10 Things About My Childhood That You Probably Didn’t Need To Know

I was tagged by the lovely LazyBuddhist and, while memes usually stump me, I will have a go at this one because she called me a lagomorph lover and because her own answers are so worth reading  

1. I had many nick-names as a child. Among them were: ‘Tufty’, ‘Tuppence’, ‘Woo’, ‘Chuce’ and ‘Fairy Foo Face’.  Only one of them has stuck, thank god.

2. I had an imaginary friend, Chelft, who was sometimes a small man and sometimes a brown dog.  My mother says she knew she had spent too long alone in the house with only a two-year old and a baby for company when she asked Chelft if he’d like seconds for dinner one evening.

3. My Dad taught me to read when I was 3 so that he wouldn’t have to keep answering annoying questions.  A tip, for all those parents of young children out there: it did not work.  At all.

4. At age 6 I was caught creeping stealthily towards the cake tin in the dairy at my Grandparent’s house with 7 kittens stuffed down my tank top.  

5. I devised a new board game called ‘Extremely Trivial Pursuit’ when I was 12 which featured questions to which noone in my family but me knew the answers.

6. I fed my baby brother red smarties before he had teeth.  He began frothing pinkly at the mouth and my mother nearly had a cardiac arrest, convinced he was spewing up his lungs. 

7. I led a rebellion at my all girl’s boarding school, refusing to conform to the rule that insisted we wear skirts to church on Sundays.  The Rebel Alliance consisted of me, Sarah Batty and Tabitha O’Mahoney.  Needless to say, it was swiftly crushed.

8. I really wanted to be Sherlock Holmes.

9. I can vividly recall lying in my navy blue pram as a baby, looking up at bright green buds on trees through the white silk tassles. 

10. My Art Teacher, the incomparable Mr John ‘Jack’ Walton, died of a massive heart attack in his classroom on 27th September 1987.  I found him.

Tag!  Now you’re it.