The evils once confined to fairytales and folklore have burst their fictive boundaries and bled into the real world
Lucy Mangan: 'The extremes that stories are meant to invoke and warn and protect us against dwell among us. The big bad wolf is here, not there.' Photograph: James Gritz
'It was a dark and stormy night…" No, wait, too specific. "In the beginning was the word…" A touch grandiose, perhaps. How about "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin"? No, let's stick with tradition. "Once upon a time…"
Today is the first day of National Storytelling Week, and it comes just as I'm starting to realise that my son and I will probably never be farther apart in our respective relationships to stories than we are now. For him, at two and a half, they are, of course, all new and things of wonder. Books whose words are a last-minute adjunct to the wheels, buttons and buzzers they are set around are as good as The Gruffalo, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Tiger Who Came To Tea. (Children, nothing's as good as The Gruffalo. Nothing. End of.) The laboured adventures of Thomas The Tank Engine elicit the same rapt attention as the Ladybird classics – fairytales' beautifully distilled by Vera Southgate and even more beautifully illustrated by Eric Winter. And don't get me started on stories involving stickers. Under-three humanity knows no greater happiness.
I, on the other hand, am having trouble with stories. Over and above, I mean, my natural and growing parental antipathy towards the Reverend W Awdry's relentlessly cheerful, pathologically humourless and sinfully boring creation. What, after all, are they for? Entertainment and education, most would say, a way to make sense of the world. I remember entertainment. It's what I used to get from books, TV and films before my mind became too cluttered and susceptible to the nagging voice that endlessly recites the list of chores I should be doing (cleaning, tidying, cooking, at least periodically scraping the mould from my body even if I can't manage to have a shower every day) is too loud.
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Today is the first day of National Storytelling Week, and it comes just as I'm starting to realise that my son and I will probably never be farther apart in our respective relationships to stories than we are now. For him, at two and a half, they are, of course, all new and things of wonder. Books whose words are a last-minute adjunct to the wheels, buttons and buzzers they are set around are as good as The Gruffalo, Each Peach Pear Plum and The Tiger Who Came To Tea. (Children, nothing's as good as The Gruffalo. Nothing. End of.) The laboured adventures of Thomas The Tank Engine elicit the same rapt attention as the Ladybird classics – fairytales' beautifully distilled by Vera Southgate and even more beautifully illustrated by Eric Winter. And don't get me started on stories involving stickers. Under-three humanity knows no greater happiness.
I, on the other hand, am having trouble with stories. Over and above, I mean, my natural and growing parental antipathy towards the Reverend W Awdry's relentlessly cheerful, pathologically humourless and sinfully boring creation. What, after all, are they for? Entertainment and education, most would say, a way to make sense of the world. I remember entertainment. It's what I used to get from books, TV and films before my mind became too cluttered and susceptible to the nagging voice that endlessly recites the list of chores I should be doing (cleaning, tidying, cooking, at least periodically scraping the mould from my body even if I can't manage to have a shower every day) is too loud.
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