I’ve got to confess I love reading and finding out about other writers, I’d like to say its research on how to become a better writer, but to be honest a lot of it’s probably down to plain old nosyness!

I’ve decided once a month to feed my curiosity/nosyness with a Did You Know post to give you all as many facts as I can muster or as you can bare to read focusing on a different author each month.

As Roald Dahl is such a huge hit in our house at the moment and with my eldest ploughing through Roald Dahl’s books like there about to run out. I thought I’d give you a few scrumdiddlyumptious facts about Roald Dahl first;

1. Did you know that Roald Dahl was 6 feet 5 and three-quarter inches tall! I was really surprised about this, for some reason I’d always pictured him small!

2. As a young man Roald Dahl’s hair was chocolate-brown.

3. James and the Giant Peach was nearly called James and the Giant Cherry, but Roald decided that a peach would be much nicer and squasher with a lovely stone inside.

4. Roald Dahl wrote two screen plays, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and James Bond film You Only Live Twice!

5. Danny Champion of the World was written in a Romantic Gypsy Wagon that he’d purchased in the 1960s.

6. In 1971 Roald Dahl received a letter from a man named Willie Wonka who lived in Nebraska and worked as a postman.

7. Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 73, he was buried in Great Missenden with some of his favorite treasures like; his snooker cues, chocolate and his HB pencils.

8. One of Roald Dahl’s most treasured possessions was an old, red exercise book which he used to jot all his story ideas in so he wouldn’t forget them.

9. Roald had two steel hips and had six operations on his spine.

10. When he first started writing Roald only wrote stories for adults, which were published as Tales of the Unexpected. It wasn’t until he’d had children of his own that he started writing children’s stories.

11. Roald Dahl was terrible at spelling.

12. He used to mix bedtime drinks for his children called “witches’ potions,” they were really things like tinned peaches blended with milk and food colouring! I might have to blend my own “witch potion” for the children tonight.

I’ve really enjoyed finding out all these Roald Dahl fact and I’ve actually had to force myself to stop. So I’m definitely not going to mention that Roald Dahl’s favorite colour was yellow and that he only wrote with yellow HB pencils on a yellow legal pad that he ordered especially from New York.