There may be nothing finer on this day than to be an 8 year old traveling the British countryside outside of London. Today is Roald Dahl Day, a celebration of the late, great author who was born in Wales on this day in 1916. Master of the devilishly absurd, Dahl is of course best known as that most towering figure – literally, in fact, as he stood 6’6” tall – of children’s literature. Hardly a more beloved children’s book exists than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His other children’s works – James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, and The Twits among them – are all classics.
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire has a full day of events and delights for Dahl’s younger fans. But it was not, of course, for children alone that an imagination so vast and wondrous as Dahl’s bore fruit. It was not for children that he told the tale of a woman murdering her husband with a frozen leg of lamb (“Lamb to the Slaughter”). It was undoubtedly not for children that he authored a collection of short stories entitled Switch Bitch.
Nor was it for children that he penned the short story “Genesis and Catastrophe,” an ironic (and in substance true) account of nervous young mother in a panic after the birth of her fourth child – as the first three had all died. This fourth child, it soon becomes apparent, is the one who survives. That child’s name is familiar enough to even the least students of history, as you can see for yourself. These are the twists of plot that readers of all ages could expect to find in all of Roald Dahl’s stories. His was a wit that could at once charm and bite.
So to return to a state of being eight may be an impossibility outside of one’s own mind, but to be an adult on this day is not such a bad thing itself. The Roald Dahl Children’s Gallery at the Buckinghamshire County Museum in the county seat of Aylesbury is only a short stroll from the historic King’s Head Inn. The centuries-old inn, now administered by the British National Trust, is home to the Farmers’ Bar – a fine place to toast the zealously whimsical Roald Dahl while savoring the local offerings of the Chiltern Brewery.
Life is regrettably fleeting. Beer, though it may linger as it dances on the palate, is ephemeral. Genius is eternal. Yes, it is a fine day - a fine Roald Dahl Day – for a beer.
