Once upon a time ………

 When you are a child you pretty much take things at face value (unless you are one of those super precocious ones but this isn’t about you okay)  and to be quite honest it’s probably a good thing that kids don’t analyse stuff too much 

I was having a conversation the other day about nursery rhymes and fairy stories and a lot of them are a bit nasty aren’t they 

We know the obvious one ,  ‘Ring o roses’ is about dying of plague , so that’s a great one to start with but a lot of them are also a bit macabre 

Step mothers feature heavily , Cinderella , forced to do all the housework , forbidden to have fun and treated terribly by her step mum and step siblings .

Snow White , given a poisoned apple by her Step mother after she had tried to escape the domestic situation by running away to live with seven men (let’s not go there with those 7 eh!!) 

Rapunzel , locked in a tower , people using her hair as a ladder , what was going on there ? 

Then we have Hansel and Gretel ……..firstly what were they doing wandering about the woods by themselves alone ? Where were the parents ? And then they get abducted by the old witch in the woods and put in a cage , well that was always a risk wasn’t it when you let kids wander off by themselves 

Animals don’t fare much better , the deaths in The Lion king , fox hunting in The Fox and The Hound , doggy fur coats in 101 Dalmatians , strays in The Arisocats and The Lady &  The Tramp and Bambi ……..her poor Mum , no , I can’t , don’t make me remember that 

Nursery rhymes….Humpty Dumpty , a human sized egg falling from a wall and then expecting the Kings horses to fix his scrambled brains ? Don’t they have paramedics in nursery rhyme land ? Jack and Jill falling down a hill and Jack suffering a fractured skull which is ‘fixed’ with vinegar and brown paper …..someone tell the nhs they are wasting so much money on neurosurgery, get down to Tesco and stock up on the Sarsons!

 Ding Dong Dell …drowning kittens , 3 blind mice …..tail amputations , Little Miss Muffet …arachnophobia, there’s no end to the horrors and that’s not even counting the stories by The Brother Grimm which were always a bit dark for me , even the books I loved as a child by Enid Blyton can only be described as ‘trippy’ when you re-read them as an adult , The Magic Faraway Tree is just totally out there 

As children grow up when they are much younger these days I wonder if these stories and rhymes have a much shorter life than they once had before young minds start to question talking snowmen , handsome Princes coming to the rescue and all that crazy stuff !! Xx