I've always lived in a world of my own, ever since I can remember I've had a vivid imagination.

Personally I blame my Mothership for teaching me to read at an early age, Its also one of the best things she's ever done for me and I pity everyone who finds reading hard. How I love to escape from my real world into a book.
I remember teaching myself to read too by listening to those taped books, the disney ones you got and following the words on the page and my favourite was "She-ra and the Golden Goose"
I cant remember not being able to read and reading novels when my classmates were still reading what I considered babyish.

I took those stories and adventures and played them out, sometimes with my classmates, sometimes with The Brat, sometimes with OF and her brother and sister and mostly on my own.

I must have looked strange playing on my own..

I was Bambi when the leaves fell at autumn, pawing them aside to find the grass, I was a wolf running in a pack hunting, as I peddled my bike furiously.

I was Mina Harker hunting Dracula, I was Robinson Crusoe and Bertha Rochester, occasionally Jane Eyre but Bertha was always more fun, and wasn't I over the moon when I read "Wide Sargasso Sea"? I was Nancy fighting off Sykes in Oliver Twist, I was the Hunt brothers going around the world catching wild animals. I rode Black Beauty every time I went on the little ponies at the stables. I was Cathy running across the moors, wild and restless. I was Ahab catching whales and Scout meeting Boo Radley.

I was eight or nine and they were more real to me than my live friends and I plagurised the books shamelessly in my own stories for school work. My teachers didn't think I really read those books and understood them but I took the gist of the story and made it my own, perhaps I missed all the deep meanings of who Heathcliff was, I thought he was a prat and it wasn't until I got older that I truely realised his character and how he loved Cathy and why he hurt everyone else.
I think they forgot sometimes when they saw me ploughing through The Mill On The Floss or Vanity Fair that they were just stories. They quizzed me on the relevance of the Cunninghams in To Kill a Mockingbird and I didn't pick that up when I was 9 and they took that as me not understanding what I was reading, but I did. They were stories.

I made up stories in my head, I wrote them down on paper, I acted out dramatic parts often being two or three character when I played on my own.

And as I grew older my sense of randomness increased, I fell in love with Monty Python and the more my own sense of loneliness increased, through school and my misery at being at home the more I went into my own world and I suppose I was like Peter Pan, my sense of humour never grew up, I find childish things more fun than supposedly grown-up humour, I still love jumping in puddles, and rolling around in bubble-wrap and I still love reading more so than watching TV and films. Now I'm older I return to my "friends" and I understand them so much more and love them still. And I love retreating into my own little world of randomness that gets me strange looks from others and keeps me sane in what ever situation I find myself in and I hope that continues.

Where has all this led too? Well I've found me a secret tree-house so to speak. And I've been "playing" in it all summer and today I realised just how in depth I've made that fantasy world.