When I was 10 my aunt gave me Spike Milligan’s brilliant Book of Milliganimals for my birthday. I quickly fell in love with the great man’s nonsense poems and was soon reciting The Silly Old Baboon, The Gofongo or The Wiggle-Woggle to myself and anyone who’d listen. Some years later I thought I’d risk writing a poem myself and penned The Man Next Door one rainy afternoon and that was soon followed by Our Beastly Boiler. I don’t remember deliberately creating William, but I simply found I enjoyed writing silly poems from the point of view of a well meaning but easily befuddled young lad with a huge imagination.