My father hated Enid Blyton. Didn’t rate her as a writer at all. He tried to steer me towards his boyhood favourites, like Swallows and Amazons, but Enid always lured me back. Her books were the ones I read repeatedly, the ones I scoured the library shelves for, and spent birthday book tokens on. When life was tricky, I’d mentally escape into one of her worlds. Up to the magic lands at the top of The Faraway Tree, or off on horseback with Carlotta at St Clare's. Now my son is enjoying them. We’ve been reading him the Famous Five stories. The trouble is, all baddies are swarthy gypsies or foreigners of some sort, and the gender stereotyping is pretty disturbing. Anne is always washing-up and the boys get to do the fun, dangerous stuff. A terribly humourless edit job has been done on some Blyton books. In The Magic Faraway Tree, Dame Slap becomes Dame Snap and Fanny becomes Franny. Wikipedia tells us why: ‘Fanny is a slang term for vagina’ and ‘Dick changes to Rick for similar reasons’. Yawn. I don’t want to edit The Famous Five in such a heavy-handed way, but fortunately my partner has come up with a clever gender-bending ploy. He swaps the names of Dick and Anne. So instead of ‘Anne always enjoyed tidying things and putting them away.’ you get: ‘Dick debated whether to send Anne to the stream to wash the breakfast things, and decided not to. Anne wasn’t too good with crockery.’ Vast improvement. But not recommended after a couple of glasses of wine, it gets too confusing. And I’ve become rather enamoured of the frequent mention of things being ‘queer’.