Welcome to The Hallowe’en Edition of Musical Monday.
I’ve never really celebrated the ‘holiday’ particularly
since the idea of extortion, sorry, I mean trick-or-treat has been a scary
concept from either side of the door.
Plus, I can’t eat most generic sweets so The Appeal of the holiday was
quickly lost on me as a kid when even if I did get any loot I’d just have to
give it away immediately.
But I do like
fancy dress. I was trying to remember
Hallowe’en costumes of The Past, but I struggled quite a lot to remember
any. Which brings me back round to I
guess I’ve just never really bothered with it.
I have a vague notion then when I was very small I dressed
up as a ghost, and by dressed up I mean I put a blanket over The Head.
This was quite an important costume though because I’m
fairly sure The Blanky sacrificed its life for it.
As a teenager during The GCSE Years I went with the terribly
original costume of a black cat to possibly the first Hallowe’en party I’d ever
been invited to
(and since it was actually the birthday of the host, it
doesn’t count).
During college I went to possibly the only other Hallowe’en
party of The Life in pale clothes, went into the bathroom and transformed The
Costume into that of a blood-soaked maniac.
I did get fake blood on the host’s bathmat, but skillfully,
uh, didn’t mention this. Sure they
never worked out who did it.
In Year 1 of uni, I went to a club for probably the last
time in The Life with The Flatmates, all dressed as ‘robbers’.
But for some reason we actually went a week before
Hallowe’en so nobody understood why we were dressed up. To the L-A-Z-Y extent that we were.
And talking about L-A-Z-Y, in Year 3 of uni I wore a top hat.
Yup, that was The Costume.
A hat.
(and even then I was asked to remove it by the bouncer
before I was allowed in the pub)
And that is an exhaustive history of a Hillesque Hallowe’en.
So on with The Hallowe’en Musical Monday. Something scary maybe? How about going to a dinner party and
getting possessed into a dance number:
It’s always difficult to pull quotes out of these books
because the pictures are usually the punchline to the text and that dimension
is lost here. So go, seek these books
out for yourselves.
‘“When Mother Nature has finished soothing our fevered brows
perhaps she could give us a good rubdown as well,” said Sampson bitterly as
they stood dripping by the water’s edge.
This made Humphrey very angry. “Here we are, cast up on a foreign and exotic shore and all you
can do is make silly jokes,” he snapped, studying the map which had got a
little damp.
“According to my calculations, we’re in China,” he said,
“probably on the Pong Yang Peninsula.”
“We’re in Wortlethorpe Park,” mumbled Sampson.’
In ‘Spread Their Wings’ the mice force Sampson to give up
all his weekends to escort them on country breaks, and of course everything
that can goes wrong, until the mice are convinced they’ve been washed ashore in
foreign lands and Arthur and Humphrey suffer a terrible fate.
AND!
The Diary Of A Church Mouse
written and illustrated by Graham Oakley (1986)
‘My New Year’s Resolution this year was to start work right
away on the Story of My Life, but I’d hardly finished one sentence before up
breezes Arthur and says that really it’s best to wait until you’re very old
before you write your life story because by then you’ll know what happens in
the last chapter. I said that it was
more likely that by then you’d have forgotten what happened in the first. But he says no you wouldn’t, not if you kept
a diary. Well, I must say, that sounded
a pretty good idea which is quite surprising because Arthur doesn’t have many
of those. For once I’m going to take
his advice. So here goes. 1st January Absolutely nothing happened. 2nd January Ditto. 3rd-8th January Very
uneventful. 8th-10th January As above only
more so.’
Humphrey keeps a diary of the year’s events, including an
encounter with an abominable snowman, a very special Valentine’s card, some
expert kite design, May Day celebrations, some very unsportsmanlike sports,
Sampson’s new mouse-eating girlfriend, a disastrous attempt at homemade
fireworks and a Christmas with fifty-seven Father Christmases.
This brings The Church Mice Collection to 10/12. I only have the two ‘new’ (as in, written
after I was no longer a child) books to get and I’ll have The Complete Collection. VERY EXCITING.
I’m either excited or eating a banana sideways.
The Church Mice Spread Their Wings is the fourth book in the
Church Mice series and The Diary Of A Church Mouse is the ninth. Rather coincidentally, both books have a
similar theme of Sampson wanting revenge on the mice, especially Humphrey,
since Humphrey has always had a spiteful relationship with Sampson. But then Sampson is pushed the brink of his
‘not-killing-mice’ vow in every book, which is always a lot of fun.
There’s a rather dark joke (SPOILER) at the end of ‘Spread
Their Wings’ where Arthur and Humphrey crash their own funeral and the mice are
annoyed with them for not being dead. The callousness and shallowness of these (very British)
characters is delightful to find in children’s books (no patronising wackiness,
just genuine humour), and is convincing for the personality of mice. Small and fickle go well together.
