Category: Uncategorized

[SOUND OF ICE CREAM VAN JINGLE]

Lil S: Dad, Dad, listen! Church Bells!

Me: Yes, that’s exactly what they are.

Little S has just recovered from the first of her Autumn colds. I woke up this morning to find she had passed it on to me. I was just working on the appropriate penalty when I had a little bolt of nostalgia. These days getting a cold means snuffling, snorting Lemsip and being grumpy to colleagues. How I miss being told to go upstairs and take my school uniform off and then being tucked into bed with some new comics and a bottle of Lucozade wrapped in orange cellophane.

One of the single greatest things about being a Dad is reading bedtime stories. I love books and push them on the kids like a QVC huckster. Last night I wondered whether we had a copy of the Winnie the Pooh in the house so that I could read it to Big S. We didn’t, so I went online and as soon as I saw the illustrations I had Proust moment. Suddenly I was 5 again, taking my father’s copy from the bookcase and poring over EH Shephard’s illustrations. I could remember exactly what I had thought back then:

What is he picking up? Is that …? No, really? Eeewwww? Is that why they call him Winnie the Pooh?

Why have they called this little girl Christopher Robin?

I went looking to see if the Puffin Post was still going. The Puffin Club was the first club I ever joined. I wrote the application letter myself having found the address in the flyleaf of a library book. I felt giddy sending off a stamped addressed envelope. In the 70s most truly magical things seemed to require you to send off an “SAE” and to “wait 14 days for delivery”. It must have been a eerie job being a postman. Each street you turned down would reveal a fresh row of children’s faces pressed against windows with excitement, their eyes following your progress, their furrowed brows trying to force you telekinetically up to the front door. The Puffin Post was my dream magazine. It was full of pictures of the covers of new books (so I could judge them) and had nerdy articles that appealed to swotty little middle class children like me. Hence my knowing, at age 7, what a “palimpsest” was. I tried to work it into school essays at every opportunity.

I’m pleased to see that the Puffin Club is still going but it now costs £45 a year and has, dispiritingly, a commission scheme. What would Kaye Webb have thought?