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"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought unique and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."
-Alan Bennett


My sister and I had a very long talk a few nights ago (long indicating it stretched for several hours and I did not fall asleep till the next day) about very nearly everything. Mainly we talked of our romantic futures (she told me that I am very passionate but not at all romantic. I am the kind to resemble Eve Casson from the Casson series, and wander vaguely in and out of my husband's and children's lives, with a "there darling" now and then to make up for my scattered tendencies. Which is sad but true.) and of our childhoods.

(I am sure there are some mothers reading who roll their eyes at this- after all 17 is still technically a child- but I'm also sure you'll agree there is a bit of difference between a child and a teenager. So yeah.)

We talked of the imaginary worlds we inhabited when we were little- most children do. You probably remember...for instance, simply eating breakfast before school was not enough, you had to be a condemned prisoner on her way to the gallows, eating her last meal before staging her daring escape. My head was in the clouds about ninety percent of the time. Looking back, I remember being a shockingly bloodthirsty girl. My imaginary world was filled with dark murky oceans and harpies singing their ruthless songs to lure poor lost sailors, and quiet coral grottos and mermaids with strings of pearl and bones in their hair; basically it resembled a cross between Moby Dick, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the 2nd and 3rd POTC movies with regards to the fantasy. Good thing I was not introduced to these things at a young age. I think my little brain would have broken.

Then there was an unlikely but very loved side filled with Paddington Bear and Pooh Bear and Brambly Hedge and Shirley Hughes and other cuddly marmalade-and-cambric-tea British children's literature. Also Dorling-Kindersley first-word books, which trained me for Anglophilia at an extraordinarily young age. I don't know; is this making any sense? I think JM Barrie explains it better...

"I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

  Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other's nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles [simple boat]. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

  Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real. That is why there are night-lights."

From Peter Pan. (It gets better the older you get.) This is very definitely the way it was for me. And still is, except I'm less likely to imagine being invisible and more likely to imagine a lovely husband and babies and home of my own (complete with library, window seat, and tea service). Alas. My younger self, upon meeting my current self, would roll my eyes in disgust at this silly lovey-dovey nonsense (before popping off to slit a couple of throats). What can I say, I have become Domestic. And remarkably do not mind a bit.

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