Doug's message is to dig in to school work

You've seen the books, the jigsaw puzzles and the games - now meet the real thing.
That was the case at the Hawke's Bay Show when I came across the Doug the Digger Roadshow and remembered how last summer I bought my grand-daughter a book about Doug the Digger.
There was something about the name when I saw it on the shelves, and the message, sadly, went somewhere over the top as I passed the book on to the smiley one among a few other prezzies around Christmas.
Gladly, I met Doug the Digger creator and showman Alistair McIntyre at the show yesterday, a special guest of the Hawke's Bay A&P Society, who'd come all the way from Northland to use an excavator and its story-book persona to get children to dig all sorts of messages, about safety, about health, about reading and, oh, about diggers.
The short story is that as a youngster he "fell in love with machines" and, at 15, he was out of school and, within a couple of years, running his own businesses as he started amassing an array of machinery, from diggers to trucks.
But life took a real turn in 1986 when he crushed an arm in a work accident, leaving him not only unable to continue the career but also realising how ill-prepared he was to tackle anything else.
"At the age of 37," he says, to make a point to one youngster as he prepares to hop aboard the digger for a lesson at the controls, "I went back to primary school, and did my ABCs and 123s again."
It wasn't until the end of 1997, maybe a little tired of the ACC, that he "put pen to paper" on the first sketches of Doug.
The message, of course: make sure you learn to read and write when you're young. "Do your school work," he says.
One youngster, 10-year-old Crownthorpe School pupil Albert Rocard who has just come from the calf and lamb judging where he won the prize for best-dressed, seems a natural as he guides the digger in a stick gather-and-place manoeuvre with pinpoint accuracy.
Asked what he wants to be when he gets a job, the boy barely hesitates and says: "A marine biologist."
Mr McIntyre, or Mr Mac as he is known in the books, makes the point that if the youngsters do want to be digger drivers, there are qualifications to get, and they've still got to learn to read and write.
While it's the first time he's been at the Hawke's Bay Show, it's not the first time he's been in the Bay, but usually it's at schools and in the classroom - reading to the children.