The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (Enid Blyton)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

What is heaven? Heaven is dark chocolate cake and strong coffee. Heaven is ‘under-sleeping’: waking up a delicious 30 minutes before the alarm clock does. Heaven is orange roses. And heaven is re-reading a book you ADORED as a child, 20 years later.

I credit Enid Blyton for giving me my imagination. For creating characters and places and adventures so colourful and so tantalising that I could taste them. Even when the book was closed. And because I am a copywriter who feeds herself and her family with the fruits of her imagination, I think Enid Blyton is deserving of sainthood.

The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (originally penned in 1937) is the book that started it. Off we went – Mollie, Peter and I – to the Land of Dreams. To Chinky’s home. To the magician’s party. Again and again, over years and years. And all in the magic chair with the cheeky personality and the little red wings.

Egmont has re-published this first enchanting Blyton book, but retained the original artwork. I’m also pleased to see tidbits of charming, anachronistic language like, ‘Horrid thing!’; ‘We’ll go to-morrow’; and ‘Hurrah!’. All I have to do, now that I’ve read this book for perhaps the hundredth time, is find somewhere safe to keep it until I have kids.

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