FRUMPTIOUS FREAKS & MUGGLE-WUMPS (The Twits - Roald Dahl)

Member Name: stuleg

Product:	The Twits - Roald Dahl
Date:	15/10/04 (720 review reads)
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“Mr Twit was a very hairy-faced man. The whole of his face except for his forehead, his eyes and his nose was covered with thick hair. The stuff even sprouted in revolting tufts out of his nostrils and ear-holes”

What a disgusting couple Mr and Mrs Twit are, they never wash and they detest children. They are never happier than when they are playing tricks on each other, Mrs Twit thinks it hilarious to take out her glass eye and hide it in Mr Twits beer, Mr Twit finds it equally funny to put a frog in Mrs Twits bed and tell her it’s the dreaded sharp toothed skillywiggler – and that it will bite off her toes. Maybe the skillywiggler incident merited the repost of putting live worms in Mr Twits spaghetti dinner but he sure didn’t find it funny, which is why he pretended Mrs Twit was shrinking and in need of a good stretching! Of course it is all well and good while these two loathsome articles are only annoying and berating each other, unfortunately they can often be found turning their beastly attention to a family of four monkeys called the Muggle-Wumps that they have trapped in a cage in their overgrown garden. Mr Twit has the harebrained notion of starting the first ever great upside down monkey circus, and insists that the Muggle-Wump family spend up to six hours a day standing on their heads as practice.

“Mrs Twit was no better than her husband. She did not, of course, have a hairy face. It was a pity she didn’t because that at any rate would have hidden some of her fearful ugliness”

Another disgusting habit of Mr and Mrs Twit was to eat bird pie for supper every Wednesday. So every Tuesday evening without fail Mr Twit would climb the dead old tree in the garden and paint Hugtight™ glue onto the branches so that when the local birds went to roost they would be stuck tight and unable to flee, Mrs Twit would then boil up the birds for the pie. Of course this frightful behaviour could not go on forever, so with the help of a visiting African bird called the Roly-Poly bird, the Muggle-Wump family set about an ingenious plan to stop Mr and Mrs Twit in their tracks, and thus making life safe for themselves and the local bird population.

“Once a week, on Wednesdays, the Twits had bird pie for supper. Mr Twit caught the birds and Mrs Twit cooked them”

You know I get annoyed that Roald Dahl is no longer with us, why when a man is so expert at writing can he not be allowed to live to 150! I’d never read the Twits before but thanks to a recent Nestle promotion I found a copy in my packet of Cheerio’s, and with a current price of £4.99 on Amazon.co.uk I’m gosh darn glad I did. Dahl has the unique ability to span the generations with his books so that they can be enjoyed by anyone aged five to ninety-five. Granted, the innocence of his words are from a bygone age long before computers and pokermon had ever reared their ugly heads, but it is so refreshing to read a book like that. His characters are portrayed so perfectly that you know within a few words if you are meant to like them or not, and such words as Skillywiggler and Muggle-Wump are the work of a genius. I sat and read this with the sort of smile on my face that I’m sure Mr Dahl would hope his books could illicit.

“Mr Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever”

At eighty-seven pages long and broken up with exquisite pictures from Quentin Blake the Twits will not take you an age to read, but for sheer fun and glorious story telling nobody can hold a light to the late great Roald Dahl. What else but the full five stars from me with the footnote that you would be as big a twit as Mr and Mrs Twit if you miss this book – so read it!

www.roalddahl.com
ISBN: - 0-1413-1138-X
£4.99 from Amazon.co.uk
Published by Puffin
www.penguin.com

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