Tagging Along

I was honored to find that wonderful Sharon tagged me into this amusing little bit of vox-poppery.

But first the rules to this meme game:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

1. Ivy Tied Up
2. Presentstorms Corner
3. Blog, Blah, Blah
4. Adventures of a Domestic Engineer
5. Crazy Like A Zircon

Next: select new friends to add to the pollen count. (No one is obligated to participate).

1. Kristal
2. Chameleon
3. Dave Rupert
4. Mingling & NotSo
5. Kitty

So ... the challenge is to list the five things I miss most from childhood. First I took sneaky trackback through previous offerings and discovered a broad vein of slighlty shmaltzy misty-eyed nostalgia for what sounded like a halcyon American distillate of idyllic childhood consisting, in the main, of beloved cousins and camping weekends and fishing trips. In an instant I was overcome with a nauseating mixture of jealousy and ... well, nausea.

Jealousy because there is still a part of me that harbours a little envy for anyone who was lucky enough to be raised in a part of the world where the plumbing worked and also where it was possible to find somewhere to live that was within easy travelling distance of wild territory. The nausea? I am no fan of shmaltziness and sugar-coatings are for wimps.

All of which, by way of preamble, is probably going to look rather sad in the context of my five items; a list that needed some thought to compile. I am not especially case-hardened; much of my laconic rhetoric is more a disguise for a too easily bruised ego than evidence of urbanity. However I mostly keep my sentimentality to myself, choosing to share it with only the closest of friends ... so if you don't know me from Adam kindly leave the room now, because I am going to expose myself.

Number one on my list has to be my teddy bear, Charles. (What an odd name for stuffed toy ... wasn't I ever precious when I coined that name!) My mum burned him because he stunk. He was a cheap old thing and washing was out of the question ... I know because I tried to wash my last boyfriend's childhood friend and the sawdust stuffing dissolved and dyed the threadbare plush of a mostly grey panda an alarming shade of burnt orange. The erstwhile owner was last seen crying as he stuffed his bags into the back of his car .... Of course Charles had become a stinky thing because he'd been used by me, mostly, as a pillow. There's a limit to how much infantile drool one bear can adsorb before ... well never mind. I still haven't forgiven my mother for her heinous crime, though. Forty plus years later it still rankles.

Numero deux would have to be my mum's cooking. Mum was never a 'fancy' cook, although it would be a mistake to think that label means she was untalented. She likes to tell the tale of the occasion she made a cheese soufflé; the soufflé was perfect, unfortunately we kids (and my father) were far too unsophisticated to appreciate it. I miss mum's cooking because it symbolises all that is precious about my childhood. A full belly, comforting company at table, the sheer miracle of food appearing as if by magic with no effort required on my part. One's mother's cooking is pretty much a metaphor for 'mother love'. I still have the latter, but i don't consider it selfish to continue to miss the former.

It starts to get difficult. More than two? Come on! I can list hundreds. How is there a way to place one above another? I decided to leave people out completely because the brief that I read seemed to specify 'things' rather than people. So number three is my bedroom. Meaning my first bedroom. The first one I had all to myself. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, even though I was the eldest. For some reason I never queried that decision. The room that I had shared with my sister became hers and I got my own (more grown up) room. I shall never quite forget the slow, almost glacial, build up of my excitement as my dad sealed himself inside the little junk room and began the mysterious task of converting it to a bedroom. OK so the process mostly involved paint and wallpaper, it was hardly alchemy! But my dad had a way of making the most mundane seem like something else and of course in missing the thing I miss the man as well. (I realise I am slipping people into my list by Machiavellian stealth ... but, hey! If make a rule, I shall determine the protocol for breaking the bugger.)

Four would be Radio Caroline. I decided that childhood had to be encompass the whole of my minority. I first heard pirate radio when I was eleven. We were travelling through Kent en route to visit my paternal grandmother (who was then on her third and final husband ... she was bride and widow three times and all in the right order) and I copped my first listen to Radio London playing something decidedly un-BBCish and all done with commercials too! How terribly Bohemian! Mostly I miss the feeling that came from number five ...

I miss Tomorrow's World the Beeb's weekly magazine programme that presented the latest in the cutting-edge of technology. Specifically, it isn't the television programme I miss so much as the lovely comfy feeling I got from watching it. I was comforted (strictly as a gullible child) that come the twenty-first century we would have solved all of humanity's problems. We could take holidays on the Moon, robots would do the housework and any sort of disease would be a bad memory like the Black Death.

That's it.

I regret that our planet has completed ninety degrees of its solar orbit during my ill-mannered silence. I have an excuse.

I am a lazy bitch!