Mathos wrote-
Quote: The lads will love it. I hope so anyhow, I'm pretty sure they are well blessed with the bottle to look after themselves in general and not be afraid of taking chances.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, and they were real knights then, not any of this Sir Elton John, has a scene, in Alan Quatermain I think, where a father is watching his son taking some chances in circumstances which you are unlikely to meet with in the theme park. He expresses some fears for his son's safety and the lad tells him, looking up from the pit he's descending into that hasn't had the Park Ranger disinfect it since the last Evolution but three, that there's no need to bother because there's plenty more where he came from.
And Sir Henry was a few years up country when there were no mobile phones and the local lads couldn't have a jump until they had "dipped their spears in the blood of the enemy", and they didn't need a QC to get them off when Mr White man appeared in their midst.
That was no theme park.
I hope you are taking care to introduce these young lads to the writings of Sir Henry. Every young lad should read those. The feminists are doing their best to ban them of course. Sir Henry had a somewhat jaundiced view of the ladies. The love of his life had married another man whilst he was away bravely serving his country, and for position too, and he saw the other extreme in the bush probably after smoking some wild savannah ganga.
Imbuing a love of literature is a most important aspect of a young lad's development. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do that later in life. It's the love of literature that is the main thing. Swinburne said that Bowdler had done the world a big favour by cleaning up Shakespeare so it was fit for kids. Once the love of literature has been implanted it never goes. One can then always come back to literature when all else fails as is often the case. I hope the Harry Potter books have had the same effect on the kids despite my fearing that they might be a feminising influence. The problem with Harry Potter is that it's so fantastic it isn't being really believed. Assuming sane kids which I tend to do. There's a distance between the reader and this nutty stuff. The Bond movies are not much good for the same reason. Henry Fielding warned writers off doing it but it hasn't done. Kingsley Amis took notice though. With Sir Henry the reader is in the thick of it and there's nothing happens that is physically impossible. Even King Twala's wink as his head rolled past Quatermain was only one that he could have sworn he saw. He doesn't say his severed head actually winked. That scene has been cut out of some editions.
I always thought that Leo Vincey leaving college, bearing in mind the advantages he was blessed with which Sir Henry lays on him thick, to pursue the impossible dream in the Orient was impossible.
And here you are proving it is possible.
