My Mind - A Freaky Place

This morning I thought about my childhood. I do that occasionally, particularly when I have behaved in an especially neurotic or unhinged way, and need to look for a defining moment in my youth that I can blame on someone else (usually my parents), and consequently get out of trouble with my husband.

I don't have a brilliant memory, but I was astonished at some of the things that popped out from the dark recesses of my mind. And I thought, if I was to make a mind map of these bits of information, my brain would look very peculiar indeed.

Amongst the things I recall , the following memories were particularly vivid:

• After a game of 'Drop The Hanky' in school sport in Year 3, Martin Hunter told me "If I'd got the hanky, I would have dropped it to you." I tingled all over. Because in those 12 words, he had told me he loved me.
  
  
• Seeing Grease for the first time at the age of ten, I turned and asked my dad what it meant to 'refuse to see it through'. He told me that it meant 'to refuse to see things through to hugging and kissing'. This made absolutely no sense to me at all. It took me years to work it out.
  
• In Year 4, I came home from school utterly inconsolable when my best friend Lisa got into the choir and I didn't. I thought that nothing could ever be more painful than that rejection. As I found out a few years later, I was wrong.
  
• At the age of ten, during a sleepover, my other best friend, Leeza, caught me using the page of one of her books as a toothpick. She was not impressed. It was one of my earliest episodes in humiliation.
  
• In Year 5, I auditioned for all the female lead roles in the primary school play, and was rejected for all of them. I particularly had pined for the part of the 'Narrator', who was supposed to speak with a Yiddish accent. Unfortunately, though, the best I could come up with was a sort of French/British hybrid, which clearly did not do. Instead, as consolation, I was given the very minor role of 'High Priestess Of Ba-al', whose only line was to comment on the gruesome death of another character by snake bite. I tried to make the most of it, but I felt angry and bitter for the duration of the production.
  
• I was devastatd when I missed Johnny Bowles' last episode of Young Talent Time - the one where he (apparently, as Lisa told me excitedly the next day) kissed Tina Arena on the hair. I was obsessed by the Young Talent Team. I fantasised relentlessly about being one of them. The fact that I didn't get into the school choir, didn't know how to dance, and had only been deemed worthy of playing the lowly High Priestess Of Ba-al did little to dampen my enthusiasm.
  
• When I was in Year 6, I wrote a story that was read out in class. It was about a picture that came to life, and the last line was: 'Then I got the picture. It was all a dream!' Everybody clapped and laughed, marvelling at how clever I was. But it was a complete accident. I'd had no idea I'd made a joke. I never fessed up.

So these are some of my defining moments, without which I would be me, just a different, possibly saner, certainly less scarred version of myself.
What were yours?