The Diary Of A Church Mouse is the most different of the
series, being written from the perspective of Humphrey, rather than a 3rd
person narrator. The books always rely
on juxtaposition to create humour, with the narration often being contradicted
by the illustrations, but this one takes it even further. Humphrey is an utterly unreliable
narrator. We all know he’s a verbose,
pompous idiot who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he’s read a
lot of books (having started out as the school mouse) so having him narrate
means that every single picture shows the real story behind his
blustering. It’s very funny and a nice
change, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck in Humphrey’s mind for more than one
book.
The layout is noticeably different in The Diary Of A Church
Mouse. The pictures appear to be
slightly cropped, not fading out at the edges but with clear corners that look
to me as if part of the picture has been lost.
This may be because it is a 1996 reprint. It is clearly from the same series of editions as The Church Mice
In Action I have, which come with a thick green panel on the left of the cover,
which isn’t very attractive. I much
prefer the editions that have a full picture on the front cover that then wraps
around on to the back cover (as I have with The Church Mouse, The Church Cat
Abroad, The Church Mice Adrift, The Church Mice At Bay and The Church Mice At
Christmas). But when collecting out of
print books, you take what you can get.
Besides, I don’t even know if that style of cover is available for the
later books in the series.
Anyway, back to the layout.
In this book most double pages have one large picture on the left which
depicts only one of the entries on the right page, and it’s a little confusing
because the right page still has smaller illustrations for some of the entries,
so basically the pictures are out of order.
In all the other books, the correct pictures and text are placed
together and there’s no confusion about which one to look at first.
Despite this, both books are funny, clever and full of wonderful
illustrations (I wouldn’t expect less from the extremely talented Graham
Oakley), and this completes the main part of The Collection, so I am looking
forward to sitting down and reading them all from The Church Mouse (1972) to
The Church Mice And The Ring (1992) with no gaps.
Thank you everyone who has helped me get hold of these
books.
Only two more to go!
See Here, Here and Here for more on this series of books.
‘2nd June Being democratic we had a
meeting today to decide which team sports we all want to play. The most votes were for kiss in the ring,
next came marbles and then I spy with my little eye. Obviously they’re not yet ready for democracy so me and Arthur
told them what they wanted to play and that is football and cricket. As their leaders, me and Arthur will play
tennis because it’s posher. 3rd-10th June Busy making bats
and balls, etc. 11th-28th June Everybody
practising hard. Team Spirit not
particularly noticeable yet but under pressure, in the matches tomorrow, it
will blossom like a beautiful flower. 29th June It didn’t.’
~ The Diary Of A Church Mouse by Graham Oakley, 1986
For the rest of you, who don’t now own the ten greatest illustrated
children’s books ever published to whisk away those Monday blues, you’ll just
have to make do with a Musical Monday.
I'm really having to limit The Posts until I get a new, non-spiteful, mouse, which I plan to do this week.
But I do HAVE to post today just to say
I had a slightly bad day today, nothing very bad, just a little bit poopy,
so when I got home I decided to crack out the Back To The Future game I received for The Birthday, which seemed like a good idea since I was wearing a Back To The Future T-shirt.
I'm sure I have mentioned before that I like Back To The Future quite a bit.
There are good films and bad films and it's all a matter of opinion. But then there's Back To The Future. It is The Perfect Film. It's funny, exciting, thrilling, romantic, emotional etc etc. Something for everyone. It has the full emotional range and a mix of pretty much every main genre, and the fact that it's all hiked up to the extreme makes it EXPLODE. This is the only film that makes The Heart race in every exciting scene and I've seen it dozens of times.
In 2010 I had reached a stage where I didn't feel it could do anything new for me, and then I saw it on the big screen for the first time and the whole experience was refreshed. Click here to see the post about that.
And today I had a similar experience. I was not keen to play the Back To The Future game when it came out last year (or whenever) because it didn't have Michael J Fox as Marty. I love Back To The Future, I love Marty, I love Michael J Fox and he's a brilliant voice-over actor, so I was really put off. But I got the game for The Birthday so today I popped it on and I am sorry, Game, I should never have judged you.
Until today I had no idea I wanted a Back To The Future Part 4, but that's what this is and it is like that refresh experience again. Just when you think you've had all the Back To The Future magic there is, somebody goes and makes more. Right from the start it got to me, emotionally, and I thought
(I promptly accepted the new Marty voice - it might not be Michael J Fox, but it's still Marty McFly)
and with the references and the music it's just exciting being in the same room as it, and it's genuinely funny too, and so far the plot really feels like YES, this IS what Part 4 would be. It feels... I dunno, earned.
I'm not saying it's the greatest game ever made; it's a point and click narrative game, which isn't going to be for everyone, particularly on the console, but I'm not a game connoisseur: I'm a Back To The Future connoisseur, and this, I tells ya, is Back To The Future.
I don't know how the entire game will hold up, because I'm only 1/5 of the way through,
but today...
It made The Day.
It made The Day in the way only Back To The Future can.
I can't even recall the poopiness of this morning. I will remember this day as BACKTOTHEFUTUREAWESOMEMAGICFEELING Day.