Did someone mention Britain's anti-child attitude?

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger studied Henry VIII in the British Library yesterday.

You are right.

I am aiming to breed a bunch of girly swots who dress in black wool and stride about in eager haste to return home for a night's entertainment of recataloguing their nineteenth-century book collections.

I am succeeding in all things literary and fatter-than-500 pages with Shark and, in part, with Tiger.

But rest assured. I am failing with Squirrel, because the British Library, seat of all knowledge and fount of all learning, is still not painted pink and covered with sparkles.

Never mind. She puts up a jolly good show at smiling gamely and pleasing mama by coming along to the David Starkey curated exhibition on Henry VIII. She clamps herself to my side and listens dutifully and attentively while I drone on and on in teacherly style about the reformation and whether the Church of England is all down to Anne Boleyn's bosoms.

At some point, possibly as she fears death, Squirrel eye-spies salvation in the form of a try-it-yourself lance.

Thinking this would be better than a further enthusiastic biography of Cranmer, Squirrel leaps off to reach the try-it-yourself lance before anyone else lays their hands on it. In doing so, she squeezes past an old lady peering at a document possibly requesting someone's death by axe or sword.

The old lady - who an innocent bystander might assume was simply a dusty historian absorbed in the calligraphic development of the letter S - suddenly whips round to Squirrel, stabs her with a full on laser beam stare, and sucks in her mouth to the size of a cat's arse. Squirrel is pinned to the floor in the laser eyeballs of deliverance and oldladyhag spits out a canon-ball sized TUT and follows it with a skewer of WELLINEVER! Squirrel, charcoaled, mortified, humiliated, dashes back to me, buries her red face in my bosom and sobs.

Lady, if you think a little girl clipping you with a pink sparkle handbag is the worst, most grossest and most scandalizing affront you have ever received in your life, you have just been lucky. By rights, it should have been followed with a full kicking by Grit.