On a whim this evening, partly inspired by Baino, I looked up one of my childhood homes on Google maps, using the satellite view.

I was born in London, but when I was ten years old my father got a new job, in Tiptree, and I got my first experience of moving house. It was a bit of a culture shock all round - we moved from an eighth floor flat in the city to a semi-detached house in a medium-sized village. Mum breathed a sigh of relief, being a country girl, and was soon elbow deep in compost, planting things in the garden. My older brother chose to go to a college in London and so he pretty much continued living there, but my younger brother and I had a little adjusting to do. For the first time in my life I was allowed outdoors by myself. I had a garden to wander out into, and kids my age just outside my front door, and I made the most of it.

I ended up having a long walk to school - if you look at the map above, my home is marked by the blue tag towards the top, and my school by the blue tag near the bottom. Oh, I was given money for the bus, but you know what kids are. We used to pop into the shop and spend the bus fare on sweets, or stop the milkman on his rounds and buy a third of a pint of orange juice in real glass bottles … so my friends and I would walk the mile or so to school in all weathers and think nothing of it. In fact we used to take detours and find different routes, and play in streams and fields on the way, and buy apples from trays outside people’s houses if we had any money left - and when I looked at that satellite picture today it made me a little bit sad.

Gone is the huge triangular field where a friend of mine once tried to ride a cart horse bareback and fell off, breaking her arm. Gone is the disused railway track we would walk along to pick wild strawberries between the tracks. Gone, the Kiltie Cake Shop and the little grocery where we could put our pennies together and buy a few ounces of biscuits, sold loose from big wooden boxes and handed to us in brown paper bags.

The meadow where I picked bunches of wild red and white campion is gone, and so is the brook. There are houses there now, and the brook is probably buried in a concrete pipe. The rough, sandy bank near the crossroads is gone. I used to catch lizards on that bank and watch them blinking in the palm of my hand for a few seconds, before they leaped to freedom.

The pond is gone, for goodness’ sake! That pond was an institution! Where did the pond go?

But, hey, the old windmill is still there, and the playing field too, and none of it has been sold off for housing, although they’ve tidied it up a tad. They’ve enclosed the play equipment with a neat little fence and put down some kind of kid-proof surface. I don’t know what was wrong with grass, but there you go.

My Dad worked for the Anchor Press, which churned out thousands of paperbacks, including Dennis Wheatley and Barbara Cartland among the popular titles. Now, there is yet another housing estate where the Anchor Press used to be, and it was one of the two biggest employers in the village. I wonder what happened?

The other big employer is still there - Wilkins’ jam factory. I used to earn pocket money picking strawberries for Wilkins, and let me tell you, those Little Scarlett strawberries were the very devil to pick - they used to pay us extra for those! So small! And yet, so deliciously sweet! Wilkins jam is now Tiptree Conserve - you can still buy it, and it’s still expensive. ‘By Appointment to the Queen’ … I wonder if she ever knew that my brother’s friend, working there during the summer holidays many years ago, dropped his lunchtime peanuts into the vat?

Go on, look up your childhood home on Google maps, and see what’s happened to it. I dare you.

If you moved away and haven’t been back, my guess is that you’re in for a shock.

It’s hard to understand how people’s minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s good to try to keep members of the public safe, but this is a private reservoir on private land, with a rather patriotic locked gate, and a fence around it and everything. In fact, you wouldn’t know there was water there at all if you didn’t have local knowledge, because you can’t see it unless you’re trespassing. You can see nothing from the road here, can you? And on the footpath side, it’s overgrown and practically invisible.

That being the case, the sign below is more than a little puzzling.

I’m guessing that the owner of the farmland wants to avoid a lawsuit, possibly from parents of local youngsters who decide to go for an illicit swim. Or maybe he thinks some dog-walker might accidentally climb the barbed wire fence, negotiate the thistles and brambles and the steep, rutted and weed-strewn incline, and just, you know, think it’s a large rectangular puddle or something and try to walk across it.

But there’s a flaw in this thinking. You see, someone stupid enough to do that would simply not be able to decipher the message on that notice.

‘Overhead water’? I couldn’t help it, I looked up involuntarily to see if I was about to be hit with some vast practical joke of a deluge.

So what chance does Mr Stupid have?

Other Half knows I’m much more comfortable with insects than he is, so he usually calls me if something wanders in. He thinks they all belong outside, and this time he was right - it was a wasp.

Mr Wasp was sitting on the kitchen counter, right by the kettle, looking rather forlorn, and with the weather we’ve been having this week, I couldn’t blame him. It was probably the only source of warmth he could find.

Now the thing about wasps is this: they are persistent little buggers. If you do the glass-and-postcard thing and transport them outside, they’re just as likely to fly straight back in again, because they smelled something nice in here the first time and they’re not about to give up because of a temporary setback. And each time you take them out, they get more pissed off about it, and a little harder - and more dangerous - to catch.

