The Adventures of Pip

This morning as I put away Archie and Mehitabel (a book by Don Marquis) having just re-read the piece of blank verse entitled a spider and a fly (the verse is not only blank but contains no upper case characters nor punctuation) which I was going to send to a friend.  My mind then wandered to what the fly had been saying in justification of its existence.  Then I recalled that I knew about flies and germs from Enid Blyton’s book The Adventures of Pip (written in 1948) which I had read when I was knee high to a grasshopper and from which I had learned so many things.  In fact it is a testament to the book’s author that I can remember much of what I learned and can actually trace it back to that book.

A propos this morning’s thoughts I learned that a Bluebottle (a large fly in case they are called something different in the US) carried germs from rubbish and dung heaps and deposited them on our food and so on.  I also recall that, as would have been usual then, good triumphed over evil and a Robin ate the Bluebottle. 

But I also learned that some trees (I think it was a chestnut) had buds covered with sticky stuff to prevent them freezing (although it didn’t explain about the chemistry involved – and at around the age of 5 I wouldn’t have understood anyway); that caddis larvae covered themselves with bits of vegetation to prevent tadpoles eating them; that male sparrows had black bibs'; that Blackbirds have bright yellow beaks; that you could tell the weather from the Scarlet Pimpernel; that the Hermit Crab had no shell so used discarded shells from other creatures.  There was also something about catkins and lambs tails but that’s a bit hazy.  There was so much more but all things have to end somewhere.  So this post ends here.