What I learnt from a skateboarding sheep and the ill-fated Cheetadile.

It started as a cloud. Just a bog-standard doodle of a cloud. But then we added a head, ears, a tail, 4 legs (of indiscriminate sizes) and obviously rollerskates. No, not rollerskates, that would be silly. We added a skateboard. But if it’s on a skateboard, then the sheep had to be going somewhere.

Well this sheep was going home, from the shops. On her back was a shopping bag full of apples, bananas, milk, a supermarket, a time machine and... ‘ewe’… a poo (tastefully bagged up). She might be a sheep, but she’s not an animal.

The skateboarding sheep with a penchant for surrealist shopping was the collective brainchild of a gaggle of kids (between 4 and 7 years old) that were pushing their felt-tip pens through a doodling workshop I was running.

An hour before, I was nervously pacing through the tents of ‘Village Green’ a local (if you live in Southend on Sea) Arts and Music festival – in search of the facilities. The queues for the beer tents were starting to build, the hum of local bands was mixing with the rays of the sun, waiting for people like Kate Nash, Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly and local lads Nothing But Thieves to join the fun.

Jacqson Diego, a not for profit organisation that celebrates the fun and adventure in books, and a client of ours at Yes&Pepper, had a couple of tents full to the brim with children’s authors, storytellers and a doodler, all there to do the one thing subsequent governments and education authorities seem hell bent on eradicating – helping kids to learn through enjoyment, by encouraging them to use… God forbid their imaginations.

If a child enjoys stories then let’s be honest, you don’t need a degree to work out that same kid will probably read more stories, improving their reading as they search for more adventures.

And as I witnessed time and again, there’s no handbook for imagination. When one child wanted to learn how to draw a crocodile and another kid wanted a cheetah they were both equally excited with us inventing the Cheetadile, the fastest animal on four feet both in or out the water.

So in just an hour a bunch of happy kids learnt how to create animals out of shapes, how to draw all kinds of emotions on faces, how to create stories with a couple of doodles and how inventing a whole new type of animal helped them get along without disappointment.

I learnt that kids have an imagination that could change the world… if only the world would nourish it.