'Kid In The Front Row Blogathon' - revisiting my childhood in The Magic Faraway Tree

One of the blogs that I follow is this: http://www.kidinthefrontrow.com/

It's jam-pack full of great posts - thought-provoking insights into screenplay writing and the film industry. And all created by a mystery man (Or woman? Or possibly Creature From Another Planet?) who never lets his/her/its mask slip.

So he's just Kid In The Front Row - who has great ideas (sometimes) and this is one of them - re-read a favourite book from childhood and blog about it. I'm a sucker for a interesting interlude, so on the plane over to Vancouver, in between watching all those films and wishing I could lie flat and that the screaming infant across the aisle would just...(insert own imaginative way of silencing screaming infants) - I read:

The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton.

Sadly not the very edition I read as a child but the very same copy I read to MY children when they were, well...children.
Oh Saucepan Man, I loved you then, I love you still. And everyone should have the opportunity to visit The Land of Magic Medicines.

It made me smile. And it made me regret that today we are all SO up our own bottoms, SO concerned with political correctness that innocence has somehow been sacrificed.

How many children's books today could be about a little boy called Dick and a little girl called Fanny without raising a salacious smirk? (I did SMILE but it was FONDLY) How many could contain the sentence 'He wiped Dick with his hanky' and have the word 'queer' as the most frequently used adjective?

It's sad. I got to wondering - is it what I'VE become because I'm older than I was when I was a child (surprising, that!) and my mind belongs somewhere in the gutter or is it what SOCIETY'S become?So jaded. So cynical. So CAREFUL.

I favour the latter interpretation. But then, I would, wouldn't I?

I must confess I was glad to finish it by the end - it WAS repetitive - and I DID get weary of good girls Helping Mother In The House while the boys had so much more fun Digging Potatoes For Father In The Garden.

I should have read it out loud to the screaming infant across the aisle...I'm sure she'd have been rendered silent.