Play and little boy reading

The week after all the D-Day stuff and as I'm typing this out weather appears to be very much all over the place as I headed out into the park during a sunnier dry spell in the proceedings.

Uniform continues to be a topic but another kind of uniform tends I feel to forgotten about and that what we wear for play as we didn't spend all our time sat in school as much as you might of felt that by Friday morning.

Unlike today where there's a massive market of casual branded clothing for life beyond school back then it was second bests and maybe the odd t shirt as schools then didn't accept them as uniform

Thus I was out in short charcoal short trousers and a red top and grey socks very much a seventies little boy.

Moving on, while on the other blog and the odd time here I've talked about reading  I do sit in a streamed children's reading session where books from peoples childhood are read and people do chat between and we finished one book on Sunday.

Although Enid Blyton was and remains all over children's literature in the UK, it remains a adult game to find every ism and -obic in all she wrote which reflected the world a child back then lived in when often little was meant and let's be honest how will today's children's favourites be seen in eighty or more years hence?

Her more recent publishers have had chunks rewritten to fit various agendas but when we read Noddy And Tessie Bear this didn't have references to gollies, and Noddy having a spanking removed.

After all it was written in 1952 and such things existed as indeed for me they did in 1972!

A bit like the comics we loved such as the Beano, everything is set in children's world - instead of Beanotown we have Toytown where things mirror in a way the world you are in - with the pleasures and disapointments of everyday life.

The story concerns a  playful adventure gone awrywith Noddy and Tessie not realizing what was about to happen unto it's too late and the consequences.

It was fun and I was able to get a fairly early copy free from alterations for my own story book collection as I read Noddy but was seldom bought any and those I'd of had were, like my childhood toys often handed to others on the basis "You a big boy now, you don't need them".