Things I Miss About Being A Kid

Sitting here, waiting to go out to buy Harry Potter 7, is enough to make me understand - if ever there was a mystery about it which for me there isn't - why Harry Potter is SO great.

For adults I mean. Simply put - it makes us feel like kids again. Like Disneyland, swimming in the sea and...in my case, almost nothing else. (If you're very good at things like surfing and skiing you probably get this feeling from that too, but last time I skied I was trembling with fear and then I snapped my leg across the top of my boot - and heard it crack.)

I miss being a kid, even though you're relatively disempowered and have homework and exams, and you can get teased and bullied, I mean, there's no doubt it can be tough, BUT:

What a great feeling it used to be to wake on a Saturday morning and know that beyond the hour or two of chores that you might have to put in, the day was yours. I used to lie awake in bed making plans which would go something like this:

1. Call for Eoin across the road.
2. Mooch into the village to buy sweets and comics.
3. Go to Eoin's house to read comics (Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD), eat sweets and watch TV.
4. Get ready to go watch Man United (if we were playing at home)
5. Drop by the sweet shop on the way to the bus to get supplies for the match.
6. Leave for Old Trafford around midday.
7. Get to the match early to get a good standing position, usually on the railings at the front of the Stretford End Junior Paddock.
8. Amuse each other with silly stories and voices (mainly Eoin's)
9. Go home (hopefully triumphant but if not then full of mock-bitterness and disappointment)
10. Watch "Doctor Who"
11. Hopefully have a teenage babysitter of an evening, and persuade them to read to us from their totally inappropriate book of horror tales, or if a girl, to tell us about their dates with boys.

(A close second for a Saturday when United played away, was scoring some new William, Mallory Towers, Tintin or Hardy Boys books at the library, or trespassing in the garden of the nearby grand house.)

Ah. Days where you don't count the minutes of time wasted, responsibilities ignored, calories and the effect of sugar on your teeth.

Well, I'm having one of those days today and the housework can sit there and my kids can Make Their Own Entertainment.

Gobbolino the Witch's Cat

I first read this, one of my favourite children's books, when I was about seven after seeing it on the TV show 'Jackanory'. After just a chapter or two, I remember thinking that I MUST HAVE IT! I hassled my mother until she went to buy it from a bookshop. That must have been a marathon mithering session because we were too poor (or my stepfather too mean? who knows) to actually buy books. I owned fewer than twenty books by the time I was 12. But the library just wouldn't do for this book. With a fierce desire, I wanted to own this one.

Tonight, I'll be reading the final chapter to our little five-year old daughter. It's the first long book we've read with her - until now we were mainly reading the wonderful picture books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. But my beloved baby brother Michael remembered how much I loved this book and sent it to our daughter last Christmas. So I thought we'd try it out, to see if she was ready for a long narrative - and she is.

She's very excited about bedtime tonight, to see how things work out for Gobbolino. Me, I'm watering at the mouth at the possibilities this opens up. "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" is next - she adores the film. Then perhaps "The Robber Hotzenplotz".

It's all lovely. Our older daughter didn't share my tastes in books - adventure stories. She was bored by most of the long books I tried to read to her, until we discovered Jackie Wilson. But our younger one is dying to be read Harry Potter. I think we'll give that just a couple more years, for maximum impact.