My Uncle Oswald

My Uncle Oswald - Roald Dahl “I do love a romp.” Try Googling “MumsNet My Uncle Oswald” for the effect this enjoyable piece of ribaldry can have unwary readers. It’s the perfectly innocent tale of how the narrator’s sozzled Uncle Oswald made his millions with the miraculous Sudanese Blister Beetle, touring Europe with honeytrap Yasmin Howcomely and pilfering the DNA of miscellaneous Kings and artists. How does Yasmin manage to this? Oh, you can guess. A modern re-write might have a Katie Price type relieving Premiership footballers of their precious fluids but Dahl has Oswald and Yasmin target Picasso, Proust, Puccini etc (and Freud, who is very satisfyingly rubbished) which makes the story one notch more fantastical and j-u-u-sts lets Dahl get away with the sauce. It’s also, despite MumsNet members promising to destroy the book, very tame with schoolboy euphemisms in place of anything explicit; “Snozzberry” gets used in very different context. Great pity Dahl never recorded an audiobook version of this, or completed further episodes from Oswald’s debauched life. It’s a perfect piece of light English ribaldry that could have come straight from the lips of Falstaff.