Grin and bear it is the order of the day at the Bull Arts Centre in Barnet tomorrow, when Richard Medrington's puppets present three different performances for both young (Eeyore's Birthday 1pm & Tiggers Don't Climb Trees 3pm) and old(er) (Now We Are Very Old, An Audience with AA Milne 8pm), adapted from the classic stories.

Sir: You report (15 January) that Aesop's fables emerge in a new translation as "not pretty purveyors of Victorian morals [but] savage, coarse, brutal".

A Year Full Of Stories by Georgie Adams, illus Selina Young, Orion pounds 20. Aimed at the under-fives, this has a new story or poem for each day of the year. Young's exuberant illustrations entice you to turn the pages.

Change of Heart

Price of Pooh

A return to traditional teaching methods including reading schemes, grammar exercises and liberal use of the "magic pointy finger" have revolutionised standards at an infants school being used as an exemplar by the Government.

Rowing

Not even the innocent world of Winnie the Pooh is sacred, it seems. A radical adaptation of the AA Milne children's classic in which Piglet is painted as a swearing drunk and Pooh as a homosexual has been penned by a businessman keen to give the characters "more of a racy treatment".

Sir: A A Milne? A carefree childhood? ("Now we are sick", 28 January.)

Yes, it's time for those traditional panto classics, Cinderella, Babes in the Wood, Oedipus... we're promised the biggest giggle since Theseus's father threw himself over a cliff. Looks set to be the only panto that's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

THIS IS a dark and witty book. And if to be political means that systems of order and power are interrogated and stood on their head, then it is a political book as well. But it is not a tract, and for good reason. Tract- writers and polemicists have every faith in argument, but little enough in the imagination. For Michele Roberts, imagination is the cutting tool she uses to rearrange perceptions of sexuality and pleasure, of customary relations and received values. As the nine stories in this collection unfold and then fold back into each other, a shifting array of meanings is laid out. How you look at them depends on who you are: there are, after all, political readers as well as political writers.

A wonderful fairy-tale, welcome after all the moral fables and slices of life, about a widow who suddenly acquires a witch's broom. The broom can sweep by itself, but also chop wood and play the piano; the widow knows it's a friend, but has to save it from the suspicions and violence of her neighbours. The pictures are exquisitely detailed and luminous, in shades of grey and sepia, as if done by moonlight.

Beating the panto season with a Hans Christian Andersen story, Trinity's 'Unfamiliar Music Series' has lived up to its ahead-of-the-times reputation. You can't get less familiar than a new, full-length music-theatre piece, specially commissioned by Jane Manning. In Matthew King's score she shares the platform with instrumentalists from Jane's Minstrels and a schools chorus. Singers narrate; players sing duets with their instruments or suddenly leap on to the stage; the Snow Queen picks up her handbag and takes over at the piano. King switches deftly from Prokofiev to Mozart, Handel to Wagner, pastiche to parody, like a bright Hollywood composer with a sense of humour.