My twins are “studying� Jack and the Beanstalk, and I’ve just packed them off to school with my battered copy of Ladybird’s Well-Loved Tales.
I’ve collected a few old Ladybirds from car boot sales because they are beautiful and nostalgic, hailing from a time when truths were simpler and there was faith in the future. My favourite is The Story of Newspapers, a Ladybird Achievements Book that is testimony to the speed of terrifying technical obsolescence – and welcome progress. A drawing of a newsroom where all 14 journalists are men shows the past wasn’t always lovely.
Now our affection for perhaps the most perfectly packaged objects in publishing has been reawakened by the satirical Ladybird series for adults. Like more than a million others, I received one – The Dad – for Christmas. The next Ladybird relaunch sounds like another spoof: Prince Charles is co-writing a book explaining climate change, the first in a new Expert series.
While Ladybird’s spoofs clock in at about 800 words, the Expert range, covering topics from evolution to the Battle of Britain, are 5,000 words. Charles’ co-authors are the polar scientist Emily Shuckburgh and the environmental campaigner Tony Juniper, and Penguin stresses that their words have been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
Hooray for Ladybird’s championing of expertise, but I wonder if it will chime with readers reprogrammed to see the books as satire. Perhaps Ladybird should commission Michael Gove to write The Ladybird Book of Brexit. I’m sure there would be a readership for a spoof Ladybird called Climate Change Deniers. A few laughs might be an effective educational tool too.
Melting into memory
The cover of Prince Charles’ book was inspired by the flooding of the Sussex town of Uckfield in 2000, which led him to criticise humanity’s “arrogant disregard of the delicate balance of nature�. Much-trailed floods failed to materialise along Britain’s east coast this weekend, and non-appearing blizzards were much mocked as #snowmageddon.
One popular meme of a two-dimensional snowman created by laying a carrot nose and two twig arms on to two puddles is the sum total of the snowmen my children have witnessed during their five years on this warming planet.
I recently interviewed Greenland residents, for whom adapting to climate changes is part of everyday life. We don’t really consider ourselves to be living climate-changed lives in Britain, but my childhood 30 years ago was enlivened by two winter blizzards that each shut down my village for a week. That snowmaggedon was great for community spirit.
I’m convinced that the gales and sleet that dusted my home with white for an hour last Friday would have been a proper blizzard back in the 1980s. I’m saddened that those days are unlikely to return for my children, but we needn’t mourn any loss of extreme weather-induced community spirit. There’s been plenty in evidence during the recent precautionary evacuations along the east coast. And there’ll be plenty more in the future.
Now for the greatest escape
We humans may be hopeless at acting in our long-term interests over climate change, but our ingenuity can be boundless when desperate. Take HMP Channings Wood, in Devon, where staff have reportedly had to ban sugar and fruit used by inmates to brew homemade booze after smoking was banned.
After the Isle of Man’s prison became the first in Europe to ban smoking in 2008, prisoners improvised roll-ups from pages of Gideons Bibles packed with tumble drier lint and pubic hair.
But will we devise something equally clever to stop the planet smoking?
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