DO we need happy endings? Yes, we do. There’s enough doom and gloom in the world these days without inflicting it on children via their story books. That’s assuming kids still read and are read to by parents any more.

David Bellamy, Britain’s best known botanist, was telling me this week how reading Arthur Ransome’s classic Swallows and Amazons fired his imagination and desire to see the Lake District for himself as a young boy. The book was set in 1929 and has stood the test of time with its innocent adventures, although no doubt in today’s world there would be a dark side with implications of sexual ambiguity, simmering violence among the pirates, health and safety regulations and quite possibly a weirdo lurking in the bushes on the island.

Significantly, the book recently voted Cumbria’s best ever for children was about a tractor called Felix and his mates Colin the Combine Harvester and Tippy the Tipper, who all work on Farmer Story’s farm. Author Catherine Cannon, from Great Strickland, seems to have managed to capture the joyous attention of children without resorting to stabbings, sexual shenanigans and some of the bleaker plotlines that have found their way into young literature lately.

The message? Maybe kids still want escapism and happy endings rather than hopeless realism. Former Children’s Laureate Anne Fine agrees. Children’s books were once full of adventure and fun, but now they are being replaced by grim reality that has gone too far. Children’s books are becoming more sexual and violent. Life can be confusing enough without depressing our kids even more, Miss Fine, the author of 40 children’s books, told a conference this week titled “Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children”.

Of course we can’t shield kids from all of life’s trials and tribulations. A lot of children’s books from my childhood represented a middle class, privileged life I was not familiar with. Frankly I never identified much with Swallows and Amazons, even though my old primary school head, Mr. Hall, warned me that my interest in Roy Race and Melchester Rovers would never get me a job writing a column for the Herald! At least that was the general tenor of his remarks when he confiscated an illicit comic I was reading under the desk one day.

But now kids of 10 and 11 are being sexualised and dressed up like the false television stars they worship from afar. Television has a lot to answer for, particularly the soaps with their racy storylines shown well before the watershed, and the inherently depressing lives of their main characters.

When my kids were young they went to sleep content and safe in the knowledge that Mr. Pinkwhistle, Enid Blyton’s ubiquitous invisible righter of wrongs, was on the case. I wonder how many of today’s children have nightmares about bullying and stabbings?

We aren’t going to go back to Enid Blyton or Just William’s harmless escapades, but there’s plenty of time for children to discover life isn’t always fair and there aren’t always happy endings, without their books leaving them suicidal. Thank goodness for the likes of Felix the Tractor, Postman Pat and, yes, I can still name the entire Melchester Rovers side that won the World Cup in 1956.

A CLOUDED TRUTH

THEY are up there, silently making their way at 30,000ft towards the Scottish coastline, then off across the Atlantic. Most of the big jets making the transatlantic trip pass over Cumbria; it’s just that the skies are rarely clear enough to spot their lazy vapour trails.

Pam Am Flight 103 flew over Cumbria just minutes before the bomb outrage blasted it from the skies above the town of Lockerbie, just across the border. A terrorist’s timing could, by chance, have brought it down here. As it was, many rescue volunteers from this area rushed to the scene to help, only to be met by terrible scenes of carnage.

Not surprisingly, many people involved on that fateful December night are angered that the Libyan convicted of the bombing has been released from prison and returned home to a hero’s welcome.

But do we really know, or will we ever know, the true story? Was the bombing really the work of one person who most likely was chosen as a political scapegoat. Or was it a plot hatched by Syria and Iran in retaliation for the earlier shooting down of a passenger plane by an American warship? Even some of the relatives of the victims disagree about al-Megrahi’s guilt.

The one fact we all seem agreed on is that we can’t trust anything the politicians tell us. Alleged trade agreements and much American and British government hypocrisy make this whole issue stink to heaven to such an extent that if the truth really is out there most of those involved have lost sight of it, possibly deliberately.

I have some sympathy with Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill who sanctioned the release. It is rich of the Americans, thousands of whom used to collect money to finance terrorists in Northern Ireland, and whose record on human rights and corruption is second to none, to lecture him and threaten trade boycotts.

None of us has the facts to decide whether the freeing of al-Megrahi was right or wrong, but for once someone has shown the Americans that not all our politicians are pawns in their international meddling.

BIGGER BUT NOT BETTER

BIGGER is better and centralisation reigns supreme. Yeh, and the Churchill dog really has been helping Rolf Harris move house and drinking coffee on the Champs Elysee with Melanie Sykes.

One day it will happen. Someone will ring the swish, all signing, all dancing ambulance control at Preston to report a serious accident “midway between Tripenna and Rasset”. Or maybe a serious prang at Cumbria’s Moscow or a farm incident just outside Bolton.

Ambulance staff and unions in the county have been rightly concerned that lack of local knowledge could mean longer waiting times for assistance. Already there have been claims that a stroke victim in Penrith had a four-hour wait for an ambulance although crews were available locally.

A bid to move Cumbria’s fire calls to another out of county central HQ was strongly resisted earlier this year. This is not dog in a manger localism at work, but common sense. The county is a huge geographical area full of quirky place names that only someone with local knowledge will instantly react to. Blennerhasset and Torpenhow, for example. How confusing are they likely to be to a phone operator in urban Lancashire?

The North West Ambulance Trust tells us it can pinpoint callers in most rural locations. But I simply don’t accept that all this desire for bigger, more prestigious centres is beneficial. There is already evidence it’s not working efficiently with suggestions that ambulances have been sent from one side of the county to the other and patients’ lives could be at stake.

Following talks, the trust has gone some way towards alleviating the concerns by setting up a non-emergency support centre based in Carlisle. The lesson is we must not lie back and accept decisions we know are not right. It’s time we started kicking and screaming more often for local rights when decision makers play the centralisation card which takes more and more ground level input out of the system. Worst of all, whenever we get these bigger is better ideas, they have the cheek to try convincing us it’s for our own good.