Tulip Festival Mania

It’s early Spring, and today the girls joined all the other cats and rabbits for a hop and prowl through new tulip rows at Silvan. It must be said, the mood was more ‘skip and stomp’, then ‘tulip tiptoe’, with a large, slightly manic crowd descending on the gentle rows of bulbs at the Annual Photo Snapping-Flower Squashing Tulip Festival. A Golden Age? Nope. Anything like Amsterdam? Nup. Rotterdam? Not even damn close, but this was a fine way to get personal with some stunning fields of colour … and in disguise.
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Chatterbox No.4

CONVERSATION WITH A TWO-YEAR-OLD
Camille: We live in India
Me: No we don’t. We live in Australia.
Camille: No Dad. We live in India.
Me: Sorry sweetie, but we don’t. We live in Australia, not India.
Camille: Oohhh! Pfffft!

A Guilt-free Read

Some years before fancy concepts like bookcrossing entered the scene two boxes of books have sat unassumingly under a tree, by a foreshore path, in the happily underdeveloped seaside town of Merricks. A sign on the tree reads: ‘Free books. Replace cover. Free books. Surplus books from St. Marks Op-Shop, Balnarring’.

Locals, or Sunday strollers passing by the dusty old boxes may pull off the weathered canvas and finger through an ever-changing collection of kids books and old novels. If you see something you like, it’s yours – guilt free. Sitting atop the current crop is Down at the Doctor’s The Sick Book (1987), by the fabulous Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake, it’s a little collection of silly sayings and flights of fancy among other things.

‘Well, Doctor, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you. You’ve got spollyollydiddlytiddlyitis”.

Sick Book, thank you, I’m feeling better already.
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Peter Rabbit Hops Again

110 years after Beatrix Potter’s original Peter Rabbit book was published, actress Emma Thompson has written a sequel The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit.

In a departure from the original, the tale is set in Scotland rather than the Lake District locale of Beatrix Potter’s stories of Peter, Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers.

The Thompsons have form in the reworking and rebooting of classic material. Emma’s father Eric wrote the scripts for and narrated the English versions of The Magic Roundabout. He used stop-motion animations created in France adding his own inventive tales of Dougal and Zebedee over the top of the footage.

Listen to this delightful interview with Emma on BBC’s Radio 4 Woman’s Hour as she explains how Peter himself wrote her a letter asking if she would consider writing a sequel.

I’m sure Beatrix Potter would approve.
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Chatterbox No.3

CONVERSATION WITH A FOUR-YEAR-OLD
Isadora: Do spiders cuddle?
Me: Maybe. They’ve got plenty of legs to wrap around each other.
Isadora: What do crocodiles eat?
Me: What do you think they eat?
Isadora: Blueberries
Me: What about lions, what do they eat?
Isadora: Lions eat lions … what about butterflies?
Me: What about them?
Isadora: Do butterflies have bottoms?
Me: Good question, I guess they do.
Isadora: I want to eat butterfly bottoms.
Me: Umm. What about dogs, what do they eat?
Isadora: Breakfast.