Wikipedia is a gift to the world and we should all be thankful for it.

I’ve recently started to read the Main Page each morning. There’s something about the random nature of the articles that is refreshing and fascinating at the same time.

Today’s featured article is of an Australian woman called Mary Fortune, who (as I learned), was one of the first female authors of detective fiction. She was a contemporary of Charles Dickens and I am partial to a bit of Charles Dickens.

Before I continue on that particular thread: a short recounting of my dog-walk yesterday.

On my usual dog-walking route is a large and very dead tree. Yesterday, as I was paused by this tree waiting for Lola and Delilah to finish sniffing each and every blade of grass, presumably for some evidence of the presence of alien lifeforms, or perhaps just other dogs, I looked at this tree and was reminded of a song called ‘The Lightning Tree’. And I remembered how we used to sing this song at my English primary school in the 1980s. At that time that I really had no idea where this song came from or why we were singing it in morning assembly.

Since there are a not insignificant number of blades of grass to be sniffed in the vicinity of the large and very dead tree, I passed the time reading Wikipedia. And in doing so, I learned that ‘The Lightning Tree’ was the theme song to a 1970s TV show I had never seen, called ‘Follyfoot’.

The dogs finished their work, and without reading what this ‘Follyfoot’ was about, I put my phone away, we continued the walk, and I thought no more about it.

During the 19^th century, there was a well-documented fashion for large families, owing in chief part to other Victorian fashions, which I’m sure we all remember with fond nostalgia (which itself is fashionable still), such as ‘child labour’, ‘prohibition of contraception’ and ‘dying young’.

Anyway, the Dickens family was no exception to this fashion of sprawling family, and among the children of Mr. C. Dickens was a son called Henry Fielding Dickens, who had a son named Henry Charles Dickens, who himself had a daughter by name of Monica Enid Dickens.

Monica Dickens, known as ‘Monty’ to her family and friends, was quite the card. One incident reports her being expelled from school for throwing her school uniform in the Thames. As if this wasn’t enough to endear her to me, being myself from the suit-and-Saturday-school crowd, she was an advocate against animal cruelty and a prolific author.

These latter two interests brought us the book Cobbler’s Dream, a story which centers on the running of a rest home for aged and ailing horses, which was, as I learned this morning, the inspiration for a TV show called ‘Follyfoot’.

Thanks to Wikipedia, in the space of 48 hours, I learned that a song we sang in primary school, about a lightning tree, in which we were all encouraged to grow, grow and never give in too easily can be traced back to Charles Dickens.

And if that wasn’t enough, Monica Dickens has a tangential relationship to Mary Fortune, who was, as I mentioned, Australian. Monty was herself at a book signing in Sydney in 1964. A woman approached her, handed her a copy of her book and asked ‘How much is it?’ in a broad Australian accent, which led to Monty misunderstanding and dedicating the book to ‘Emma Chisit’, which is a neat example of strine.