The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

ATM – suggestions for podcast title

by 13 Comments

Mrs M and a friend are working on creating a podcast about children’s books. Mrs M has a Masters in Children’s Literature and a lifelong interest in children’s books, and her friend is a well known writer of and broadcaster about children’s books in New Zealand. They pick two or three books and discuss them at length and in detail, looking at every aspect from the story to the illustrations and everything else. It’s very engaging because it just sounds like them sitting round the kitchen table. A bit like our heroes David and Mark. They’ve done several trial episodes and are almost ready to unleash it on the world except they don’t have a title.

The current working title is “A Wrinkle In Time”. For those like me who don’t get it, it’s the title of a 1963 iconic children’s book. As someone has pointed out, if you’re looking for a podcast about children’s books then you’ll get it. Like the Beatles podcast called Things We Said Today.

Anyway if anyone has any brilliant ideas please share them here…

Lines remembered from children’s books

by 45 Comments

In terms of books, I had a pretty special childhood. My Mum was a children’s librarian so she made sure my sister and I had the right books at the right age. There were disadvantages – no comics, although we were allowed Tintin books (I used to read Mickey Mouse and so on at friends’ houses, or at the doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room).

My Mum was, not surprisingly, an inveterate quoter of lines from kids’ books – her own favourites were Alice In Wonderland (so many lines ending with “…said Alice”) and Winnie The Pooh, from which her favourite was (when Pooh was offered a choice of two things) – “Both”, said Pooh.

As I get older and less able to remember what happened 5 minutes or 5 days ago I find myself often remembering and quoting lines from books I read 50-60 years ago. The current one, as I am doing a lot of cooking, much from Ottolenghi’s books which seem to require honey every second recipe, is “Ramona never minded being sticky”. I find myself saying this when I wash my sticky hands for the umpteenth time – I don’t have OCD or anything but fuck I » Continue Reading.