Shock confession rocks NTSP: 'Dim' bloke was my literary hero

I have a confession, and it’s not going to be pretty. In fact, good feminists and literary types might want to look away now.

Obelix, of Asterix and Obelix fame, was my childhood literary hero. Yes, you know the one: the stonemason with a taste for xenophobic violence and who, looking back, was perennially dim. His BMI was probably at the ‘morbidly obese’ end of the scale and he had a girl’s haircut. And he wore his trousers too high. And he was French.

Hmmm. I’m not sure I can actually fill the remaining 114 words of this speed blog after that clanger.

But there you have it: I’m a feminist and my childhood literary icon was a man, and not a very inspiring one at that.

I could put it down to my childhood reading list - for reasons I cannot recollect – being short on the classics. No Anne of Green Gables for me. Nor The Railway Children. Or Little Women. Of course, Pippy Longstocking (whose eponymous heroine had a similar haircut to Obelix) was very, very, very cool indeed. She was confident, independent and, best of all, irreverent. But the fact is, for some reason, she didn’t have as much impact on me as that wild boar-scarfing, Roman legionnaire-thumping Gaul. But then I was also quite keen on Pigsy from Monkey, described on Wiki as “a pig monster”, so perhaps I always set the bar low.

Wendy Saunt is a interior designer, writer and art consultant. She lives in London. You can follow her on Twitter @Wendy__Saunt