My childhood

I strangely have very vivid memories of my childhood, which started around the age of 4 though they are mostly images of certain pages of books
e.g. The Kingfisher Encyclopedia that I read to bits even though I couldn’t even lift it up (I remember I still wore diapers- I was potty-trained late- and I’d feel it squish uncomfortably as I tried to pick it up), the original Hans Christian Anderson and Grimms’ Fairy Tales that I didn’t fully understand till I was 10 because damn, some stories were so… ummm… For the lack of a better word? Weird.

There were stories where grasshoppers married princesses and water droplets travelling the world and even though I drew up on fairytale my little brain couldn’t understand it all.

I also remember rooting through my mum’s bookshelf and attempting to read Lord of the Rings (gave up, it was too hard), or getting really bored with her art books, like the complete works of Michelangelo or a particularly boring Baroque architecture book, but I loved Jurassic Park even though it was too hard for me.

Then when I was 6- my mum bought HARRY POTTER! I loved it so much I read each book more than fifty times. It started my love for fantasy books, and I remember my brother and I would traipse into Borders every Saturday after lunch and sit there for 4-5 hours (I wonder what my parents did), then beg our parents to buy books, and go home and read some more. That was our routine for 8 years 😅

During the holidays we’d go to Centrepoint or Citylink mall (there was a bookstore next to the now-defunct HMV), eat a bagel with cheese, and spend 3-4 hours of pure bliss reading, then grab groceries at an organic store we frequented. (the uncle always gave us yummy rice biscuits)
Looking back I think I had the most unhealthy obsession with books, they were my whole life (other than catching butterflies and random insects downstairs) and I remember them most vividly.

When I pick up an old book and turn to a certain page, memories come flooding back. I can almost see myself reading on the bench at home, feeling the warm sunlight on my face… and then I experience some sort of inexplicable joy.

The sunshine is warm like the heat of candles that we’d light at every circle time at home.
It’s gentle, like the first rays of sunshine are, and we’d grab towels and lie in a comfortable row, basking in the sun in our training pants and my mum in her swimsuit (she insists we get our daily dose of Vitamin D)

It’s familiar, and we spend hours under it chasing after butterflies with nets and plastic bags and rolling around on grassy hills as my mum watches from the window upstairs.

When we get home, there’s freshly baked bread for us, and we’d show off our (mostly half-dead) catches of the day.

We’d pile in the bathtub, my siblings and I, and add every possible soap to the filled bath to make bubbles. We’d try to concoct weird potions and dare each other to drink it (we loved Roald Dahl’s book ‘George’s marvellous medicine’ or whatever it was called). My mum would come in after half an hour or so, find us all pruney, with water all over the floor, and all the soap and toothpaste in the bathtub. She’d scold us, then sit down on a stool beside the bathtub and float little plastic cups, and she’d show us the ‘magic trick’ where plunging an empty cup facing down would not make the inside wet at all, but the moment we grabbed at it, the thing would tilt and fill with water.

I also found out the hard way that letting go of the cup like that would cause it to shoot right up (air pressure) and hit the unlucky person on the chin, hard.