Today, after two months of enforced hibernation, I am very tired and very grumpy. I am tired of Johnson the Shit and his government of man cocks and patriarchal cronies. I am tired of capitalism and consumerism and destructive ideologies. I am tired of the climatic, ecological and environmental catastrophe unfurling before us, and my powerlessness to do anything meaningful about it.
I'm therefore going to take all this infuriation out on the only appropriate target: children's books.
The Mr Men books mark their 50th anniversary this year. I remember enjoying the stories narrated by Arthur Lowe when I was a child. Reading them to my daughter now, I find them poorly written and boring. In the main, wearing.
When we were allowed out in one of JtS's lockdown interregna, I took my daughter to the local library and she chose - among other things - some Daisy Meadows books about rainbow unicorns. They were astonishingly dull. During the current lockdown, she found some more among the library's audiobooks. These were about rainbow fairies. They were also astonishingly dull. So bland, anodyne and formulaic I said Daisy Meadows was either an android, or a committee. Turns out she's the latter.
Next she chose Philippa Gregory's The Princess Rules. The stories were actually quite good, a marked improvement on all that had gone before. Sadly, the narrator - Daisy Bevan - sounded more bored than a shipwormed galleon. They've been returned.
Now she's chosen the Mummy Fairy stories, written and read by Sophie Kinsella. "Cupcakeridoo!" Twee and trite. Home counties mumsiness for the telegraphed upper-middle class. One is playing as I type this, and I've had to retreat to the kitchen to stop myself smacking my head repeatedly against the wall.
My daughter's reading skills have improved during lockdown. My listening skills have not. One of the first things I will be doing when she returns to school is to finish writing my own children's books.
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