It’s that time of week when another blogger is going to be sharing their childhood memories. This week it’s Jess from Babi a Fi.

Which decade were you born in?

1980s. (The best decade, of course!)

What is your earliest memory? How old were you?

Watching a spider crawl across the wall and willing it not to come anywhere near me. I would have been about 2 or 3, proving that my spider phobia goes back a long way.

What was your favourite toy at 5 years old? At 10?

At age 5 I loved my garden swing. Seriously, I could play on that swing for hours singing songs to myself and daydreaming about all the places in the world I could be swinging away in.

Even at 10 I was still pretty fond of the swing, but I was in the final stages of another obsession:

Trolls.

Under my bed I had a whole network of what, to my mother, looked like broken cardboard boxes and scraps of toilet tissue. To me these were the homes and sleeping areas which made up troll villages. Every weekend I’d go to the car boot sale with my granddad, buy a new troll, and initiate it into the clan with a snazzy new outfit created by my own fair hand. (A piece of white cloth tied together with some red wool.) They were given a name, assigned a piece of tissue and a space in a box, and commenced their new life…

Do you still have any toys from your childhood?

I still have quite a few of my old toys. One of my hobbies is collecting doll houses and miniatures, which I’ve been into ever since the Troll Village days, and some pieces date back to that time.

I also kept some teddies, a baby doll, books, and other toys – including a rocking horse that spent a couple of decades in my granddad’s attic. These days they all live in my daughter’s bedroom except for Betsy, my childhood soft toy, who lives on my dressing table because she’s too delicate for a toddler!

Who was your favourite pop group/artist as a teenager?

I really liked A1, and then I became a ‘mosher’, in the local parlance, and listened to lots of punk-rock and nu-metal bands which I thought made me very edgy. I had the band hoodie, the dyed black hair, and the eyebrow ring, and was generally very emo before emo actually became a thing.

What was your favourite TV show(s)?

As a little kid my favourite show was Rainbow, then as I got older I loved Scooby Doo, The Worst Witch, and Dragon Ball Z.

What was the first film you remember seeing at the cinema?

The Flintstones live-action movie in 1994. I thought it was brilliant but, in my defence, I would have only been five or six.

Do you have any dodgy haircut/ outfit memories that you’d rather forget?

So many. The worst was probably the bowl like haircut I had at 11. It was androgynous in all the wrong ways.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A children’s author and illustrator. Then I wanted to be a teacher for a bit.

If you could go back to being a child again what age would you choose and why?

I’d go back to about age 10. We were sucked into the renewed Pokemon craze this summer, and it got me thinking about last time I was so obsessed with a yellow rodent. It was kind of a cut off point for me between being a kid, and caring more about ‘grown up’ issues.

 

Thanks for sharing your childhood memories Jess  – I love the whole Trolls village, it sounds brilliant!

If you enjoyed this post then please do come back next week when another blogger will be remembering their childhood.