Saved by Tintin

From where I sit at the family dinner table my eyes fall on a tall bookcase, on top of which, just under a map of Narnia, a crowd of small resin figures seems to be in perpetual motion. One of them, the diva Bianca Castafiore, is singing the "Jewel" aria from Gounod's Faust, but if she is not run over by two detectives in bowler hats driving a green 1926 Citroën 5HP, she will soon be knocked down by Professor Calculus walking in an intellectual trance, or by Captain Haddock pacing the deck. Interspersed among these characters, smaller than the rest, yet the reason for their very existence, is Tintin, the young reporter, standing in his blue sweater and brown plus fours before a preternaturally large Amanita muscaria mushroom, scaling a craggy cliff in kilt and tam, trekking in a pith helmet and khaki shorts, crouching in a porcelain vase with his white terrier Snowy.