Choo choos

One place I visited in my childhood was in North Derbyshire near the Cheshire border which you have to climb up steep hills along the Pennines in our car.

Pop you see was something of a Railway Enthusiast, insisting on dragging us everywhere  in pursuit of his interests when all I wanted to do was sit out in the sun having a picnic with teddy, which if you ever been there you'll understand as the scenery is lovely. This period of my life wasn't so nice as he'd get mad if he didn't get his ways although I have now started to be to separate an understanding of the engines and appreciation of the engineering from all that.

This was a famous train that at the time run at the rail centre which I think was covered on the BBC TV children's program  Blue Peter in 1971.

Candyfloss

As it was my birthday recently, I had this new in paperback book that originally came out a year ago.

Floss's parents are divorced, and she divides up her week, spending five days with her mum, her new stepdad and her baby half-brother. The other two days Floss spends with her dad, helping him to run his greasy spoon cafe. But their simple arrangement is thrown into disarray when Floss's mum decides to move to Australia.

Making the difficult decision to stay at home, Floss moves in permanently with her dad and they muddle along happily together, surviving on chip butties and enjoying visits to the local funfair. But disaster strikes - Dad's money troubles catch up with him and they have to move out of the cafe. They're homeless - but can their new fairground friends help out?
This is what the story explores.

Birthday 2007

Things can creep up a bit on you not least as winter often seems to be slow moving, frequently cold period but it is here all good and proper rather like my pussycat.

He could tell a tail or two!

Birthdays used to be rather problematic with totally inappropriate things being bought even the wrong text on your birthday cake but things have started to change since Mommy started to listen more to me even if there are limits when it comes to other people.

I even have flowers on my birthday!

Mommy likes me as a little girl so she buys me girls socks both regular and more cute animal or heart design ones and pretty panties.

It's not that I don't get other things like music, I've always loved music but everything around it is changing and I'm being encourage to move on, being the girl I am.

Out with the old

I first started buying DVD's about 2002 but It was only those titles that went straight to first time DVD release plus a few classic TV and Music releases I bought leaving a legacy of titles I had to use my trusty S-VHS recorder for.
At long long last I have been replacing a good many of my VHS tapes of movies with DVD versions since updating my DVD player a short while back.

I replaced recently the following:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Wiz
Flash Gordon
ET
Staying Alive
Two Of A Kind
Streets Of Fire
Top Gun
Labyrinth
Cocktail
Days Of Thunder

The improvement over the tapes is hard to describe but they are sharper with better colour rendition

The restored but changed world

 Your world can be more complete now not that you didn't really share those feelings when you were officially younger but seen as a different gender that back in the day had uber rigid lines between what was acceptable for you to have an interest in and maybe own and what was not.

You might of been able to had an action figure  you could pose and create adventures for but a dolly was off limits to you cos of that misunderstanding regarding your real gender although I spent time looking at dollies in museums and later on got some porcelain dolls even if it cause many gasps and that.

Today as that little girl I can have dollies to play with and that's just super!

Comics of my youth

We read these comics whenever it rained in our junior school and we were unable to play as they were kept in a big cardboard box and shared at recess.

Here's another long gone we read:

That one's more of a boys comic but it didn't matter that much when you couldn't play out back then.

Reading up on the past

One of my stronger memories of my official childhood is reading, not that I was what you might call a good reader but we did have a fair number of books in the house and stored in a big wooden toy box were some of mine, usually those my Mom thought I'd outgrown.
A good example of which is this one which was really a book for seven to ten year olds that stayed in that box well into my mid teens.

It's a series of two short stories of a group of young children called Benji, Jack and Jane plus dog who have to move together with their parents and their adventures through play with other children and grown ups.
Its very innocence, the clear lessons shown about appropriate behaviour such as owning up if you do something and clear consequences for wrong doing are woven into a fun set of adventures.
It was really that I before I knew the terms I was looking for even in my mid teens as what I now know as regression was even then a part of what made me different than most of my peers not least in my own mind I WAS that younger child.
 It was why I kept the books and puppets from that era.