Jolly HockeySticks.

I was a disaster with a hockeystick, and given half a chance, I would have been a disaster at Lacrosse too. But I so wanted to be good at these archetypical boarding school games: if only because our local comprehensive just didn’t live up to my idea of what school should be about.

In my head, school should have been like it is in Malory Towers. Slimy toads called Gareth and Lee, and Robert and Paul should not have existed, because I was destined for a girls school were everybody said "Rather!", ate cucumber sandwiches, had wonderful thing’s called tuckboxes and got to have their very own grown up room’s when they became Prefect’s.  "Mother" should have called once a term to take me and my orphaned friend Clarabelle to the swankiest hotel in the area, before delivering  me back to a world where parent’s didn’t exist and the head girl wasn’t the biggest suck up in the class, but a really rather fabulous creature with Hollywood Starlet looks, a wonderful sense of humour and kindness eminating from her every pore…

Alas it was not to be. I was instead destined for the local comprehensive, where Hockey was designed for inflicting injury to the lower shins on biting cold days, and boys, in all there gruesome twelve year old glory, were the bane of my life…

So, as has become the pattern of my life ever since, I created my own little world with the help of old fashioned books and a healthy dose of imagination. And to this day I still adore my wonderful collection of vintage schoolgirl annuals, old fashioned kids books and picture house stories, if only because they take me to a place I longed to be, when I was eleven…   

Slowly but surely, I am building a little collection of vintage "Boy’s Own" annuals, and the likes in the probably daft hope that one day I will be able to parcel up a tiny little piece of my own childhood and offer it to Finley as a scrumptious alternative to Play Stations and MTV…