It’s dark. There are children shuffling around me. The air is heavy with an unknown fusty smell. I could really use a trip to the bathroom. But I am grinning ear to ear.
That was me watching the new Mary Poppins film. I was a huge fan of the first and, it will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen my Spotify recently, I loved the modern instalment too. They kept the magic of the Julie Andrews classic and even sprinkled in a few near miraculous cameos too. But before I wax lyrical on how much I loved the film, and its soundtrack. I want to talk about the real thing I’ve taken away from the film. I want to be more Poppins.
We all know that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. Mary Poppins is known for that sugar, for coating her lessons in joyful song. We remember her flying in on an umbrella, her bag of infinite size, and if you’ve seen the Emily Blunt incarnation her ability to bring a ceramic bowl to life.
Famously, P.L. Travers, the author of the books the films are based on, never wanted Mary Poppins to have the saccharine songs and animations which are a big part of the reason they’re known and loved. While the film saved her from bankruptcy, she hated it. She hated it so much it brought her to hot angry tears in the theatre. She wanted Poppins to be as “tart and sharp” as she’d written her, for her to be the pragmatic realist she saw in her aunt, in herself.
While Travers felt that Walt Disney’s Poppins lacked the backbone a nanny needed. But, while we remember the “spoonful of sugar”, Mary Poppins does always insist we take our “medicine”.
There’s always a lesson in her songs. The play room is always cleaned. The children always go to sleep exactly when they’re told.
That’s the true magic of Mary Poppins. It’s not the songs. It’s not the dancing penguins. It’s not even the flying. It’s the way she teaches us to find the joy in the everyday and then just get on with it.
I want to be more Poppins. By that I don’t mean jumping into paintings to escape the streets of London. I want to find ways to find magic in the everyday, to find joy in the work I do while I’m doing it, no matter how hard or how soot covered. Not only that I want to find a way to sing about it. Perhaps not literally, you don’t want to hear me sing, but I want to share that joy wherever I can.
