It’s 8.29 am, my earliest start so far. My plan is to write this but only post it after I’ve finished the chapter. If the photo that accompanies this is of some pink geranium flowers on the balcony, that means I have transitioned straight from blog to book with minimal distraction. If it’s of a coffee or something else, that is an indication of a longer interlude than I have in mind.
Writing about my Wendy house on Friday for chapter 4, I had even more of a memory lane distraction than usual. I thought a lot about memory and phones, thanks to the, ahem, “installation” of a Fisher Price phone in my Wendy house. My friends and I used to “phone” our friends and boys in class who we used to giggle over (early crushes!). I can still remember three of those phone numbers. Maybe those phone numbers count as my earliest memory, something I know with certainty can only be a memory I created. It’s not a very exciting early memory though.
My Wendy house was, I like to think, my first (and only) creative studio. My friend Carolyn and I made magazines from our publishing house/the Wendy house. We cut and pasted pictures, drawings and boxes of handwriting to make our magazines. Works of art. Well, sort of. I used to serve tea (orange squash) in a miniature china tea pot with cups and saucers.
Nowadays, I cut and paste in the modern sense and a blog is a variation on a magazine. I have now progressed from orange squash to strong black tea and, while I rarely use cups and saucers, I absolutely love drinking out of cups and saucers, in part because it gives me a sense of familiarity and comfort. I will also, obvs, be making a cuppa as soon as I finish writing this.
A lot of my memory lane stuff has come from relating things I used to do when I was very young to things I do now. Maybe that’s over-thinking, but I am finding an unexpected enjoyment in relating my older self to my younger self, the latter which I usually struggle to connect with my grown-up self.
Chapter 5 will be about a “box of treasures”, the contents of which I do not remember. This means the chapter will largely be about why the box of treasures meant so much to me and is still something I think about a lot. This is an item of imagination and a bit of magic.