Showing posts with label Blake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blake. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

Your Series

YOUR SERIES
 This marks the first post, in what I hope to be a snowballing idea for Dahl heritage..

It's very simple, just send in, comment or tweet your earliest Roald Dahl memory so it can be added.
Then have a good time reading others tales of childhood terror and literature love- have fun guessing who's could possibly be who's.....

+) My earliest memory of RD- falling in love with charlie and the choc factory and wishing I would somehow find a golden ticket... also made lickable wallpaper thanks to Roald Dalh's revolting recipes book!


+) Although the storyline line is a little muddled, my earliest and most vivid memory was of the absolutely terrifying (when you're 6 years old, anyway) crocodile in "the enormous crocodile" - I could never get over the size of his menacing jaws and teeth - and its stuck with me ever since.
Oh and him being flung into the sunset at the end of the story!
  
+) Lying in bed listening to the BFG tapes when I was small, my heart would race all the way through thinking that giants would appear at my window too Making "Plate of Soil and Engine oil" from the Roald Dahl recipe book for Sunday lunch pudding, perhaps THE best chocolatey treat....
+) Every night my dad used to sit down with me and read a bed time story- he's really good at putting on daft voices for all the characters. One night he brought out a book with a collection of Dahl's stories; the Witches, Esio Trot, The Giraffe the Pelly and Me, and the Twits (the latter he began to read). To this day I still feel a bit uncomfortable when I need to itch my belly, as Dahl said - only ugly, nasty people get itchy bellies! Of course, for me, Dahl wouldn't be without Quentin Blake- together, they are magic, and I will most definitely be reading those books to my children one day. 

+) I used to listen to Dahl's autobiography in the car with my family on our annual summer drive to the south of France. When he's in Africa he's served rice with fried bananas in, on a big banana leaf (I think). We have a banana tree in France so at the start of the holiday I demanded from mother some banana rice on a leaf like Roald Dahl had. It was delicious, definitely recommend it.  
+) When I was little I was inseparable from my copy of the twits. I once went to the toilet and fell asleep reading it.  

+) The first time I remember was when we listen to his tapes. I don't know who did the audio voice over, but it was very calming and I would always fall asleep.  I think I had to listen them 5 or 6 times before I had heard the whole story between naps.
+) I rememeber when I was suddenly signed up to the Roald Dahl Kids club. I had a badge and new book mark. I was also given my first Dahl audiotape "The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me". I actually thought i was really sad when I first listened.

+) I once ate a worm because that's what happened in the twits. I'm still not ashamed of myself- rather proud if I say so


 

Friday, 27 December 2013

Merry Christmas


"Where art thou, Mother Christmas?
I only wish I knew
Why Father should get all the praise
And no one mentions you.

I'll bet you buy the presents
And wrap them large and small
While all the time that rotten swine
Pretends he's done it all.

So Hail To Mother Christmas
Who shoulders all the work!
And down with Father Christmas,
That unmitigated jerk!"



Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake wrote this poem for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in 1988. It part of a full anthology found in the Roald Dahl Treasury

Mother Christmas- the busiest mum on earth at this time...
Picture: Quentin Blake

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, a happy new year and a lovely break from work (giving you more chance to read some Dahl books!)