Humbug ! Dickens’ s Christmas tale is retold as a mini-play, with Natasha and Rob playing all the parts between them including Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner!

The Curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. It was a strange figure – like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man. The voice was soft and gentle. I am the ghost of Christmas Past.

It was always said of Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless us Every One!

The Elephant’s Child from the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling tells the story of how the elephant got its trunk. Set on he banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River in Africa.

This romantic nonsense by Edward Lear is a classic of children’s literature. Its lilting rhythm has a wonderfully calming effect on the senses.

The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse by Richard Scrafton Sharp (based on Horace). The Mouse and the Cake by Eliza Cook. Two charming Victorian poems about mice.

The Spider and the Fly by Marry Howitt is a poem with a moral and a warning for children. Listen to this dramatic reading by Natasha Lee Lewis.

Down the Rabbit Hole. Alice follows a White Rabbit into a hole, and falls down, down, until she lands softly. She finds a bottle with a label Drink Me – and she does. Soon she shrinks.

The Pool of Tears. Alice continues her out-of-the way experience as she stretches like a telescope, and then almost shrinks away alltogether. She has a wonderful conversation with her feet, and she dreadfully offends a mouse. It all ends in tears – so many tears that Alice and the mouse are swimming in them.

A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale. The Dodo bird is far from dead. The mouse tells a very “dry” history to try and dry out Alice and the other creatures who are still wet from swimming in the pool of tears. They run a race (a caucus race is actually an election).