Childhood

I loved being a child, mainly because all kinds of crap can come out of your mouth and people think you are imaginative, rather than clinically insane. I’ve been feeling fairly reminiscent of my childhood recently, mainly for my creativity to turn any inanimate objects into endless entertainment. I was a very imaginative child; I loved make-believe games, writing stories, acting, pretty much anything which put me in the centre of attention while simultaneously letting my insanity run wild.

Looking back I absolutely crack myself up with some of the things I used to play with my friends. For example, most playtimes in Year 3 (so age 7 or 8?), Oriel and I used to play Magical Clock. It consisted of me holding a hula hoop up around my face, because I was a magical talking clock, and making Oriel plates of imaginary sausages. The game always resulted in the same one-liner from Ori: “that’s a lot of tomato ketchup Magical Clock”. And then we’d die laughing and play it again the next day. And the next.

Another thing that I only remembered recently was when our family went to visit our friends, the Foxes. They had this amazing stream that ran through their garden, and Lucy and I would basically go and play with the mud/clay in the riverbed and pretend we were making a whole world out of treacle. We were the Treacle People. I think it was based on a TV show at the time, but really, we made mud our plaything. Our imaginations knew no bounds.

Rachel Easter and I were always the craziest though. We’d always both had a ridiculous sense of humour, which half entertained and half scared our parents because, well, essentially we were insane. One day we decided that we needed powerful titles, and became self-designated Overlords of the Mutant Chickens and Cows. We’d write each other cards and letters and sign them ‘OOTMC’. I’m sure if we had been seen by a child psychologist we would have been diagnosed with something but luckily it never came to that.

One of my favourite games to play was schools. I was a bossy child (see my point below about arguing with friends at sleepovers – this was undoubtedly due to me telling people what to do) so playing schools seemed an obvious choice of game: being a teacher, the ultimate authority in a ten year old’s eyes. I used to write out maths sums and make my friends complete them ‘in the game’, then I’d take great pleasure in pointing out their mistakes when they handed it back. Given that the people I played schools with most frequently were Bryony (1 year younger), Flora (2 years younger) and Hugh (4 years younger), it was unsurprising that the times tables I knew were going to be near impossible for them to do. Especially as I was the only one allowed a calculator. Check mate.

Being imaginative was the main entertainment of my childhood. I rarely watched TV (apart from the Treacle People apparently), I wasn’t interested in Ben’s various game consoles – all I did was read books and live in a fantasy world. It was a fun place to be! I kept pretend wolf cubs under my bed as pets; they used to follow me to school and I’d have to tell them off and make them run home (I love how I just specified that these pet wolf cubs of mine were imaginary, in case anyone actually thought I might really have had wolves living in my bedroom). I do feel sorry for kids who have no imagination. And I hate it when children nowadays say they don’t like reading (says she, up on her high horse). Books can be fun! My children are going to read, and they will love it, goddammit.

I used to love writing stories. I still remember the creative writing part of my Year 6 SATs: I wrote a story about a girl called Abby Quire who sang in the Abbey choir. There was a policeman in the story called PC World. I was even the winner of a city-wide creative writing competition when I was 10 – we had to write a poem in honour of the millennium about something environmental. I wrote (and subsequently performed) a rap about recycling. Yes, I rapped in front of people. My prize was the have a giant poster made of my poem which was then displayed at the St Albans dump. I even drew the illustrations myself – a giant bottle bank wearing sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. Word.

Some fun facts about me as a child:

·         My earliest memory is waking up on the bottom bunk in the first house I lived in and seeing a tarantula on my pillow. I was actually still dreaming, and when I really did wake up there was nothing there, plus it was probably not a tarantula because I would have been about two and it’s unlikely I had ever seen a tarantula in order to then imagine one on my pillow but still, I remember being terrified either way. I’m not sure if I am scared of spiders because of this dream, or if I dreamed it because I was already scared of spiders, but yeah, what a great first memory!

·         My second memory is not being allowed in the ball pond at IKEA. My first few years on this Earth were traumatic to say the least.

·         My celebrity boyfriend (you know, the guy who played your husband in all your games) was Stephen Gately. That’s right, I routinely chose to ‘marry’ the gay one from Boyzone.

·         I was a chubber. Seriously, I did not shift my so-called ‘puppy fat’ until I was about 16. I have actually been told by a couple of adults that knew me as a youngster that they were worried I wasn’t going to ‘blossom’, and they were relieved when I grew out of my ugly duckling phase. Unfortunately for me, this ugly duckling just grew up to become a duck. None of that ‘swan’ shit that was supposed to happen.

·         When I was 9, my older brother tricked me into watching the Sixth Sense, by telling me and my parents that it was a 12 and ‘not even a scary one’ at that. I am consequently still afraid that there is a dead girl who lives under my bed who wants to grab my ankle if I stand too close to her in the dark. No joke, ask Josh.

·         Every time I had a sleepover with anyone until about the age of 11, we ended up getting in an argument and would fall asleep in angry silence. I’m not saying it was always my fault but I do seem to be the common denominator in all of these scenarios…

Ahh youth, it really is wasted on the young! :)