"I'm not a doctor." "No kidding."

Apparently, Julie Andrews sent Randy Rainbow a message of approval about this video -- via Carol Burnett. That's got to be Gay Guy Cloud Nine.

For all you Mary Poppins fans, who don't mind the occasional cuss-word. (I gather Julie Andrews is one of those.)

Storm shelter

The wind moaned in the bathroom vents this morning, but didn't really get going until we were thinking of walking into town to catch the new version of Mary Poppins.

I looked out at the seagulls surfing on the invisible hurricane gusts roaring across the school field, and listened to the windows rattle. It was only the second day since Mary Poppins Returns opened, and I thought about being surrounded by tiny movie-goers at the matinée, but I had promised elder daughter that we would go see it as a family.

And it wasn't bad. I found the plot a bit cheese-clothy, flimsy and full of holes, but P.L. Travers' books didn't have plots so much as episodes, and this was striving to stay closer to the spirit of the sequels of the original, by being set in the 1930s (as it originally was), and with Mary Poppins being rather more snarky and forbidding.

Actually, although Emily Blunt played Mary Poppins less sweetly than Julie Andrews, she was still quite a bit more amicable than the nanny of the books. And who could complain when Dick Van Dyke showed up, singing and, heaven help us, dancing in his nineties?

The lights came up during the final titles, and I could see elder and younger daughter swaying to the music. As the endless track of gold-lettered credits spun out, a young boy appeared on the stage in front of the screen, spinning and leaping to the music. He was joined by five other children, all about seven or eight years old. They began cart-wheeling across the stage, as the music played on. We watched them, entranced.

I thought about being seven or eight, five days to Christmas and the second-to-last day of school, and having just seen Mary Poppins. Will the cartwheeling kids remember this? I think they might.

Some days, it's the right choice to go to the cinema, even if the hail stings your neck on the walk home.

Super-sensitive potassium

Because I can't resist.

Saving Robertson Ay

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that I was obsessed with Mary Poppins when I was eight.  There were no videos or DVDs when I was that age, so I spent most of my spare time playing the music and replaying the movie in my head.

The fetish continued. I dressed up as Mary Poppins the Hallowe'en I was nine and insisted on saying "Supercalifragilistic thank-you!" when we got treats, until the friends with whom I was trick-or-treating begged me to stop.

On windy days, I'd feel the pull on my umbrella and pray that just this once, I'd finally sail over the rooftops.

It wasn't only the film. (Although, frankly, I would have killed to become Julie Andrews.)  The movie brought me to the books which I collected and devoured and re-read.

By the time my little girls discovered Mary Poppins, the magic wore off a little, possibly rubbed away by sheer repetition, DVDs being readily available.

Still, I'm not sure if I can fully articulate my excitement when I discovered last fall that Emma Thompson (Emma Thompson, the closest I've come to a full-on girl crush) would be playing PL Travers in Saving Mr Banks.  Elder daughter emailed from Halifax:  "We're going to this, right?"

And we went. And it was a skillfully-made picture -- entertaining, a wee bit manipulative, but it's Emma Thompson, people.  (All I ask -- all I ask, please -- is a movie, or television series starring Emma Thompson, Julie Andrews and Alex Kingston.  Wouldn't you watch it?)

And at the end, I found myself fighting tears.  Now, they have PL Travers watching Mary Poppins and weeping, giving the erroneous impression that she was moved.  (As far as I can tell, she never came to terms with the Disney-fied versions of her precious characters.)  But I was weeping -- struggling not to weep --- because I had been blind-sided by memories.  I had forgotten about how much that movie had meant to me when I was eight, and how much the books meant to me when I was nine.

And I had completely forgotten Robertson Ay.  There's a story in Mary Poppins Comes Back (the second in the series) when we hear the back-story of Robertson Ay, the Banks family's perpetually sleepy gardener.  Part of me thinks that Robertson Ay, not Mr Banks, is based on PL Travers' dreamy and alcoholic father.  And I know a little bit about that.

So I sat while the cinema emptied, thinking about a nine-year-old girl with an umbrella on a windy day.