You may have noticed that I am a big fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. For British Flowers Week last year, I created a tea party of flowers for Alice Day. Last year was the 150th anniversary of the book, and there were celebrations in Oxford and London.
It's World Book Day today (I got confused when I heard people saying it was on Tuesday; I was sure it was usually a Wednesday or a Thursday, but I thought, "Social media wouldn't lie to me, would it?!") and Lewis Carroll's fairytale is the obvious choice. It is our old publishing boss's big birthday (I won't say which) on Saturday, and I made a sort of CBeebies type Mad Hatter's tea party card for him, as he said he didn't want a fuss. Unbirthday cards don't count as fuss, do they?
Last December, I went to the Alice in Wonderland exhibition at the British Library with my old mentor from publishing. She bought me an Alice exercise book to help me organise my various scribblings for my dissertation. I bought a Nursery Alice card for another friend's birthday, and a few days before his birthday, I met him at Waterstones in Trafalgar Square. I looked all around the fiction section, poetry, music, and film, before heading back to the children's section, where I saw him reading the Nursery Alice. The British Library exhibition is on until 17 April and it's free!
I went to an interactive production called Alice's Adventures Underground last summer with my two cousins who were visiting Britain from Canada for the first time.
The first picture at the top of this post is the programme from this production, and I love how programmes are now playtexts, too. It was the same when I saw The Odyssey at the Liverpool Everyman in October. The London production was a wee bit more expensive than the Liverpool...can you imagine paying £6 for a top tier student ticket on a Saturday night in this heinously expensive capital?!
Earlier this year, I attempted to do Alice/Queen of Hearts nail art. I've not got the steadiest hands, so this was the best I could do.
I'll leave you with the Dormouse and Alice in A Mad Tea Party:
Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. ‘Why did they live at the bottom of a well?’
The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, ‘It was a treacle-well.’
‘There’s no such thing!’ Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went ‘Sh! sh!’ and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, ‘If you can’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.’
‘No, please go on!’ Alice said very humbly; ‘I won’t interrupt again. I dare say there may be one.’
‘One, indeed!’ said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. ‘And so these three little sisters — they were learning to draw, you know —’
‘What did they draw?’ said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
‘Treacle,’ said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.
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