Same interests, different decade

It's quite odd how things you like when you're really young seem to stay with you all through your life. I was thinking about the Enid Blyton books that I mentioned in yesterday's updated post (when I probably also contravened some traditional blogging way of doing things in the process, but ho hum, whose blog is it anyway...)

I must have read everything she wrote, as there wasn't a lot of choice in the Lusaka public library for children and it was a very long time ago. I liked the Mystery books best, because it sounded really exciting to go snooping around and solving mysteries like amateur detectives. My mum found an old notebook of mine from then, with real life 'mysteries' in it I was trying to solve, like the Mystery of the Disappearing Pets (probably eaten for someone's dinner, not very mysterious really). Or the Mystery of the Girl - what the hell was that?? Or the burglary, when I spent ages looking for 'clues' the next day, and drawing the broken window and footprints nearby! I'm sure that would make a real detective cringe, but I was only about 6.

I'm still interested in crime and detective stuff, so it's quite fascinating, in a way, that things you become interested in when you're really young stay with you through your life, even though no-one else in your family has prodded you in that direction by doing the same thing.

There's a really old photo of me feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square a really, really long time ago, wearing a little red tartan plastic macintosh... (cynics might say I needed a mac to keep the bird crap off!) So did that experience develop into a strange lifelong fondness for tartan and gingham fabric, and birds?? Why do we like the same odd things all our lives, even when no-one else around us does? It can't be parental influence or peers at school, as none of mine ever liked detective stories, tartan or gingham, or birds for that matter... Can't be genetic either, can it? A tartan-bird-detective gene, there's a thought! I guess someone's done research on it somewhere or other... Psychology's never been my 'thing', but I'd be interested to know.

That Enid Blyton site is great, images of all the covers and some illustrations.... ooh The Magic Faraway Tree too!! I got all nostalgic when I saw it! Will try to write less personal stuff next time though, as it's probably not very interesting to anyone else, but one can indulge occasionally, wouldn't you agree?

Update 6.5.07

I was reminded last night that it's not very fashionable to admit to liking Enid Blyton these days, as some people consider her a weeny bit politically incorrect. I don't think she spawned a generation of monsters somehow, was a product of her time, as writers are, and maybe children just take what they want from books anyway- in my case, exploring the adventures and fantastic worlds girls (as well as boys) could have through reading. I wouldn't say I had acquired any horrendous ideas from her work, and it certainly got me into reading from a very young age... can you say the same for the current generation of computer games players?
And anyway, going along with the currently fashionable and hip view is very overrated sometimes.