But first...
Dulltown, UK: Today's dictionary words are: zingel, zoea, zyme, zastruga, zanja, and proparoxytone. Please have these words looked up, and placed in suitable sentences, ready for Professor Mouldie first thing after breakfast tomorrow morning. Should the professor turn up in the bright, outlandish garb of a Chelsea Pensioner, you must not allow this to distract you from your studies. (click)
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Was today's title puzzling you, dear reader?
If I were reading this, I'd be puzzled too - it sounds like the title of a story for children.
No, and it being Christmas Eve, it's time for another look at that real children's book (actually, a boys' book, the girls' book would have a pony on the cover). Another of my cheap, junk shop, charity shop, books - it does have a great cover though - rockets, and spacemen, with ray-guns!
Yes, I imagine this was once a Christmas present for - oh, let's call him Billy, back in, oh, probably 1955, the book being for the following year. Billy probably had a bossy sister called Shirley, she would have had the one with those ponies on the front.
Shall we have a look at one of the illustrations?
How about this one on the double page spread called Wonders of Outer Space, by a fellow called Harry Hollinson, D.F.C.
Of course, Billy would be in his sixties or seventies now.
As a kid he must have stared at this drawing thinking - chaps, in space suits, floating in zero gravity, a space station, other chaps looking down, out of the windows, at the Earth turning round under them, look, there's Britain, rockets are coming and going, building the thing...
Well, yes, in the next half-century, we did all that!
Well done, Harry Hollinson, D.F.C!
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