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When it comes to bedtime reading, old-fashioned is best

By Peter McCloy - posted Monday, 7 June 2004


It is my self-appointed duty to be an old-fashioned grandfather to my grandchildren, and it is a role embraced with enthusiasm by my children, for they too learned about Winnie-The-Pooh from the original. I will never give my grandchildren an electronic toy or a computer game, and I shall read to them only from books that have magic in the wording as well as a story line. Books that are challenging, not just accessible.

I want them to be challenged, not sent to sleep. Well, that's not quite what I mean: I want them to go to sleep with the sound of magic in their head.

Classics like Winnie-The-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows are timeless, and I want them to be familiar friends to my grandchildren as they were, and still are, to me. I want them to know the beauty of the English language; this is a journey that starts with Pooh Bear and progresses to Shakespeare, not Mills and Boone.

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There are many people in my grandchildren's lives to provide instant gratification - they all have fine collections of videos and CDs and electronic and computer games. So I'm old-fashioned I suppose, although Harry Potter gives me some comfort - that fiction can be magic and well-written and can still capture the attention of both children and adults, that the human attention span, when appropriately stimulated, can survive beyond the thirty second television grab.

I read books to my children, books that were old-fashioned even when they were young, but to my great satisfaction they are all now voracious readers, and even encourage me to be old-fashioned with their children.

The kids love it, of course. Mind you, they have a different attitude when I want to teach them to do little odd jobs like chopping the firewood but they all have their own copy of Winnie-The-Pooh, courtesy of their grandfather, and they look after it. I have a feeling that it will always have an important place in their bookshelves too, and that some day they will enjoy reading it to my great-grandchildren.

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About the Author

Peter McCloy is an author and speaker, now retired, who lives on five acres of rock in an ecologically sensible home in the bush. He is working on a 20,000-year plan to develop his property, and occasionally puts pen to paper, especially when sufficiently aroused by politicians. He is a foundation member of the Climate Sceptics. Politically, Peter is a Lennonist - like John, he believes that everything a politician touches turns to sh*t.

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