Five do go adventuring again

In 2010, publisher Hachette updated the language to make “sensitive text revisions” to Enid Blyton’s 21 ‘Famous Five’ books in an attempt to make them appeal more to modern children. This followed market research that suggested children were no longer engaging with the tales about child detectives, due to their dated language.

Now though, Hachette has decided to abandon the idea because the new revisions were not received well by readers.Changes made included replacing the word “tinker” with “traveller”, “mother and father” with “mum and dad” and “awful swotter” becoming “bookworm” The revisions also made the language more gender-neutral, with the character Anne altered to enjoy teddies instead of dolls.

 “The feedback we have had six years on shows that the love for The Famous Five remains intact, and changing mother to mummy, pullover to jumper, was not required,” McNeil said. “We want Enid Blyton’s legacy to go on. Millions of readers have learned to read with her.”

Tony Summerfield, of the Enid Blyton Society, said it would mostly be adults who cared about the changes. “I think to a child it wouldn’t make any difference what edition they read. The 2010 versions will only be reverting back to the text of the already revised versions from the 1990s – so [they are] not even Blyton’s original texts, although those revisions were just small word changes, not completely rewritten like the 2010 editions. Chances are, a child who picks up the ‘classic’ edition is reading a different version to their parents anyway.”

Despite being criticised as racist and sexist, Blyton remains one of the most popular children’s authors. Hodder sells more than half a million copies of the Famous Five books a year, with Blyton amassing more than 500 million lifetime sales.

So everything is back-to-normal yes?

No way, now there is a series of Famous Five parodies, - the continued adventures of Julian, Dick, George and Anne as adults, along with Timmy the dog in “Five do dry January”, “Five Go Gluten Free”, “Five Go On A Strategy Away Day” and “Five Go Parenting”.

A few details from the “Five Go Gluten Free”, to give you a 'flavour' of what is in store: the gang “are all feeling really rather rum, and it’s been going on for days. Nothing seems to work, and with their doctors mystified, they’re driven to trying out various expedients to cure themselves. Julian goes online to self-diagnose that he’s got pancreatic cancer, bird flu and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Anne decides that the old methods are the best and decides to have herself exorcised – which proves to be an awful lot of bother for everyone, and such a mess. Dick goes to a witch doctor who calls himself a ‘homeopath’ but it’s George who discovers they need to go on an exclusion diet, so they enter a world of hard-to-find, maddeningly expensive specialist foods …”

Ho ho ho

How do you know when Christmas is approaching -
Is it the store decorations?
Is it the jolly man in the red suit appearing simultaneously in different shopping centres?
Is it the mound of catalogues in the letter-box?

No it's not these, it is the current splurge of best-selling authors producing a new book 'just in time for Christmas gift giving!'

Here is just one day's delivery 

(Sideways for easier spine reading)

You can always rely on Di Morrissey each October/November to write another saga, though this year's "A distant journey" is slimmer than usual. 
And it is only a few weeks since the last James Patterson, but this one, is the 24th 'Alex Cross' and has no joint/ghost writer.
There are other series - another Jack Reacher ("Night School"), Dr Scarpetta ("Chaos"), the final 7th Clifton Chronicle ("This was a man"), a Harry Bosch ("The wrong side of goodbye"), the fourth Jack West Jr adventure ("The four legendary kingdoms"), and the Tempe Brennan is actually a prequel to "Deja dead" (which ruins the numbering of the entire series - thanks for nothing Kathy).
 
Now to be faced with the resulting hordes of holds for them all.

Monumental weekend

And I do mean 'monumental' as in the dictonary connotation - "historical prominent".
I visited some cemeteries, like the lonely Sailor's Home Cemetery

And some notable headstones - on the left is the single grave beside Simson Street in Brim, and on the right is George Bell in the tiny Lake Coorong Pioneer Cemetery in Hopetoun.

Another lone grave (and lonely too) John Archbold's grave at the top of Lake Albacutya, needed to wade through a wheat crop while scaling the hill to reach the two pines overlooking his memorial.

But it wasn't only about dead people monuments, there were the two Silo Art Trail murals, definitely giant monuments - 

Fintan Magee's at Patche (still not convinced about the dead tree), but it does look impressive on the approach to town from the east and from the north.

And there can never be too many of the Brim silo, especially as I'm still to be there on a sunny afternoon. This was relatively early with the sun behind the silo.

And I had both to myself, no other photographers in sight.

Then there were the small monuments - see if you can spot the brown sign (not the hand-painted sign on the fence)

 
This as the sign says was the first site of the Tyenna (Tempy East) school, a single room weatherboard building with an open fireplace, situated there from 1923 to 1946.

The guys who erected the sign didn't anticipate the  growth of the old peppercorn tree. 

Little wonder that someone else took it upon themselves to create the hand painted one on the cyclone fence. 

Further west there was this poignant  building - 

The Echunga State School No. 4481 (originally known as Gaalanungah West, alternate named Euchunga and Weeroona). It opened in June 1931 in the rented Echunga Hall (erected for school purposes), a limestone rubble building rendered in concrete. It was situated on the road between Hopetoun and Yaapeet (a road busy with hay carters). The school closed in 1947. Sad when the local people had put so much effort into establishing it.

Another monument to our build/create and abandon/discard, this car rusting away just north of Rainbow.

And finally one of nature's monuments, this is a panoramic shot of Lake Hindmarsh, taken from 'The Cliffs'.