So I thought I’d try a different approach.

The little guy was already walking in circles around the inside of a glass and wondering what the hell had happened to his world, because OH had dropped one over him before he called me, and very brave it was too, considering that the last time he was stung he went rather dizzy and faint and worried everyone considerably. Anyway. I cut a nectarine in half and removed the stone, and wiped some of the ripe flesh off the stone onto the postcard (waste not, want not!) and then I slid the postcard under the wasp’s new home, carefully lifting the rim over the smear of fruit and I took the whole thing outside.

I left him under the glass, already greedily feeding on the pulp, and rushed in to get my camera, but I needn’t have worried. He stayed right where he was even after I took the glass away. He stayed right where he was as I took a few macro shots. He stayed right where he was even when I put the flash into ‘forced on’ mode and took some more shots which must have half-blinded him, and last I saw of him he was still there, sucking that stuff up as if there was no tomorrow. He’s probably there even now, sleeping it off in a happy, drunken haze.

Now, I know most of you will think I’m absolutely crazy for saving the life of a wasp and feeding him nectarine, let alone taking pictures of him, but hey - he didn’t fly straight back in, did he?

Of course, if it had been early spring and it had been a queen wasp in my house, she would have been flatter than … um … a very flat thing in … ah … no time flat, because I really don’t want a wasp’s nest hidden somewhere inside.

I’m not completely insane.

For those who are interested in such things, this is a German Wasp - nearly as common as Vespula vulgaris, the Common Wasp, but I think a little prettier.

I was abruptly taken back to my childhood while reading Not Afraid To Use It this morning, because a question which blighted her childhood also echoed through mine. It was a metaphorical question, and you can bet your life that if we’d answered that one, we’d have been in very deep shit indeed.

Looking back, it seems to me that our parents came out with certain stock phrases without too much thought about what effect they might have. Maybe it was simply that their parents said them, or maybe they used them because they had the desired effect of making the kid shut up. Whatever the reason, many children of my generation heard the same things, over and over again.

So let’s examine a few of those phrases, and see if they’re as bad as I remember them. We’ll start with the one mentioned by Not Afraid To Use It in her blog post. ‘Just who do you think you are?‘

What does this say to a child? It says ‘you are not good enough for that’. It says ‘you are far too confident in my love for you if you think you can say that to me and get away with it’. Uh … don’t we want our children to grow up feeling worthy and confident and trust that we love them no matter what? I thought we did …

I used to get ‘who do you think you are?‘ when I questioned my Mum’s dictates on what I should wear or how I should behave. Now, I was basing my rebellion on the fact that my brothers were treated differently, but I had failed to take into account the facts that a) they were older than me, and b) I was a girl. However, I still think it would have been better had she pointed these things out to me and explained why she was making me conform to different standards. For instance, ‘I know, love, it’s tough isn’t it, but life just ain’t fair’ might have been easier to take. As it was, I was so wounded that I did indeed shut up, and I was still following Mum’s rules three decades later, when they were well and truly redundant.*

Another one I heard with distressing regularity was ‘Those who ask don’t get‘ which was often followed by ‘.. and those who don’t ask, don’t want‘. What kind of a twisted, sadistic thing is this? So you’re fucked whatever you do? Oh, way to teach a child the concept of learned helplessness and make sure they don’t try anything!

‘Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about‘. Classic! If a child’s upset enough to cry real tears, what are the chances that they can recover their equilibrium by sheer force of will-power? Yep, pretty well non-existent. So in saying this, you’re ensuring that the child becomes instantly more upset and you can get even more righteously angry at them. Sheesh. Great parenting lesson.

Well. at least my parents never - ever - said anything like ‘Don’t you fucking swear at me, you little bitch‘, a phrase I actually heard aimed at a toddler in a local shopping centre at ten o’clock one night by a very young mother.

Most kids had more responsible parents than that, of course, and most took the admonishments in their stride, but for those who took things to heart and who tended to think too deeply, they caused lasting damage, and clearly I was a sensitive soul because I grew up insecure, seriously lacking in confidence, and with an absolutely terrible self-image.

As you know, I’m not a fan of political correctness, but this isn’t a matter of PC gone mad. It’s psychologically damaging when conundra like this are aimed at children too young to understand, especially when they’re said in anger. Now, my parents loved me, that’s without question, and I’m pretty sure they were doing their level best to bring me up properly. They must have said these things without the faintest notion of how much they hurt. So if those words could screw us up so badly without our parents ever being aware of it, doesn’t that beg a very obvious question?

Yeah, that’s right. This one -

What damage have we done to our own kids without realising it?

* Yes, in my late forties. Then I discovered Johnny Depp and his ‘fuck it’ attitude to life.