Blogtober 2024 : Day 15

Tuesday!  What’s your day been like?  I’ve been rootling through bookshelves today.  It must have been all the decluttering I was talking about with my girls at the weekend, and I’ve been going through to check that I still want to keep all the books I have.  I’m not very good at letting books go, and if I’ve really enjoyed a book then I’ll happily read it more than once, but I do know that sometimes there are books on my shelves that would be better off being enjoyed by someone else.

It wasn’t actually that long since I last looked at them and I didn’t find anything new that I wanted to re-home, but I did find some books that I have had since I was small.  They’re not hidden away but because I don’t look at them all the time, I forget they’re there.

I was an avid reader as a child.  All my life, really, until about 10 years ago when I finished my Master’s Degree and found that I just couldn’t face another book.  I can read text books but not novels; they just don’t appeal to me and whilst my book-reading mojo has been lost for a long time now, I am still confident that one day it will come back and I’ll manage more than one or two a year!

The books I found today, though, have been read many times!  They were read to me and by me when I was little, and I used to read them to my girls when they were small too.

They were published by The Medici Society, a company set up in 1908 to bring artists’ work to a wider audience, and they are gentle tales about nature, animals helping each other and kindness – and always with a happy ending.  The Medici Society still exists although they don’t sell books any more.  You can still find the books that they published in old bookshops and also on Ebay, so I’m glad to know that other people can still read and enjoy them.

I think the top one, “Tom Tit Moves House” has always been my favourite.  It’s a story about a blue tit called Tom who is driven away from his home by developers who move into his woodland with diggers and bulldozers, and how he finds a new place to live with help along the way from other animals – and does a bit of helping himself!

It was the pictures that always caught my attention.  They are so beautifully painted and reproduced, and there is always something to see in the detail.  I like that even though it’s picture for a children’s book, there is as much attention to detail as if it were a painting to be hung in a gallery.

My other favourite books were about a hedgehog called Pinny Needlekin.

He’s a happy soul in a blue jacket who saves the day in all the stories just by being kind.  There are no heroics in any of these stories, no superheroes; they’re from a different time and I love the gentle nostalgia.  They’re from a time when there was nothing more important in my own life than what I would wear that day, or whether my Mum would make another batch of my favourite biscuits for our biscuit tin.

There’s no peril or danger, nothing to make a child jump or be scared.  The “baddy” is a fox (Mr Cunningleigh-Sligh) who steals a Christmas pudding and Pinny Needlekin rescues it so that Christmas dinner isn’t spoilt.

He helps a frog who can’t understand why nobody would attend her birthday party until he explains that most people don’t want to go to a party in a pond.  The party is rearranged for somewhere dry and everybody has a wonderful time.

I have stared at that page for a long time over the years!  I like the mouse with the tiny cracker, the grasshopper with the Jammy Dodger biscuit and the robin about to help himself to the currant buns.

I’m obviously very taken by story books with lots to look at because it reminded me how many of these sorts of books I have read with my girls.  I feel the need to go and look those out now – that can be a job for later on this week!