Frydmania

Do you remember the Usborne First Thousand Words books? They came in various languages, including English. I think they were one of those things that parents might buy in another language, and hope some of it would stick.

What definitely stuck was the spot the duck bit. Hidden on every double spread is a duck, with a very inscrutable expression – a bit like Gromit, but without the eyebrows thing. And, of course, the duck turns up in various guises – some ‘sensible’, some less so.

These days, you can’t move for the ‘spot the themed item’ in children’s books (improving or otherwise). And it is fun. But the bigger enjoyment of the duck was the way he turned up in pictures to poke fun at what was happening.

I can’t detail too many, or it would spoil the fun. Let’s just say that duck eating spaghetti is one of my personal favourites.

There seems to be an Usborne book for everything these days. I’m not knocking it –
I get quite a few of them, and I rather like their colour in cards.

But those earlier books retained a little of the genuine scruffiness of childhood experiences: dads with hair going the wrong way and shirts coming out; kids not wearing matching anything, and far more interested in getting close up to a manic duck.

And I like that. But I also like the broader notion that there is absurdity out there – we just have to keep our eyes peeled.

It may be camouflaged in daily life, but it is still available. And when it turns up the scruffiness of parenting life, it is all the more welcome.

I’m not ignoring you. I’m ignoring the imminent return to school, the general routine, and the whole shebang. This means I have been ignoring other ought tos, shoulds and mean tos. And while I go about ignoring, Robert Louis Stevenson poems come to mind.

Anticipating the return to early alarm clocks definitely sets this one in motion for me:

‘In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light’

Living in Scotland in wintertime, there is still a shock factor of the degree of darkness at getting up time. And, quite frankly, at how dark it is at half-four in the afternoon, when it feels like bedtime and isn’t even teatime yet.

For the young, less skilled in telling the time, it is confusing indeed. Although Stevenson penned the poems as an adult, there are still a good number of them that retain that sense of confusion about the world – and its unfairness.

The poem is called ‘Bed in Summer’, and most of it is actually about the bigger unfairness of having to go to bed when it is patently clear that there is plenty of interesting stuff going on, but the child is shut off from it by bedtime.

‘And does it not seem hard to you
When all the sky is clear and blue
And I should like so much to play
To have to go to bed by day?’

As adults, we have grown used to these bits of life that don’t make sense. We forget to rail at them, and instead excuse them.

Admittedly, there’s not a lot we can do about the length of day or night where we live, but we can look again at other aspects of life where we have more choice. That’s as good a New Year’s Resolution as I can think of so far.

Once upon a time there was a little girl and she loved reading. She loved reading so much she read in the dark too often, and ended up having to wear glasses. But one particular time she had to wait: for a story whose arrival each evening was also the stuff of magic.

Mr Friend Mr Leakey is a book about a man who just happens to be a magician. Part of the wonder of the book is how perfectly the everyday and the magical are mixed. The narrator joins him for dinner, during which time many unusual things happen:

– the wallpaper pictures ‘move on’ over the course of dinner
– the salt is spilled and the little cow salt seller comes over and cleans it up
– perhaps best of all, the magician’s pet dragon comes out and prepares the fish course by cooking the fish on his red hot paws.

A child’s world is a mixture of the everyday and magic, all rolled into one, so the book made great sense. As much as also wishing that I had my own little dragon, a magic carpet, and the other amazing things that Mr Leakey has.

The further magic for me was my father reading it to me. It is not a long book, but I think he must have split up the chapters a bit more to make it easier to read at bedtime.

But here is where the magic got especially good: the book was put away at the end of the night. When I looked for it there the next day, it wasn’t there. Or where it was before that.

Every day, story time came round, and my father would ‘find’ the book in a completely new place, with me watching, and settle down to read. It was extra exciting because of that little bit of showmanship – no doubt suggesting that magic itself cannot always be searched for, but will be found at the right time.

I later found out that the book moving trick was one that my grandfather had done for my father, and he in turn did it for me.

I was determined to give a copy of the book to a young friend and booklover (and did in time, along with other key reads I had come across in my childhood). And I am reserving the right to move the book myself for my own small audience, whom (I predict) will be just as enthralled by the stories as I was.

There is something of this story that is about deferred gratification. I still think that books are something to dive into, something to savour. But I can see that, sometimes, the waiting makes the story even better.

