BLISTERING BARNACLES!

Tintin, Belgians, and book-fights…



Now, dear readers, help me out here, please:



Clear your throats...


Stand up straight, breathe deeply, and approach the nearest microphone…


Adopt a gravelly, authoritative and vaguely mid-Atlantic accent…


Now proclaim loudly and boldly “HERGÉ’S ADVENTURES OF TINTIN!”


……


Well, I don’t know about you, but that made me go quite weak at the knees! You see, I used to love Tintin on TV when I was a mere Blognipper, and those few words at the commencement of the show always heralded a guaranteed fun time.


Stirring stuff!


I loved the books, too – Snowy, Captain Haddock, The Thompson Twins, Professor Calculus – all fine, upstanding chaps or hounds.


Superb penmanship and design, too. Faultless!


……


Hence, it is with no little trepidation or anxiety that I am canvassing your views upon the latest cinematographically enhanced version of our little, quiff-haired Belgian plus-four wearing pal –(why! I even believe that they have rendered him in a revolutionary `three-dimensional` format…)


Has anyone seen it?...


What did you think?...


Did it give you blistering barnacles?...


Do tell me, using the comments whotsit below.


……






Belgian?


And while we’re on Tintin’s case…the little fellow’s actual nationality has been causing a quite heated argument within the Bexleyheath Ladies Library Staff Philosophical and Debating Society…Half the group ventured that Tintin was French, the other half were adamant that he was of sound Belgian stock – well, what a fight ensued! Blood, bent hair-pins and torn fingernails all over the catalogue drawers! Nasty.






Luckily, my extensive research team have taken the cause to their hearts, and unearthed the following five facts:






• Tintin first sprouted in a Brussels newspaper cartoon in 1929


• His creator, Georges Remi, was a Belgian artist – better known now as Hergé


• ‘Hergé’ is in fact, merely the French language pronunciation of his initials – G.R. – but in reverse. (Cunning devils, these Belgians, eh?)


• Remi’s middle name was ‘Prosper’ – and prosper he did! With over 200 million copies of his books sold, he became one of Belgium’s richest men.


• Not that he led a contented or uncontroversial life…he had a “terribly thin skin” wrote one biographer, and was “an emotionally retarded workaholic who cared nothing for his art, disliked children, and allegedly collaborated with the German occupiers during the war”…He suffered numerous breakdowns, endured recurring tortured nightmares, divorced badly, came to loathe Tintin himself, and turned – eventually – to Zen Buddhism.






So now we know. Belgian, beyond a doubt!


……


Meanwhile, my colleagues in the Library Debating Society are still going at it “hammer and tongs!”:


  “How many more famous Belgians in books can YOU name, then, clever-clogs?”


  “Hercule Poirot, of course!”


  “And wasn’t Maigret a Belgian?...And I seem to recall that his creator, Georges Simenon, developed quite a reputation for his extra-curricular activities?”


  “Quite so…then there was Rene Magritte, obviously – although his work tended to be more canvas-based than paper?”


  “Not forgetting, of course, Gerhard Mercator - the great Sixteenth Century Flemish cartographer, who coined the word ‘atlas’ and who also solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings…”


(You can now see, I trust, the intellectual fervour lurking behind the furrowed brows of our Library Debating Society?…)






So, to sum up:


• We need your comments on the Tintin film itself – a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’?...


• We need to know if there are any more famous Belgians in books? …


• We need to know – precisely – just what “Blistering Barnacles” actually means – literally*


*(See Blogcast for 17th October…)






Now, I must dash…“Run, Snowy!”






TTFN