Kaye Webb is turning in her grave...

[perennialanna]

Puffin, dear Puffin, what is the meaning of this?

Of course other publishers would publish such tripe even if you didn't, but you're Puffin.  It used to stand for something.

Comments

[clanwilliam]

*foams at mouth*

[perennialanna]

I am trying to compose a suitably scathing email to them.

What it really needs is someone like Lucy Mangan or Caitlin Moran to take it up, not poor provincial benefit scroungers like me.

[clanwilliam]

Well, you could tweet it at them. So. Much. Fury.

[antisoppist]

I suppose I could tell my mother and she could write a stern letter saying this is not the sort of thing she buys her grandchildren annual Puffin Club membership for.

It has definitely gone downhill since my day.

[perennialanna]

When you think of all those Noel Streatfeilds telling girls to work hard and be ambitious in their own right, and Eleanor Graham introducing the concept of the Housework Strike...

[antisoppist]

They get 6 free books a year. The last one Daughter chose was Indigo Blue by Cathy Cassidy which led (after I'd pinched it) to me discussing with her and her best friend how it wasn't that good an idea for Indigo's mother to go out for a boundary-setting dinner, alone, with the bloke who had found them again after they escaped when he hit her last time. It wasn't a conversation I'd expected having quite yet and it doesn't quite work when they are only ten and can't see why anyone would want to spend time with blokes at all, let alone ones that beat you up.

Although I wasn't expecting the Puffin Club to be producing pre-teen misery memoirs, that one was actually much better than I had expected from the cover and the message an improvement on all the boyfriend-related quizzes in my Jackie magazines of the past. Can we hope that the plot of World Cup Wags ends with Amy telling Damian her A-levels are much more important than his bloody football match?

And speaking of Jackie

[legionseagle]

Was I the only one to notice that one of the MI6 agents in Paris appeared to be reading Jackie at a crucial moment in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?

[legionseagle]

One of those minor things which I find vaguely funny is that I suspect Julie Burchill and I were both in the Puffin Club at the same time.

Count me in as disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

[legionseagle]

I wish we could get Loo Brealey on the case - could someone Tweet her?

[ankaret]

Graaah.

Incidentally, I seem to be on some of your filters on LJ and not on DW, as I can see some LJ posts but can't come over to DW to comment on them. I keep having trouble with this myself - DW unilaterally decided that I didn't really want to share things with caulkhead or pashazade - so am sympathetic, but could I either be on the filters on both or not on the filters on both?

[perennialanna]

I think I've fixed it now - the only distinction is between public posts and friends/circle posts, but it looked like I had you as a friend on LJ but forgotten to then grant access over here, which was a combination of incompetence and oversight on my part.

[ankaret]

Yay! I'm sorry I didn't realise I hadn't friended you over here and assumed it was filters - I am deeply crap at keeping track of that kind of thing.

Does World Cup WAGS have no author at all, or is the author's name hidden in the crease of the model's shorts? I can't tell on my monitor.

[perennialanna]

It's anonymous - not sure why, surely if they were farming out the writing to anyone willing to grit their teeth and think of their next mortgage payment, they could use a pseudonym.

Arrrrrgh.

[caulkhead]

As you say, if Puffin hadn't published it, somebody would have, but...

Count me in as cosignatory