World Book Day
For World Book Day, BTP’s school is trying to encourage children to read by asking them to bring in pictures of them reading in all sorts of different locations, ideally unusual ones.
This isn’t perfect: unlike me, he’s only five, and therefore doesn’t spend all his spare time wandering about with his nose in a book. Nope, he’s still at the stage where while he can recognise letters, he has to think about them to make the words out of them (apart from some easier ones like ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ etc). So he tends not to wander around reading books all willy-nilly. The only books he tends to read are the ones with Biff and Kipper and Chip in them (think Janet and John only less dull).
Biff has a ball. Kipper wants the ball. Dad falls out of the tree. That sort of thing.
But we gave it a shot. The shots were therefore necessarily posed, as he wouldn’t normally have been sat reading a book when doing things like riding a helicopter. Obviously, we had to take our picture when the helicopter was on the ground, because as you can see it’s a small helicopter with only room for one person, so not only would it have been difficult to take a picture while it was in flight, it would have been dangerous for BTP to attempt to pilot it and read at the same time.
So let’s not hear anything about ‘toy’ helicopters, okay?
The next one I thought was even more unusual. A photograph of BTP reading his magazine from inside a painting. We’d just been doing a family cultural affair — taking the kids around the Laing Art Gallery — and admiring some of the pieces I’ve mentioned before (in particular ‘The Bard’) when, on the way out, we noticed a little kiddy section, which had these painting things you could crawl into, stick out of and so on, as well as various buttons to press, knobs to twiddle with (stop sniggering at the back!) and so on.
So a photo of BTP reading from inside a painting I thought really would be quite unusual.
And then, on the way home, we were supposed to turn left to go over the Tyne Bridge, only we turned right, got stuck in the one way system, and then some 230,000 miles later, we realised that we had taken a wrong turning, as we realised when we came out of Mare Crisium and ended up in Mare Tranquillitatis. Well, talk about a frosty atmosphere in the car!
Anyway, while we were there, we stopped for a quick photo, only initially I thought I’d got a lovely photo of BTP reading, only to realise later that some goon in a big spacesuit had wandered right across the shot. Inconsiderate so-and-so. There wasn’t really time for a second shot, because it really was very cold — obviously BTP had a nice warm coat on, but even so — so we decided it was better just to pack up and head home.
Now I do realise some people will be sceptical of this, and think that the whole thing was faked, but frankly these conspiracy nuts who believe the whole moon landings were bunk are a little tiresome. People landed on the moon, the moon landing photos weren’t faked, get over it.
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