Scooby Doo, where are you?

There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It’s fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second, hence the preponderance of male fans of science fiction and fantasy — and dewy-eyed reminiscence about children’s television. I’ve been in many female friendship groups and can’t remember a single occasion on which we’ve sat around thinking about past puppets. On the contrary, the childish things we typically recall are our awful choices of make-up and clothes, and our adoration of the pretty-boy pin-ups in our teenage bedrooms: that is, the things we used to hasten the arrival of longed-for adult life.

The internet helps those reluctant to put away childish things just as much as it helps those too shy to have sex with real people. I imagine the Venn diagram of the two types has an overlap the size of Alaska. And it can be no accident that one of the first internet sensations was Friends Reunited, where adults, weary of the drudging, workaday world and their grudging grown-up marriages, could seek out their playground loves and feel young again.

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Kristina Murkett

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

There is no end to the online appetite for sweetness of all sorts; websites celebrating nostalgic confectionery flourish, leading to the paradox that middle-class parents communally fetishise the sweets they ate as schoolchildren while treating the confectionery their little darlings might get their clammy paws on as the work of the devil. There’s even a school of writing named after defunct candy; the coming-of-age novel The Queen of Bloody Everything was recently hailed as ‘a wonderful example of Spangles Lit’.

Greg Healey writes a column for the gorgeously named Shindig! magazine on this very subject and — perhaps because of the exclamation mark — I was expecting Not in Front of the Children to be a rompish easy read.