Not Now, Bernard: Board Book: 1

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Anyone who pays an energy bill and does a weekly shop can feel the claws of a budget squeeze closing around the nation’s windpipe. There’s an ogre in the health service. “Not now, Bernard,” says Rishi Sunak. There’s a fiend in the financial outlook. “Not now, Bernard,” says Liz Truss. There are devils in your policy details. “Not now, Bernard!”

A cautionary tale. That is how it is so often read. Really? Cautionary tales are like Struwelpeter and The Water Babies. Role play conversations like the ones in the story as you go about everyday tasks with ‘Hello Mum or Dad’ and ‘Not now Bernard’ (perhaps inserting your child’s name!) as the reply. Your child might enjoy taking on the adult’s role with you as Bernard. Make a monster mask The best thing to do was, as I insist on telling my students, look at the text. So that is what I did. parents and society expect or demand of them. This disjunction is disturbing and frustrating. Children respond differently to it, of course - some try hard to be 'good', some become confused and angry. The frustrated child is terrified byShare favourite parts of the story or favourite illustrations. Talk about anything that puzzles your child, for example why Bernard’s parents don’t listen to him. Join in The Tory party recognises only two possible positions on Britain’s relationship with the EU – heroic insistence on further severance and cowardly plotting to rejoin. Labour, unwilling to adopt the former stance and afraid of being cast in the latter one, says nothing meaningful on the subject.

The author uses the word ‘said’ a lot in the story. Can you think of any synonyms that would be more suitable in each sentence? by his parents ignoring him. This is where the child reader recognises himself or herself and finds comfort in the book. It is a book that holds the infant monster-hand and says 'here's your teddy, here's your milk, go to bed.'

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If the monster, though, has eaten Bernard up metaphorically, then the mother is still ignoring her son who is now behaving like a monster by roaring at her. In other words, she knows it’s Bernard being a monster again. I was recently reminded of a book from my childhood: Not Now, Bernard. I’m not sure how it affected me then, but looking at it now, it is terrifying! Not in the ‘boo’ jump-scare way of modern horror, but in the sinking-feeling-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach-as-you-realise-there-is-only-a-void-beneath-your-feet way. Like watching Von Trier’s Melancholia and realising that all is essentially futile, as human cruelty and kindness is indiscriminately destroyed in a planetary collision. I’m sure everyone has experienced something similar. You’ve all read something that has instilled existential dread at the meaningless of life in you, right? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m over exaggerating. But have you read Not Now, Bernard?

Welcome to my new reading blog, the companion to my writing blog, Stroppy Author's Guide to Publishing. For the last two years, I've been running critical reading sessions, but they were part of a pilot scheme that ends this summer. I'll miss them, so am moving the critical reading online - here! Not Now, Bernard had a mixed reception when it first came out (all my books seem to). Libraries banned it for violence, but children and their parents responded to it.Sterling has depreciated, but without the compensating boost to export competitiveness that might be expected from a currency devaluation. Business investment has been flat since the referendum, in large part because the political climate has been so unpredictable. That volatility – two general elections and three changes of prime minister in six years – is a function of the struggle to turn an ideal Brexit, nurtured in the parochial Eurosceptic imagination, into a reality-based Brexit involving other countries and real people’s jobs. Conservative readiness to indulge Johnson is no measure of his reputation in the country, but the leadership contest is not a national election. For at least one more week, British politics is contained in that sealed chamber where there is a Boris legacy to celebrate, where the solution to poverty is corporate tax cuts, where the solution to everything is tax cuts, where tax cuts have no impact on public service budgets, where life outside the EU is all upside and can only get better. The next resident of 10 Downing Street will find the garden crawling with monstrous economic and political menaces. A chorus of Bernards is raising the alarm. Economists, MPs, former Tory ministers, charities, trade unions, businesses, local councils – all can hear rustling in the bushes where a beastly crisis lurks, ready to savage the new prime minister.