Now We Are Sixty, by Christopher Matthew

Retrieved from: The British Library bookstore
(0719559790)

My first “real” book that I remember reading over and over once I was old enough to read was Now We are Six, by A.A. Milne in paperback. My sister gave it to me when I turned (duh) six, and she annotated it. How cool is that!

Which goes a ways toward explaining why I couldn’t resist this book when I saw it. It’s mildly amusing, probably the way I would feel about the original if I hadn’t read the original as a child. The poems here are parodies of the original. But this is definitely more grown-up, as this excerpt from the “rewritten” version of "The Little Black Hen," entitled "Saloon Bar Romeos," shows:

Hebblethwaite and Hopwood,
Fothergill and Fenn
And Bob Stanford-Dingley
Are five grown men . . .
And all of them are ogling
Our barmaid, Jen.

This is probably only for Milne fans, and only a select few of them. I had a couple of twinges of “don’t ruin THAT one too” as I read this book. But these are generally in good spirit and amusing.

(Among the poems I love from the original, he didn’t do--as far as I can tell--the “Anne” poem, or “The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak,” two of my favorites. But he did work on “King John’s Christmas.”)