THE TALE OF A FIERCE BAD GRANNY

Omar Patrick has gone home to London, leaving few visible traces behind. Unlike his older cousins he's not yet big enough to bury vital household objects in flower-pots or post them through the cat-flaps, and there are no grubby hand-prints on the windows, or gnawed rusks down the sides of sofas. The only real sign that he was here are the piles of picture books lying everywhere. And that’s one of the great joys of having a new baby around: you can dig out and enjoy all the old favourites and discover brilliant new ones.

I haven't always been a good influence as a granny: I sometimes forget to mind my language and I like to raise the occasional bit of toddler mayhem. It follows that I love picture books that are wildly funny, imaginative and a bit subversive. You can keep the ones about caring and sharing, the thinly-disguised sermons on political correctness, and the deeply gloomy ones about saying goodbye to Gertie the Goldfish. Life’s hard enough, for god’s sake; children need cheering up, like the rest of us.

Burglar Bill, The Elephant and the Bad Baby, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen – these are just a few old favourites, and now I have two new ones: I Really Want To Eat A Child, and The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business. As so often happens, it turns out everyone knew about this last one, except me, but it’s the ultimate book about poo. I’m also very taken with the Wonky Donkey as read on U-tube by that wonderful Scottish granny.

Occasionally the recipients of my well-intentioned gifts have been traumatised – Bye-bye Baby reduced a great-nephew to tears: I still feel guilty – but by and large the little hellions have shrieked with laughter and demanded more. And some have the excellent sense to refuse to listen to anything remotely improving. When my granddaughter was given a picture book of bible stories she listened to her father reading for 30 seconds before she took the book firmly from his hands and said, I’ll read this one. The new, improved version began ‘Once upon a time there was a princess…’ 

And I don’t know if anyone reads Saki any more, but he wrote a wonderful story (The Storyteller) about a  bachelor entertaining fractious children on a train with the tale of a little girl who was so good that she won endless medals for good behaviour. Then, covered in clanking medals, she was allowed the rare honour of walking in the King’s garden where there were ornamental pigs - and a passing hungry wolf. Alerted to the presence of the child (by the clanking) the wolf catches her and gobbles her up. The accompanying aunt in the story is outraged, but the children are delighted that it’s the good little girl who has been gobbled up rather than one of the pigs. And this is the thing: children like a bit of anarchy, and they love to be entertained. But there's been a move lately – even in picture books but particularly in middle grade and young adult books – towards stories that are so worthy, so weighted towards the socially-meaningful and politically-correct, so afraid of giving any conceivable offence, that a lot of them are deeply dreary. Come on people, in this hideously alarming and unmanageable world, don’t we all need a little escapism?

Which brings me to one last thing: I’ve complained before about the emotional-blackmail of those Facebook posts that demand you share some stuff about cancer, pollution, puppy farms, whatever - or be exposed as the heartless, uncaring creature that you really are. Well, all I want to say is that when I die, sooner rather than later - of cancer, heart disease, liver-failure (or more likely a stroke caused by reading one more pronouncement by the cretinous Trump) – if any one of you uses it as an excuse to post something on Facebook urging others to prove that they too truly care about cancer, heart disease, stroke, etc, I will come back from the dead, so help me god, and strangle you with my own winding-sheet. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

BATS AND BORROWED TIME

I like bats. They were a regular feature of my African twilights, skittering through the dusk while the most intrepid of my many cats crouched on the spine of the roof, hurling herself up into the air time and time again in the vain hope of catching one, only to crash back down, batless, onto the corrugated iron with a noise like the pots of Hell clanging.

There were bats in Fermanagh when we were there a few weeks ago, but it was a lot more peaceful. In fact, there were signs on the trees exhorting us to silence for fear of disturbing them. Bats can live for anything up to 30 years. I am an old bat myself now, having just turned 70, and now that my biblical three score years and ten have been accounted for, obviously I'm on borrowed time, so I'm planning to make the most of it.

With this in mind, we started off our 70th birthday/ 3rd anniversary celebrations with 4 days in Fermanagh, at the Lough Erne resort where Councillor Kate and Fearless Fergal got married in March. We had a 4-poster bed and a circular balcony with a splendid view; we also had a double jacuzzi in which we almost got stuck  - and imagine the shame if you had to ring down to Reception to say you couldn't haul yourselves out! Mind you, they're such nice people, they'd probably make you feel all right about it.

A bat can consume 1200 mosqitos in an hour - it's one of the reasons I like them: I had malaria only once and who knows how many bouts I might have had if not for helpful bats? They are also eaten themselves in some places. Luckily we didn't have to eat bat; we had apple and cauliflower soup and pan-fried hake, and pork and duck and Prosecco, and pear and lemon and raspberry sorbets in the Catalina Restaurant - and if I died there, I'd die happy: the food is sublime. We also had lunch in the only Greek restaurant that I know of in the north - Dollakis in Enniskillen. Lovely friendly people and wonderful chicken souvlaki and Greek potatoes. We did a tour of Castle Coole and were ferried up the lough from Castle Archdale to White Island by a lovely young man whose father had skippered the ferry before him. We were the only passengers so we had the island with it's ruined church and ancient carved stone figures all to ourselves - apart from a few cows. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful. 

On the other side of Lough Erne, the Lough Navar Forest Drive will take you up to what must be the most spectacular view in all of Fermanagh. From the Magho Viewpoint you can see the whole of lower Lough Erne spread out before you, from Donegal Bay and the Bluestack and Sperrin mountains all the way down to the eastern islands. I urge you to go and see for yourself, only don't rely on sat-nav: the shortest route is not the easiest, in fact we gave up on the first attempt after landing up in someone's back yard at the end of a rutted track half-way up a mountain. There were baying dogs and looming trees and it was all a bit Deliverance. Follow the signs on the road and you'll be fine.

Professor Gloom inspecting map

I took a pile of novels and opened none of them. Instead I read  the Irish Times and the Guardian, and an old paperback copy of The Children of Green Knowe. I don't know if any modern child would read it but Tolly and the ghostly children he plays with in his grandmother's old house took me straight back to long-ago childhood holidays. And set as the story is in flooded fenland country, it was perfectly suited to Fermanagh.

Now I'm back in Holywood and the youngest of my grandchildren has come to visit. He is only 3 months old, but he has dozens of books already and his mother and father read to him several times a day. In fact, this could just turn out to be the first child to be read to too much. I'm pretty sure I saw his eyes glaze over as The Very Hungry Caterpillar was opened for the umpteenth time, and I had a sudden vision of him in a few years time pulling up his little hoodie and fleeing down the garden path as his parents pursue him crying, "Omar Patrick! Wait! You have to listen to this one more time..."