to want to go and live in a children's book?

[EccentricaGallumbits]

a cross between enid blyton and swallows and amazons?

I want to mess about in boats. laze on beaches. play in the water.

I want to drink warm pop and climb over styles.

I want to have a camp fire and cook sausages and pancakes.

I want to have fun and not have to go to work tomorrow.

Thanks maktaitai - have just looked up All but a Few and the cover I saw looks VERY familiar (possibly I had it and it is still at my mum's...)

YES, and he will have to darn his own socks and dig the garden for no pocket money as well

ps maktaitai the joan aiken website here lists the stories in the collections.

I'd definitely like to be Nancy Blackett from swallows and amazons! I've had a sail boat fetish ever since I first read them. I still read them now. Green Knowe would definitely be interesting, but I always find the ghost children just a little sad making.(!?) lovely books.

to A Jumped Up Pantry Boy! Actually Dick less prissy than Julian perhaps - but I always thought that Julian worked those knitted one-piece swimsuits so well!

I always wanted to have a clubhouse like the secret seven - especially the one they had in the tree and I would have loved to have gone to St Clares just to have the midnight feasts.

I want to be wee Alan Taylor out of Mr Gum but then I am a bit wrong in the head!

Brilliant hewlettsdaughter, thank you for that link! - I'm now 90% certain that it's the title story of More Than You Bargained For, so it is in All But a Few. I'm sure you'd remember it if you read it - the heroine was a girl who lived in London with her mother, and the record was a birthday present which she could never normally have afforded...

yanbu

atm I am spending night feeds grooming ponies and riding in gymkhanas with Jill and Ann

I used to look Chatton up in the road atlas when I was a child. I wanted to go and live there. My first Jill book inspired my lifelong horse obsession. Combined with my boat fetish, I'm not very economical to run!

i grew up near hundred acre wood, and lived v close to green knowe (even seen it in flood)

i have chased dd (and my nieces) round both those places, pretending to find the characters, several times.

I would also love to be up the Magic Faraway Tree or sailing in boats Swallows and Amazon style. But most of all, I'd like to be in Tom's Midnight Garden. God, I loved that book.

I want to solve a crime by spotting someone acting suspiciously and outsmarting them. I’m gutted my childhood never gave me that opportunity when the kids in the books I read did it repeatedly

I want to be Milly Molly Mandy, living in the "nice white cottage with the thatched roof ", with a lovely family, and wearing a little stripy dress, trotting off to my little village school, with Little Friend Susan and Billy Blunt!