The Well, I was really lucky I was invited to go to the private view last week of the new

exhibition at Somerset House in London which is called Good Grief Charlie Brown

exclamation mark and that is devoted as its title suggests

to the work of Peanuts cartoonist Charles M Schultz, who for every day for 50 years created a peanut strip and I, in my previous

role as an editor come publisher, edited several volumes of peanut strips in addition to being a huge

fan of them and Schultz had a hot streak from approximately 1962 to 1985. You could open any of the volumes from any year on any given day and he seemed to be incapable of phoning it in and having read the big

biography of shorts that was published a few years ago the price that he paid for

that was terrible depression and anxiety and fear of the blank page every morning he went into his studio to write.

But, you know, it's interesting to me that we're going to be talking about the Moomins today.

There are definite parallels between Schultz and the

answer that we might talk about a bit later on. But certainly peanuts, the thing I

loved about peanuts as a child was the same thing I loved about the mumins was

peanuts and the mumins seemed to me two of the only things that were

nominally for children which were prepared to acknowledge that childhood could be melancholy and that other children could

be rather unpleasant.

Those seem to me to be the two key truths which were not often named in children's literature of that

era. So although at the Somerset House exhibition they've done a brilliant thing

where they've asked contemporary artists and musicians like

Fiona Baner, Mira Callix, Andy Holden, Marcus Coates, to reinterpret peanuts in new ways and produce

new bits of work. The heart of the exhibition is not just memorabilia

that they've been collecting that we would all remember from our childhoods, t-shirts and penance and records and the coronet books of strips.

But 80 strips from the museum, from the Schultz Museum, some in an unfinished state, including a

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