ABSTRACT
Once upon a time my favourite writer was the English children’s author Enid Blyton. She was the first person who defined ‘daring’ for me, and the adventures of her ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven’ permanently distinguished my lust for life. Most impressionably, like the characters in her ‘Faraway Tree’, I too believed that atop the tallest magic tree in the forest there was an ever-changing world, and you never knew what the children would find each different day they visited - Land of the Slaps one day, Land of Birthdays the next - nor what joys or terrors they might encounter. No matter what happened though, they always made it home safely for supper, and to help mother. This, I thought, was the proper metaphor for life, one full of robust play coupled with responsible duty. Imagine my surprise then to find myself one day stuck atop the tree in topsy-turvy land, with the cloud having moved on, and no foreseeable escape route. Nothing was normal, everyone was crazy, and so it seemed was I. And that was that. How does one write their way out of this?
