QUICK, prepare yourself with a lashing of ginger beer, I've a confession. I don't care if the rotten Famous Five and their offspring get the Disney treatment. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Blyton fan, despite her limited style and vocabulary and (keep it from the lads in the pub) regard The Faraway Tree tales, The Wishing Chair adventures, the Mallory Towers school series and Noddy as jolly reads.

But the Famous Five were a different matter. It wasn't just the fact that they were irritatingly smug middle-class characters. (So am I.) Or that they were sexist, with the girls preparing the food and the boys protecting them - yes even boyish George - from danger. The tales were of their time along with many classics of children's literature.

It wasn't even that they didn't have council estate heroes or that children from other backgrounds in the stories were in awe of them. So what?

The big problem with the Famous Five was that they were blinking dull. Anne was a wimp, George ultimately lacked the bottle to stand up to her bossy cousins, Timmy was spoilt and Julian and Dick were the sort of toffee-nosed prigs you'd want to leave behind in Calais on a school trip.

For heaven's sake, the original stories aren't being thrown into oblivion. The Disney people are just updating them.

And if they make the five and their children sassier, more power to their elbows.

There is, of course, another long-standing criticism of Blyton. They say her sentences are too short. Gosh. Poor style. Fair point.

...

It's the first day of spring. And, having grumpily scraped ice off the windscreen early this morning, if anyone says to me, "Spring in the air, Ed!" there's only one thing to be said back.

"Spring in the air yourself, you idiot."