Big Things to write about

More on old books. I remember a very large book of fairy tales which had wonderful European style drawings with a very dark overview. Even if the story had a happy ending, it was coloured in my mind by the fact that the drawings suggested otherwise. No story ends completely with a happy-ever-after. I bought the Virago book of Fairy Tales a few years ago and was suprised at the vicious endings to tales which I thought had happy endings. I knew 'Little Red Riding Hood' was usually bowdlerised so that at least the heroine survived but in the version in this book she ended up eaten. However, few of the other tales were really suitable for children - Yours - Angry of Tunbridge Wells. As I get older I find myself turning into Daily Telegraph reader. Adverts are vicious and unfunny and desgined to appeal to a scatalogical humour. Now scatology can be OK in the right context but on a billboard it is just crass. In fact most adverts seem so cliched that I wonder how any of them ever hit the mark. Even when an advert is sophisticated enough to seem original, you feel manipulated by virtue of the fact that it has probably been toned down from its original concept to ensure that everyone understands it. Oh that sounds so pompous doesn't it?

None of this seems worth writing any more. I had ideas for a poem last week while I was driving back from one of our other sites. Each evening, as I drive home I resolve to work on it and then never do. Last night we ended up watching the last episode of Sparkhouse which is 'inspired' by Wuthering Heights (Please read ALL of this link before returning here). Sparkhouse had obvious parallels with WH but it had its own story without any direct mapping of the two tales other than various high level things and a very few specific incidents. Wuthering Heights has no denoument but Sparkhouse did. You didn't feel 100% for or against any of the characters despite some of them having some really bad hang-ups and some awful behaviour. One of the reviews asked if teenage boys ever went around speaking like Andrew, the lead male character. 'She is me' etc. I know of plenty of teenagers (boys included) who did speak like this. The reviewer obviously went to the Rugby Club every night (unless it was female reviewer and even then ...)

I wrote terrible poetry at that age. (Who said 'you still do'?). Maybe I should rename this page McGonagall.com. Oh well. So it's already been done. Worth a few laughs 'though please be aware that some of my early stuff was as bad as this. No time to write any poetry down today.