Age and Perception.

One of my Christmas gifts from Mel this year was a copy of the Rupert Bear annual. I might have mentioned in a recent post that the latest Rupert Bear annual was always one of my favourite gifts as a kid, and so it's been interesting to see what has changed since I last had one at around age ten or eleven.

Well, the artwork looks exactly the same, and the rhyming couplets accompanying each panel sound about the same. And as far as I remember, the stories follow the same lines. What’s changed is the character of Rupert himself. Except, of course, it probably hasn’t.

Back in those innocent and relatively simple days of childhood, Rupert seemed to me to be quite grown up in a childlike sort of way. I identified with him. His mother, on the other hand, homely and comfortable as she undoubtedly was, seemed a little remote.

Rupert has now become a child. He has a child’s mind and speaks a child’s language. His mother is the one I relate to now. Given the volume of experience which has passed under my personal bridge in the interim, I suppose I should have expected it.