Monday 28 January 2008

A tidy house is a tidy and imaginative mind

Must have been first scent of Spring in the air that sent me in to a tidying frenzy today. Have actually sorted nearly all the toys, and believe me there are many, in to groups. All a bit arbitrary, animal box still a strange collection of my old animal toys, some soft toys, and some scary Halloween things. Still sparks off my imagination to play lots of exciting animals rule the world, or goodie animals versus baddie animal games. Latter without fighting of course.

Also remembered one of my favourite games as a child, creating stone families. Daughter is quite keen on collecting unusual stones she finds, but prefers to colour them in ('fraid also my idea) than make families out of them. The weirdest thing about my stone families, looking back is that they weren't ordered by size, and it never occurred to me to decorate them. So to any onlookers it just looked like a very peculiar game whereby I just moved stones around, moving my mouth to make their voices. I loved it though, and used to spend many an hour playing stone families by by grandparents coal hole. Not sure why by the coal hole either, maybe I had some dirty families in the game?

Have been worrying my own children lack imagination, as I did as a child, but think stone families proved I had a very vivid imagination. However there was the issue of school stories that still shames me to this day. In infant school the teacher had to take me and my parents aside, and try to explain that when she said write a story she did not mean repeat the same one week after week after week. I'd actually thought I'd cleverly found a fantastic story, that was so interesting it had to keep being written. Sadly, the teacher found it a little lacking in interest. It has also been written before, as Hansel and Gretel.

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