Awful Swotters unite!!

Someone fetch me a soap box… I have something I wish to say.

Folk of the Faraway Tree

Growing up I had more than a little dissatisfaction with the world around me. I prefered the company of characters in books to that of my siblings and to this day if I had to choose between saving a tree or a box of musty paperbacks, I hope the tree enjoys being match sticks. I’m just saying.

 

One of my earliest memories as a child was snooping through my local library’s kids section, pulling out all these Enid Blyton books and flicking through them before I could even read. Taking as many books as my junior library card would let me, and secreting myself away in a closet to dream about what stories could be waiting in between those plastic, taped up covers, just waiting for me to learn enough of the alphabet to discover.

 

Years went on, as I grew I learnt to tie my shoe laces, braid my hair and write out my 2 to 12 times tables in under 2 minutes, but much more importantly, I learnt to read, and my favorite stories by a long way were those by Enid Blyton. Books like The Naughtiest Girl in School, Mr Meddle’s Muddles, The Wishing Chair, and Folks of the Faraway Tree raised me even more so than my parents. While Mumsy and Dad taught me not to talk with my mouth full, Blyton stories taught me how to imagine, pretend and have adventures.

 

So you can all imagine my supreme annoyance when I discovered that publishers were looking at ‘modernising’ these sacred tomes and making them more accessable to the next generation of bookworms. It would seem that children today (yes I just said that… deal with it) are unable to understand terms like ‘school tunic’, ‘awful swotter’ and ‘mercy me’. Apparently parents will have problems trying to teach their children that names like Dick and Fanny were quite common during the time when the book was written and in the years before iPods, laser tag and publishers on high horses, this style of writing was the norm.

 

It’s not like I am an 80-year-old biddy who is unwilling to acknowledge that the world is moving forward. I embrace new technologies and new ideas, but I also remember and appreciate old ones. What is next? Are we going to paraphrase history and only show our children bloody pasts through censored, rose-coloured glasses? If that is the case we’d better do something about all the nudity in Renaissance art, heaven forbid our bubble wrapped offspring are exposed to that. Lets black out the fact that Australia was kickstarted by convicts and prostitutes, after all we wouldn’t want to raise that sort of conversation with little Johnny at the dinner table now would we. Can we even use the term ‘Little Johnny’ seeming as it appears in thesaurus’ as a slang term for Penis?

 

At what point are we going to stop trying to re-write our past to make it acceptable in our future? Are we teaching our children that we don’t overcome language barriers but bypass them with clever editing? I loved reading my way through my childhood and desire a future when I can read to my children at night without being labelled a bad parent for saying a ‘naughty word’. Are we forsaking culture for political correctness. Mercy me!!