as for selling children to circuses, we would say to each other on particularly frazzled mornings, lucky this child is so cute or we'd have to put him out…

One of my regrets about the demise of Wayne Mapp from his role as 'Spokesman for the Eradication of Political Correctness' is that I never got around to sending him a copy of Saville's 'The Gay Dolphin Adventure'. I think it would have really spoken to Wayne.

There's a song…

One of my regrets about the demise of Wayne Mapp from his role as 'Spokesman for the Eradication of Political Correctness' is that I never got around to sending him a copy of Saville's 'The Gay Dolphin Adventure'. I think it would have really spoken to Wayne.

Or possibly not:…

One of my regrets about the demise of Wayne Mapp from his role as 'Spokesman for the Eradication of Political Correctness' is that I never got around to sending him a copy of Saville's 'The Gay Dolphin Adventure'. I think it would have really spoken to Wayne.

There's a song…

I've never had cause to actually write the word before now. In my naiveté I had naturally assumed that the word was derived from 'noble'... rather than "a small protrusion". Perhaps I really am an optimist, after all.

Emma Hart wrote:…

Did I say 'nobbed'?

It's not the crudity, it's the lack of a 'k'! Lest we forget them in their silence.

What sorta weird-arse lingo are they teaching energy engineers these days?

Did I say 'nobbed'? I meant 'became romantically involved with'...

By the way, Evgenia was as much a critic of Ransome's work as Paul Campbell. I blame her for discouraging Ransome from finishing his last book...…

Nobbed? What sorta weird-arse lingo are they teaching energy engineers these days?

Indeed. It's supposed to be 'boffed'.

I never got the Ransome thing, it was all a bit Boyish to me. But when I was a kid I inherited my brothers' old copies of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine adventures.…

If you read about Barrie, you discover that he had an absolute horror of a childhood... Lucky for him that Victorian sensibilities were so receptive to what are essentially healing fantasies for the abused.

Yes, and not to mention the death of his brother, etc. which, I…

P.S. Did you know that when Ransome was the Daily News (and later the Observer) correspondent in Russia he used to play chess with Trotsky and nobbed Trotsky's secretary? He later married the secretary, by the way.

Nobbed? What sorta weird-arse lingo are they teaching energy engineers these days?

If you read about Barrie, you discover that he had an absolute horror of a childhood

And that gets the prize for understatement of the week. Alison Lurie wrote a fascinating book called Don't Tell The Grown-Ups, which argued (pretty convincingly to my mind) that there's thick strain in classic…

Skip a few to Winter Holiday – always my favourite. And We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea has a great adventure in it.

Winter Holiday is excellent, but my favourite was always Pigeon Post – pigeon messages! Gold-mining! Science! Missee Lee isn't bad either, although some of the more…

It’s all there, folks, in black and white, and sometimes? In invisible.

Many apologies for not reading between the lines, Jolisa. In fact, it was my shortcomings in this department that caused me to abandon my undergraduate literature studies (but for my inability to see Wordsworth's daffodils…

Swallodale is second, but Peter Duck – a story within the story so not really within the timeline – can be seen to take place before it.

I'm reading them for the first…

I read S&A to my kids (it was really hard to find in the US), got through the next one but we didn't make it much further – it became hard going – the first one had all that mystery that kind of got lost later

Skip a few to __Winter…

I found myself transliterating whole swards of Peter Pan as I read it trying to edit out the sexism and racism (which to be fair I didn't remember from my childhood)

Hum... try giving your kids a little credit, and if the book is such an offensive swamp of misogynistic…

And finally, anyone out there know anything about Utah?

Oh and be careful crossing the roads, especially with young children. The streets are so wide because they were built so that a bullock train could do a U-turn without backing up. You're a long time exposed to the traffic till…

This may not be much practical help in finding things to do in SLC, but as an associative link it's not, I'd wager, too bad.

Yay! The original blogger Dooce makes it on to PAS. The circle is complete. The greatest snow on earth (it says so on the Utah…

This may not be much practical help in finding things to do in SLC, but as an associative link it's not, I'd wager, too bad.