What A Mess

I know a very good prayer. I learned it from my friend James when he was vicar of Mytholmroyd and he learned it from a nun. It goes like this -

Here I am, Lord. What a mess!

It's a good one for the beginning of Lent. In my case, it's a good one for any time. I was thinking about that prayer today and because I have a puppy dog mind that runs after everything it sees, I started thinking about the What-A-Mess books by Frank Muir. Puppy...

Frank Muir was a witty and well read writer and presenter who could spin witty stories at a moment's notice. He and his wife kept cats and Afghan hounds, and that's why he wrote the What-a-Mess books. What-a-Mess is an Afghan puppy and I think his real name was Prince Amir of Something or Other, but he thought he was called What-a-Mess because that's what people said whenever they saw him. His mother was smooth, elegant, kind and wise. What-a-Mess was an explosion, always hurtling about falling over his own paws, digging furiously in mud and tumbling into things. There were always twigs in his ears and leaves in his coat and he looked completely wild. The cat used to wind him up something rotten.

The texts were fun and the illustrations just brilliant. The backgrounds were very detailed and a bit surreal - gnomes stumped about the garden, usually looking grumpy, fairies chatted from windows in trees. Now and again a small alien spaceship would turn up. Our favourite was the Christmas one where the cat persuades What-a-Mess that the family will be really pleased if he gets that great big tree out of the living room...

We never owned any What-a-Messes, we used to get them from the library. They've been out of print for a long time, and seem to be rarer than hen's teeth, which is sad, because I would love to share them with the godchildren.
Altogether now - BRING BACK WHAT-A-MESS!