One autumn, lion finds an injured bird in his garden and generously invites him to spend the winter in his cosy little house, with the assurance, “You won’t be cold here.” As it turns out, of course, bird isn’t the only one in need of warmth, particularly the special kind that lonely hearts yearn for.
While more and more children’s books are published every year, and they do seem to be getting increasingly polished and sophisticated, especially in terms of the high quality of illustrations found in most of the books (possibly because a lot of the art can now be created or edited digitally), a lot of the time, these books seem to be designed to appeal more to adult sensibilities and tastes. In fact, these days, you can hardly tell who’s the intended audience for ‘children’s books’. Consequently, the simple, hopeful — i.e. childlike — innocence that was the mainstay of so many beloved ‘old’ stories, is almost non-existent in today’s children’s books.
Fortunately, unlike bad ’80s fashion, good children’s books never really go out of style — so a book can be published in 1960 and yet still delight a child today as much as it did another more than half a century ago. If that’s not a kind of magic, I don’t know what is.
While Mooncake
If the extreme weather conditions that everyone has been experiencing around the world, especially in the last few months — unusually snowy and super-cold winter in the northern hemisphere; excessively hot and dry summer in the southern hemisphere — are anything to go by, it’s no longer possible to deny that climate change is well underway, and unfortunately, not for the better. Even here in equatorial Singapore, we are not spared: where we used to experience frequent showers and thunderstorms, in the last two months, we haven’t so much as seen a drop of rain, and as a result, all the poor plants are turning brown and wilting from the dry heat — in fact, February 2014 was the driest month here since 1869! Thus, the arrival of the milder conditions of spring (or autumn, as the case may be), is a harbinger of hope that maybe, just maybe, this crazy weather is temporary and that, fingers crossed, things will soon go back to normal.
But I digress.
One of the paradoxes of life is that when you’re a child, all you ever want is to be a grown-up; but when you become a grown-up, you moan about growing old and wonder why you were in such a hurry to leave your carefree childhood behind in the first place. But I digress.
The Growing Story
