Inspiring Young Readers
The Annual Wait
Around about this time of the year when I was a child I would be starting to anticipate the Christmas arrival of one or two comic annuals which always formed an important part of my present haul. I always prioritised The Beano annual – for me that was the genuine premier comic annual and just a bit better than The Dandy. In my young mind The Beano was to The Dandy as Coke is to Pepsi – just that bit more classy. If I was lucky I’d get both.
I wouldn’t turn away The Beezer or The Topper but in my heart of hearts they really weren’t quite it. I’d rather dutifully go through them but secretly there were stories I’d skip, characters I didn’t really like. But when it came to The Beano or The Dandy there was a very strict code of conduct when it came to reading them.
On Christmas day itself, accompanied and equipped with a satisfyingly big selection box of Cadbury chocolate (Cadbury and Beano – is there a better combination of words?), the task was to look through the annual but not to read it. This initial sift was all about scoping out the stories, the articles and anything that might be special and require immediate attention. But in order not to waste the rush of excitement, reading the stories had to be kept and rationed out in the days after Christmas. I would consider it a major success if I could make my annuals last until the approaching New Year.
As the years slipped by I started to drop the cartoon comic annuals – with the exception of The Beano which I clung onto for many more years – in favour of boys adventure annuals – The Hornet or The Lion. These offered quite a lot more reading and so it became legitimate to settle into these by Christmas afternoon and they offered an escape from the constant barrage of television light entertainment. Looking back now there was a pretty unhealthy obsession with war stories but that’s probably not too much of a surprise when you take into account that this would have been barely twenty years after World War Two ended. In any case the stories captured me completely and these annual became my favourite Christmas presents.
Fast forward two or three years and football annuals and the Look and Learn Annual start to take the place of the comics and something of the magic has clearly gone because I have virtually no memory of any of the football annuals I got and I certainly don’t remember having a system for reading them. In retrospect this was a signifier that things were changing and that Christmas would soon stop being packed with ‘childish’ stuff and instead people would start asking me what I wanted. I couldn’t really say The Beano at this point, could I?
This is when the ubiquitous Guinness Book of Records made its first Christmas appearance. I’m not sure why it is that boys in particular seem to be obsessed with lists of things or why who holds the world record for eating sausage rolls might be of the foggiest interest to anyone but just about everyone I knew in my group of friends thought they should have this yearly digest of freakish records.
Retrospectively, I now see that this was the moment when the Christmas annual event came to an end. I was never truly interested in The Guinness Book of Records and once it had been unwrapped, a few random records read out loud it was effectively discarded. Soon there would be no annual at all in my selection of Christmas gifts and, not too long after that, a gradual tapering off of interest until there were no presents at all.
I like being present free – I’m not very good at receiving gifts and anyway I buy whatever I want when I want it and so it must be near impossible for anyone to buy me a present that isn’t just so much extraneous junk. But I do remember the exciting days of the Christmas annual with real affection and I hope there are still children out there getting themselves over-excited at the prospect of a Beano all wrapped up and ready to be read.
Terry Potter
December 2017