties, too: like his doubts about his role of external examiner in colleges of education. His visits organised as if he were some sort of educational archbishop, how can he make clear his disapproval of courses in Eng Lit in which students who've not quite managed to digest Langland and Chaucer are still gagging on the Elizabethans as their instructors place in front of them great steaming dishes of Augustinians and Romantics and Victorians? Then there's the world of children's books, and the problems of his friend William, the illustrator, who wants to draw a naked man as a naked man. ('You want me to draw in a little leaf? A bunch of grapes?') Meanwhile, at home, parenthood has become a stark embarrassment: each child's room, once a tender nest, is now a dissident IIQ. lie flies to Korea for an international literary conference on humour which sets out to establish its universality, and ends by demonstrating the opposite. There he meets the formidable Miss Yim ('I am translating Two City Tales by your Charles Dickens. But I have finished writing about your exhausting George Eliot.') At war with nicotine, happy on holiday in Suffolk, Wales, the Mediterranean, he finds himself passing through that period of life when you grow a second skin: not in order to become thick-skinned, but to be thin-skinned in greater comfort. Edward Blishen has never been in better form, whatever the thickness of his skin."