Welcome, Alex! Nice to have you here with us for the third in our series of why our privileged upbringings still managed to traumatise us sufficiently. Pull up a seat. Have a beer. (Oooo sorry nope looks like I drank the last one! Have a soy milk.) Get nice and comfy now, and start your story. Good.
Ruby.
Alright. First entry for your ass (Ruby),
Alex is my name, and wishing I could retract statements is my game.
Good.
My childhood, as interesting as ALL of it was, here are a few stories that shall we say have stuck with me.
Why I hate pooing in public.
First of all here’s a picture of when I went paraponting in the French Alps when I was 9. Same holiday we also walked through the Alps from France to Italy. How pleasant.
Ok, why I hate pooing in public. It was year 4, I’d nipped to the toilet during class (probably during PE because I hate that class) and “I decided to go for what would be one of the more eventful shits of my life,” (Inbetweeners quote, check). I can just hear it now, the dreaded noise (I was obviously too young to know the toilet-paper-down-to-silence-the-plop-trick). I need not repeat the potential onomatopoeias that can be used to describe the inevitable sounds one hears during this very personal moment.
Anyway, what followed next was not a satisfying relief of a quiet solitary bowel movement but the interruption by two girls (lets call them Gert and Kim) who felt compelled to say “Ewwww, that must be Alex”. Really, REALLY! I immediately panicked and pulled my feet above the line of the bottom of the cubicle and waited until they had left. My life was over, everyone was going to know that I poo (girls don’t poo right?) and worst of all make a hideous, echoing sound when I do it.
A week later it occurred to me that Gert and Kim didn’t really know for certain it was me who did the poo. I mean after all I waited for them to leave (it didn’t occur to my 8 year old brain that they saw me walk into the cubicle and I was the only other person in the toilet at the time). I had just been gifted with some new school shoes by my mother (big ups) and so I thought just to really cover my tracks and shift the focus off me (which, looking back they probably would’ve forgotten that same afternoon, whereas the dreaded incidence still haunts me) I would casually give them a reason to think it wasn’t me in the toilet at the time.
Genius!
How wrong I was, and how what I said to them only emphasized more that it was me, the girl that plopped. After assembly the following week I went up Gert and Kim (who were on ‘collecting hymn book duty’) and without any pleasantries (hello or otherwise) I proceeded to say to them, “It can’t have been me in the toilet; I’ve got different shoes”.
At which point the girls looked at me confused and I then realised I just placed myself at the scene of the crime, I’d given away my potentially anonymous identity and put a huge ‘I poo loud’ sign above my head.
Only last year did I begin to conger up the courage to do a number two in public, it’s a slow process but I’m getting better at it. The toilets in the link by the museum entrance are becoming quite a regular spot for me. In third form camp (4 days) I didn’t poo the whole time. What up. Never underestimate the power of a little, seemingly insignificant event in one’s childhood. Word.
Moving on to lighter childhood memories.
It seemed logical that the video player should act as a letterbox. I decided to post lots and lots of pens and other really hard-to-get-out objects to some unknown recipient.
My sister and I used to dress up as the deputy principal of our primary school and knock on the front door of the house pretending that we were in trouble.
Once, I went to pick my dog up from her boyfriend’s house, but the owner wasn’t home so I just thought I’d give Bonnie a pat through the letterbox and the BOYF (Fred) bit my hand. Good.
At the end.
Here’s a question for you all. When does childhood end? Surely its different for everyone.
I think mine ended sometime during my first year at high school (11 years) in England when a girl the year above me came to me with her continuous problems, one of which was that she was pregnant. Good, what advice does an 11 year old give, I can’t remember but I think it was something of the lines of get an abortion and stop smoking. Oh and hearing about that girl that shoved an alco-pop up her vagina in front of some boys. Good.
The end,
Alex Retractive
