Moon = green cheese. Fact.

I’m one of life’s gullible people.

When I was small, my Nanny (that’s my mum’s mum, not The Nanneh. We weren’t that posh) used to tell me that if you swallowed chewing gum it would get wrapped round your heart and you would die. I believed this without question. I also believed that if the wind changed I would stay like that, that my stepfather actually did want me to go and play on the railway line, and that if I looked at a new moon through glass (this was a weird one of my mother’s) some indefinable yet horrible fate would befall me. I used to worry when my parents played their Helen Reddy tape in the car because I thought that the man who talked in between songs on the radio was having to sit in the dark and not say anything. To this day I am not one hundred percent convinced that if I don’t get out of the bath before pulling the plug out I won’t go down the plughole. Also, who’s to say that there aren’t monsters under my bed? I still jump in from two feet away just to make sure. Safety first and all that.

It makes me wonder about the lies we tell our children, and how totally accepting they are (until a certain age of course, which in my case was about twenty three) of any information we give them. Small Person, who fervently believes in the Toast Mouse (an invisible yet emphatically real creature who lives somewhere in our kitchen – we thought he was in the butter tub for a bit, or maybe the jam pot, but the other day she had dry toast owing to an upset tummy and he still managed to take a bite out of the corner of it so the precise location of his lair is now under review), is also currently and variously a full-on Christian (owing to school just telling her that’s what everyone believes), a big fan of her dad’s pagan chanting CD, a hopeful beneficiary of the Tooth Fairy, and petrified that giants might be real (that one didn’t come from me but from her latest school reading book. Thanks, school). She has also recently assimilated the information that boys can love (and indeed, marry) boys and that girls can do the same with girls. She giggled incredulously and I think she thinks I’m making it up but there you go. As long as she continues to believe that I have “Mummy Magic” which renders me all-knowing and means I am able to read her thoughts, know exactly what she’s doing even when I can’t see her, and suss out even the smallest lie, then we’ll be okay. I am particularly keen that she still believes this into her teens, as if there’s even the slightest hint of her turning out anything like me I’m going to put her up for adoption and let someone else deal with the fallout. Coming soon – my life as a teenage nightmare….

Now, where did I put the bicarbonate of soda? Only if you feed it to a seagull it’ll explode, you know. Or is that pigeons? Or baking powder? Or are they the same thing (bicarbonate of soda and baking powder I mean. Even I can (usually) tell the difference between a pigeon and a seagull)? Whatever.