Alice

The other day in the hut I read Alice in Wonderland again.
I have never seen a decent representation of this book on screen they all feel compelled to fiddle with it for some reason.
Given away with the Daily Mail recently was a version of Alice with one Tina Majorino as Alice. (Surely they MUST have called her Utterly Butterly at school or even ‘I cant believe shes not butter’. If they didn’t then they should have been ashamed of themselves and all got jobs in the Royal Navy collecting goody bags)
This version occasionally had the feel of Alice despite from the start the ridiculous motive for the dream that they felt compelled to add that she was worried about having to sing a song in front of some grown ups. However I felt more uneasy about Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee turning up played very badly by Robbie Coltrane and some other fat chap and soon after that an elderly knight. My rereading confirmed that the Tweedles and the knight do not belong to the book.
These tales were supposed to have been told to Alice Liddell while on a rowing boat hired from Salter Brothers of Folly Bridge Oxford for a trip on the Thames.
I hired a boat for the first time from Salter Brothers. It was a motor boat called Pilgrim and it was hired during ‘Bumps week’ After being shown how to steer/drive they asked me if I felt competent to go and of course I replied yes. So we set off down river and shortly came upon the races in full flight. I steered in and out of the speeding boats in a most embarrassing manner. Ann hid below decks while Bertie Wooster types shouted at me from the bank through megaphones. Eventually we got past. But then Ann said we had left the bedding behind at Salter Brothers and would have to go back for it. I was all for leaving it there and pressing on down river but she insisted. So I had to turn and weave my way back past now frantic screaming from both banks. At one point I glanced over my shoulder and saw a crew of eight bearing down on me at fantastic speed – all facing the wrong way so far as I could see. I shut my eyes but thankfully there was no collision. We picked up the bedding and set forth again downstream. Those students must have thought I was really taking the piss but luckily there was some kind of break in the proceedings and this coupled with my newly acquired navigational skills allowed us to pass incident free.