- by Owen Morton
I don’t actually have time to write this article. I should be writing my essay instead. I’ve got to write an essay about how relations with the Vikings affected the royal policy of the Carolingian kings, a subject I have no idea about, just like all the other essays I’ve done this term. I mean, the last one I did – “Why did the papacy interest itself in Carolingian affairs up to the year 900?” – well, to be quite honest, I have absolutely no conception. I didn’t before I did the essay, I didn’t while I was doing the essay, and I certainly don’t now. Yet, somehow, I managed to get a passable mark. This essay about the Vikings I’ve got to do has to be done by 4pm on Monday – easy enough, you might think, but then you take into account everything I’ve got to do between now and Monday. Today I have to do sign-ups for the Outdoor Society and then watch the Brit Awards 2003 (well, you never know, it might be good), and then on Friday I have to go swimming and then go out for a drink. Then on Saturday I have to do a first aid course for the Outdoor Society and on Sunday I’m going walking with the Outdoor Society. That leaves Monday. You see the problem? I have written 509 words of the essay, though, so hopefully I’ll find time this afternoon to do another 1000, then finish it off at some point tomorrow.
Anyway, you didn’t click on the link advertising ‘Puddle Lane’ simply in order to read about why I don’t have time to write an article about Puddle Lane. Or maybe you did, but if so, you’ll have to settle for rereading the first paragraph, because now I’m going to set out on a serious discussion of Puddle Lane. Or as serious a discussion of Puddle Lane as one can have without succumbing to terminal brain damage.
I don’t know how many of you out there remember Puddle Lane. It was both a series of books and a television programme intended to provide some form of education – I think it was reading that it was supposed to encourage, because otherwise the only thing it encouraged was a belief in frankly impossible and stupid things, like red monsters called gruffles who eat coal.
I’ll talk about the books first, because they were an awful lot better than the TV programme, as is the case in most, er, cases. There are always people who’ll argue that watching is better than reading, but they’re wrong. (Oh, by the way, I finally got to see Moulin Rouge the other day, and all I can say is that the queue actually was better than the film.) The books were divided up by difficulty level, into five stages, ranging from the easiest, blue, through green, orange and purple to the most difficult, red.
The books told a lot of very interesting stories revolving around any number of interesting characters. Sometimes the heroes or heroines were the cat family of Pegs, Tim and Tessa, who lived underneath the steps of the magician’s house; sometimes it was Sarah, Davy, Rita and Hari, the children who lived in Puddle Lane; sometimes it was Mrs. Pitter-Patter, the irritatingly skanky woman who also lived in Puddle Lane; sometimes it was the Wideawake Mice, a family of mice who were looking for somewhere to live; in the later books it was the Iron Boy and the Sandalwood Girl, who were looking for the magical land of Zorn; and sometimes it was just random people like Jennifer Jane, Old Mr. Gotobed, or Hickory Mouse.
By the way, I haven’t read these books for years. I just have the most amazing memory, and can remember plotlines for quite a lot of them. Admittedly, the plots can often be worked out from the title of the book themselves. It is fairly obvious what happens in ‘Tim Turns Green’, for example, and ‘How Miranda Flew Down Puddle Lane’ is no less easy to work out (though, as I recall, this book did not actually explain how Miranda flew down Puddle Lane, merely that she did so, without going into the mechanics of it). Titles such as ‘Danger in the Magician’s Garden’ and ‘Two Green Ears’, however, suggested some ambiguous threat, which made it all the more exciting, and things like ‘The Magician’s Raindrops’ and ‘Tessa and the Magician’ sound awfully good, even though there’s no clear threat suggested. (The latter, I will admit, is made even better by the inclusion of a picture on the front cover of a cat with quite superbly oversized ears.)
Right, I’ve had enough of talking about the books now, because that’s around about as much criticism as I can make of them right now, and since they are primarily the instrument by which I acquired my literacy – and are thus indirectly responsible for your being subjected to this website – I think it would be unfair to insult them overmuch. Let’s move on to the TV programme, because I have no such qualms about insulting it.
The TV programme was a little different from the books, in that it always focussed on the magician who usually featured in the books in some way, but it also featured a variety of odd creatures which did not ever make an appearance in the books. These were a green thing called Toby Spelldragon (the exception, in that he was in one book), a yellow snake called Snodgrass (and the spell checker with which I have an obsession is actually recognising Snodgrass as a word – what the hell does Snodgrass mean?), a black spider which I can’t remember the name of, but was only capable of saying “For for for for for” and the like, and I’m fairly certain there was another creature in this interesting menagerie, but I can’t remember. The magician also had another human friend called Auntie Flo, who tended to dress in bright yellow, was awfully patronising and also let herself into the magician’s house, so I am led to suspect that she wasn’t actually an aunt (especially in that she was much younger than he was) but rather a lady of disreputable character.
Anyway, in the TV show, the creatures would tend to do something naughty or stupid – I remember vividly the incident in which Toby Spelldragon deliberately touched a stinging nettle to see how much it hurt – which would lead to rebuke or (very occasionally) sympathy from the magician, and he would then tell them a story, which would actually be one of the books read out. The most amusing thing about the TV show was the very bad puppetry involved in bringing Toby Spelldragon and Snodgrass to life. The time when the Gruffle appeared on the TV show was also a joy to behold, in that his costume was quite clearly made out of red paper. I was just waiting for it to tear on something.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to divert now and discuss precisely what Snodgrass means. Naturally, it’s given no alternatives in the Microsoft Word thesaurus, but if I type it all in lower-case, like this – snodgrass – it automatically makes the ‘s’ a capital. So what is it? A place? No, because if I type york, it doesn’t automatically correct it. It does change london into London, though, but not paris into Paris. washington does become Washington, yet texas doesn’t mutate into Texas. This seems very indiscriminate. Why is moscow made Moscow, but not berlin Berlin? If you don’t believe me, try typing these capitals out for yourself on Microsoft Word 2000, and you’ll find the same as that which I have here demonstrated.
Anyway, I have digressed. What is a Snodgrass? It could be a place, but I’m guessing if so, it’s a place the Americans think is important, and I’ve never heard of it, so I suspect it’s not. It could be a person, I suppose, but it’s a really stupid name, and if I type owen morton, it doesn’t capitalise that. Nor does it do tony blair, or george w bush, or saddam hussain, or sarah michelle gellar. Therefore, I think we can fairly safely conclude that Snodgrass is not a person.
I have to confess to being totally and utterly confused by this. What on earth does Snodgrass mean? It’s obviously a proper noun, but if it’s not a person – as I think the above paragraph fairly conclusively proves – and it’s not a place, or at least not one I’ve heard of, what is it?
I’m going to panic about this for the rest of my life now.