Given my interests in discovering more about Angela Banner and in wondering why new editions of her books are so bowdlerized, I thought it would be fun just to search and see what other scraps of food there are on the Internet for Ant and Bee lovers.
So, just browsing and finding:
So, just browsing and finding:
OK ... the cat's meow: Mimi
The Spectator "And I was bowled over by the references to Angela Banner’s Ant and Bee books. These fat little volumes, a perfect fit for five-year-old hands, recount the random meanderings of their eponymous insect heroes. Never before, to my knowledge, have Ant and Bee been celebrated in a work of literary fiction. Ellmann had me eating out of her hand."
The Guardian: "Harry, despite a propensity for making bad puns, is good company when he's wry and wary, reminiscing on the phone with his beloved sister, Bee, a sculptor labouring away at an under-appreciated artist-in-residency programme in Canterbury. Bee works up a couple of good rants herself, on the subject of Angela Banner's Ant & Bee books."
The Hindu "The book also pays rich tribute to Angela Banner’s ‘Ant and Bee’ children’s stories. The satirical names of places — like the Museum of Annoying Folksiness and the Town of Virtue and Chewing Gum add to the quirky, almost mythical, quality."
Love of reading:
Which book made you a forever reader?
I read a lot as a little boy; television was discouraged. My mom introduced me to this great children's book series that was popular in the U.K. (where she briefly lived) and in Canada where she grew up: Ant and Bee by Angela Banner. Banner wrote them to teach her son how to read and I think that's where I got the bug.
"My memory doesn't cling to 'what happened' in a book, but small moments and feelings within stories impress themselves upon me. Angela Banner's Ant and Bee and the ABC comes to mind as the first time a story created something within me akin to loss and longing on a character's behalf — even if it was about the voluntary letting-go of and subsequent search for a hat! I have a dream-like hazy memory of being in the living room, my mother reading this story to me as I sat beside her. What I remember sharply, though, is my mother's handwriting upon the page. She had a habit of underlining, in books, words she didn't know, and would write out their definitions in free space nearby. I just pulled out my family's old copy of Ant and Bee — taped together and hand-stitched by my mother to keep the spine intact — and found this note on page 19 in my mother's hand:
"It was because of my mother's physical interaction — engagement — with Ant and Bee and the ABC that I understood so early on that you could actually mark a book up, and that this kind of marking could make a book even more sacred."
Pinterest
{Art} Needle Felted Ant and Bee
What in tarnation is this? Dr. Who and Ant and Bee? "Angela Banner is Spinning in Her Grave"
Curious Pages
Stopping Off Place
Tumblr and Tumblr especially Totally Whack
We may think that the way to happiness is knowing what we want, and saying what we want, and then going out and getting it, but this is actually a children’s story. It doesn’t quite work that way.
So I want to tell you a different kind of story: This is the story of ANT and BEE and KIND DOG by Angela Banner, which is also a children’s story but with a very different attitude towards adventures: The story opens with Ant, Bee and Kind Dog going on a quest in search of a mysterious smell. Along the way they are joined by a camel, a koala, a duck and an owl, all of whom become equally concerned with the question, "What is that smell?" Is it hay? A lily? Hot bread? Cut grass? Seaweed? Smoke? In the middle of the story, the entire group comes to a long jetty, which is a kind of wooden walkway that goes part way out over the water. The characters travel all the way to the end of the jetty, and
when they get to the end, they all turn round and walk off the jetty again. Then there is a wild rainstorm which turns into a freak blizzard and suddenly the mysterious smell disappears. But nobody seems to mind. The animals then go to the Zoo and ask to be let into their cages. The book ends with Ant, Bee and Kind Dog still struggling to understand what the smell in the air had been. “But Kind Dog just could not remember.” Random?
Yes. Unpredictable, nonsensical, and endlessly surprising. And every single seemingly irrelevant thing that happens becomes part of the adventure. !
Why do they even go down that jetty, or pier, if it isn’t going to take them anywhere? James Joyce once said that a pier was a “disappointed bridge.” But it occurs to me that whether we are disappointed or not depends on our attitude: the bridge we are expecting may turn out to be just a jetty, and we may have to turn around again, but we don’t have to be disappointed about the inconclusiveness of our plans: we can embrace whatever happens with enthusiasm.
Ant and Bee and Kind Dog are endlessly enthusiastic! There is a kind of contagious exuberance to everything they do.!
The adventure is not in arriving somewhere fabulous – fame, success, perfection – it is in the unpredictable details. !
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