What is your earliest childhood memory?
You wouldn't believe me. I'm not one who claims to have memories from the womb, but nevertheless, I remember things which certain psychology books tell me I should not be able to. Take our family's first house in Bobber's Mill. I remember the garden, especially the small flowerbed between the bricks, and I remember the flimsy garage. I remember bouncing on one of my baby things in the red-carpeted living room. I remember the local sweet shop, I remember being taken along the local roads, and I remember heading round the corner to a small terraced house where an Indian family lived who liked to take care of me while my parents were out. The problem with all this? We moved into our current family home a few days before my first birthday.
Photographic memory, hmm?
I'm very good at remembering places, or sights. Sometimes I will scare my family by saying we've been somewhere before, and I usually turn out to be correct. I remember the wait at the Marienborn checkpoint to get into East Germany, when I was about one and a half. I remember the Scottish resort village of Glen Trool Lodge where we stayed a few days before my brother was born, when I was three, and I remember visiting my mother in the ward when it happened. I remember my uncle playing snooker when we rented out a house in Wales when I was two.
It's a blessing. But it can also be a curse. Because it's all the easier to know what is now gone forever.
I don't like the structure of these 'Writer's Block's, but I don't recall having mentioned this on here for a while.
I really need a glass of water.
