Enid Blyton is back, and all is forgiven. This summer she was voted the nation's favourite author. And yesterday the author Anne Fine, the former Children's Laureate, winner of every possible prize for her books, came out powerfully on the side of the Faraway Tree and the Five Find-Outers and Dog series, with a Radio 4 programme called A Fine Defence of Enid Blyton.

Blyton's reputation, despite her 500 million sales worldwide, has been loftily disdained since the 1960s by high-minded parents, teachers and librarians. “Miss Blyton does not present enough of a challenge to children,” her detractors said. Eleanor Graham (the first editor of Puffin Books) spoke of Blyton's “intense mediocrity”, and the children's reading expert Eileen Colwell referred to her “linguistically impoverished style.”

I remember the mother of a university friend saying that she had never allowed Enid Blyton books in their house: “So snobbish,” she said, “and all that smacking.” Well, really. At that time the nation was wringing its hands about how to get children reading at all.

That was never a problem in our childhood. We revered Enid. An Enid Blyton heroine is what I and my little coterie all wanted to be: to go off with the dog at our heels, entirely unsupervised by adults, and have adventures, meet mysterious characters, find deserted castles, row out to secret islands, solve crimes and outsmart the local police by thwarting miscreants.

The monthly Enid Blyton Magazine in the 1950s always featured a picture of her in the garden of Green Hedges, Beaconsfield, Bucks, surrounded by her little girls Gillian and Imogen and their pets, typewriter on lap.

“Dear Enid Blyton,” I wrote at the age of 9. “My sister and I have just started a Pony Club...” We had no ponies, but we were obsessed by horses and riding. “Would Gillian and Imogen like to join? Membership costs one penny.” Miss Blyton replied, gently explaining that Gillian and Imogen were rather old for our club: Gillian had children of her own, and Imogen was at university! (Miss Blyton liked exclamation marks.) But we could become Busy Bees and raise money for the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals. Which of course we did.

Anne Fine addressed all the familiar caveats about Blyton: the three golliwogs named Golly, Woggy and Nigger have long been excised from new editions; academics have confronted and dismissed the accusations of sexism (“Proper little housewife, aren't you Anne?” said the patronising Julian in The Famous Five series) - and point out that Blyton's own favourite character was the stereotypical tomboy, George: “I'm George. I hate being a girl, I won't be. I hate doing the things that girls do.” Although George is hardly a cutting-edge feminist icon, she did speak for the rebellious female.

As Anne Fine said, we must accept that books written in the 1950s are of their time, and Blyton wrote in a different world. When she was voted the nation's favourite it was not a reflection of arrested development: we don't carry on reading her for ever. It simply represents a shared national memory of happy, uncomplicated reading, a collective appreciation of adventurous children.

Blyton was not writing literature. She wrote without depth or subtlety, but she had the clearest sense of character types (mean and spiteful, fat and jolly, kind and noble) and moral values. She was against boasting and selfishness, and in favour of bad characters getting their comeuppance.

Many years after outgrowing Blyton I met her daughters, Gillian Baverstock and Imogen Smallwood, and heard all about their life at Green Hedges: “We had to play jolly quietly in the garden or she'd be very annoyed indeed.” In Fine's programme, we heard Blyton's voice, telling listeners how she wrote a book in five days: “I think straight on to my typewriter. When I start on a book, I see it all so vividly in my mind's eye, so long as my fingers can keep up with the typing I can go on until it's finished.”

Yes - she thought and wrote as a child, but she struck extremely adult and businesslike deals with publishers, a 25,000 first print run and a 15 per cent royalty, that most authors today would envy. And she kept up a constant supply of new books for anyone from babyhood to the age of 13.

“By the time you were 13 Enid Blyton had finished writing for you,” Fine said. “But she created a world that so many children also like to share.” Last week, when Times columnists were asked to name their favourite childhood reading, Enid Blyton was boldly named by Carol Midgley alongside the classics of Kipling, Arthur Ransome and C.S.Lewis. Any books that get children into the reading habit are timeless. The ultimate argument in Blyton's favour, for Anne Fine, is that Blyton got her hooked on reading, and then did the same for Fine's younger daughter, Cordelia, a hitherto reluctant reader. With this imprimatur from the former Laureate, Blyton is happily reinstated.

FAREWELL, WOOLWORTHS

The collapse of Woolworths is far more totemic than that of Lehman Brothers or even MFI. It was the bog-standard high street fixture: Pick 'n' Mix, Ladybird children's clothes, plastic garden furniture, CDs, toys, tableware. Soon only Winfield House in Regents Park, the US ambassador's residence, once home to the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, will recall the store's founder Frank Winfield Woolworth (d. 1919 and never borrowed a penny).

Woolies went awry when it switched from offering basic necessities (thread, drawing pins) to stocking whatever was most naff, and employing doltish staff. I loyally went in yesterday for a laundry basket and a Toblerone. But tomorrow I shall observe Buy Nothing Day, a welcome “global holiday from consumerism”.

Remember the Buy Nothing Day we once had, called Sunday? What a dreary day it seemed - until it became as clogged and frantic as any weekday.

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