Honest, it started as a book review, it is in no way intended to comment on any cabinet reshuffle…
Spent some pleasant time with G and S over yesterday afternoon/evening and this morning, and discovered that one of the books in S’s recent acquisitions for her girls is Milly Molly Mandy.
For the uninitiated, Milly Molly Mandy is, as you can probably tell, very much a book that girls get to read at a youngish age. It fits in quite well around the Enid Blyton type stage.
MMM (as I will now refer to her) lives in a little white cottage with a thatched roof, and has a series of shops at her disposal in the village. For added interest, there is a map of her village in the front of the book, to help you picture it for yourself.
I enjoyed MMM when younger, though to be honest any books that came within range were devoured from c. 6 onwards. Looking back it it, I realised I had to do a bit of explaining for J, my story time listener. Some of it is long changed: one of her friend wants to be a nurse, ‘with a hat with long white streamers’.
Some of it seems up to date again: MMM helps her friend’s dad repaint a garden roller and a water butt. It won’t be so long until thatched roofs are back in, surely?
But after all, MMM speaks to all kids who want routine plus a little excitement. MMM has a group of friends, and they all talk about what they want to do when they’re grown up.
MMM gets to mind one of the shops for an hour, and decides that, although she’d like to work in that kind of shop in the future, an hour is enough for now.
No one is talking of three day weeks just yet, as their economic strategy for surviving the recession, but perhaps an hour of work here or there, that you could happily stop when the owner came back, does sound attractive…
In these dark days, I do commend to you another childhood pastime which does well in adulthood: making up sequel titles with a given phrase.  Perhaps it’s time to write “Milly Molly Mandy goes to Hollywood”, that long undiscovered follow up…