Channelling "Little Red Riding Hood" today

Today I am channelling little red riding hood from the European fairy tale of the same name. As I was walking along a street in the 6^tharrondissement of Paris, a girl pointed at me and told her mother that I looked like little red riding hood – ‘le petit capot rouge.’ Today, I was wearing an Armani Exchange red wool cape that I bought in Tbilisi, Georgia, a few years ago.

The origins of the fairy tale date way back to the 10^thcentury. The little girl, wearing a red riding cape with a hood, was walking in the woods alone, on her way to visit her grandmother – when a big bad wolf approaches her.

My German mother narrated the tale often, from the big book of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales. In the German version, a hunter with an axe rescues little red riding hood. In the French version, a woodcutter saves her. In the German version, her mother tells her to stay on the path and not to go into the dangerous wood. The moral of the tale is to listen to your mother! I think this is why my mother loved this story.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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