For those interested, the book is by J. B. S. Haldane. It is still in print, and now illustrated by Quentin Blake, a fine maker of visual magic in his own right. But for the visual impact of the original, look on Amazon to see the one illustrated by L. H. Rosoman.

You will find Mr Leakey on the cover, along with the little dragon Pompey, and two other key characters. I will not tell you more about them, in the hope that you will be spurred on to discover the magic for yourself. After all, I can show you where I put it today: tomorrow I will need to find it in a new place.

Once upon a time, my granny gave me a cookbook. It was my first cookbook. It came with the provocative, and encouraging, title: Cooking is a game you can eat. I was hooked.

Before the days of needing colour illustrations for every dish, before the days of food porn, and elaborate food photography, there was a children’s cookbook with little cartoon like illustrations.

It had great chapter headings like ‘Food to run away with’. It boasted exciting recipes like 1000 year old eggs. It offered encouragement to benefit others with your cooking – like the section on making breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day.

It was exactly right. And I still have my copy. The pages are falling out a bit now, but it set an early example for me of what was possible for food. Some of it was familiar from my mother’s cooking, some of it was new and exciting.

It is also realistic. I can conjure up in my mind’s eye the picture of the little girl who has fallen asleep next to a clock, because a particular recipe take several hours to set. Cooking is not instant. But it is worth it.

I don’t remember how many recipes I tried over the years. But I do know that I still look at it at times. And I know that, like the best cookbooks, they are there as much as anything to be read, time after time, so that the food messages in there seep into you.

I acquired a new cookbook on leftovers, a year of so back, which I liked a lot. Lots of recipes. A few illustrations. I started trying to work out why I liked the feel of it so much – and realised that the visual style is very like Cooking is a game you can eat.

If you want to hunt it out, it’s by Fay Maschler. I didn’t know of her food reputation at the time – but now I realise why I was in safe hands. And I still think that many of her instincts on what kids want to cook are spot on.

But now, above all, I love the title. Cooking is one of my favourite games. I have a small sous chef who thinks the same.

And together, we go playing with food, and find that, greedy as we are, it is even better than many games because: you get to eat it afterwards.

I don’t remember how old I was when I read Harriet the Spy. It’s an unusual read. In a children’s book, a female character gets to be a spy for a change. She is spiky, not always likeable – and she notes down everything in her notebook.

I’m sure there are various lessons in Harriet the Spy – possibly, being careful where to keep your notebooks is one. Is it an early written acceptance of a certain level of obsessive behaviour? Is it an encouragement to find the small details of life interesting?

I suspect it is all these and more. I do remember picking up on the fact that Harriet is rather a loner. I also remember the outcome – though I won’t give it away here.

But the main thing I remember is that Harriet ate the same sandwiches for lunch, day after day. (Obviously not exactly the same reconstituting sandwich, but you get the picture.) Tomato, as I recall.

I don’t know quite why this stood out for me – except perhaps that I had a favourite sandwich that I liked to have, day after day. (Cheese and cucumber, if you really want to know.)

Harriet didn’t want anything different. Neither did I – although I did eat it if it appeared in my packed lunch box.

Now I am on the other side of things, I don’t know quite how my mother felt about making the same lunch for me, day after day. But there again, I know that her grandfather latterly ate the same thing for lunch every day, so maybe she was used to it. (Lots of Stilton, and a pint of custard, in his case. Not quite sure what that was doing to his insides.)

Books give us permission in lots of different ways. Often, what we look for is permission to be bold: to be daring, to be brave. There are so many books out there about being heroic, one way or another, and they can help us, particularly when we are young and there is a lot to be brave about.

But there is also a place for other sorts of permission. Permission to be grumpy. Permission to be cross, and have tantrums, as Max does in Where the Wild Things Are. As well the promise of reconciliation and forgiveness: that when we come back after our tantrum, we find our dinner (still hot) has been kept for us, despite our behaviour.

So I think there is a place for permitting preferences, strong likes, things that may make us stand out – but still, things that also comfort us, and (importantly) that bring pleasure time after time.

I have moved on from cheese and cucumber sandwiches. I allow for more variety now. But should I feel the need to have a small unswerving devotion to them again, I will look to Harriet’s example, and know that it’s OK.