Luukku 10

The Boys’ Book: How to Be the Best at Everything - Various.
A book that one of my sons got for Christmas, and apparently one of the best selling childrens’ books this Christmas. Written like the kind of books for boys of the 40s and 50s, it offers a succession of ‘how to’ advice, from how to survive being attacked by a crocodile to how to light a fire. What impressed me was how, in with the sillier stuff like how to tear a phone book in half and how to really annoy your brothers and sisters, is stuff like how to tie a knot, how to milk a cow and how to dowse for water. Might it be that it offers a format for how to communicate useful skills and make things like food growing and energy conservation engaging, sneaking them in ‘under the radar’? Might the next version have, alongside the silly ones, how to organise a screening of The End of Suburbia, how to harvest walnuts and how to primoslide? There’s a thought…