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.

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.

OH: I’ve just looked through every page of your Grazia magazine.

Me: Mmm?

OH: I think there are two and half truly beautiful women in there.

Me: Two and a half? You mean ‘half a beautiful woman’ or ‘half beautiful’?

OH: Uh … undecided. All the rest are ..

*Long pause during which many facial contortions are observed*

… scrawny. Or not very bright looking.

Me: Interesting. I shall have to go and look through it and see if I can spot which two and a half you mean.

OH: Oh, I think you will, knowing me.

*Pause*

OH: You might not spot the half, though.

Now, me, I’d have thought spotting half a woman would have been easy.

I came downstairs this morning, bleary-eyed, as usual. Sat down in the lounge with my laptop, happily tapping away at emails and PMs and suchlike … and I happened to glance up and see that mirror in the picture up there. Now, I’m not a great housewife, I admit that, and since our cleaner left to take a full-time job things have got a little dustier around here. But that upwardly-mobile graph line on the mirror? That wasn’t there yesterday, honestly!

I gazed at it for a while, trying to work out what it was. At first I thought maybe I wasn’t awake enough to recognise it for what it was, and waited for my brain to process the information and come up with something run-of-the-mill which my sleep-sodden self hadn’t quite got yet, but the longer I sat here, the more I realised that I had no idea what the heck it was!

A snail-trail, that was my first thought, although what any self-respecting snail would be doing on my mantlepiece I had no idea, and there didn’t appear to be any slime. That snail would have had to cross the conservatory, and the lounge, and make a death-defying leap up to the corner of the mirror, there to wander aimlessly up to the top of the Galileo thermometer and then disappear into thin air. Nah. Unlikely.

So I got to my feet and wandered over and peered at the little dotted line and my jaw dropped somewhat. It was a line of eggs!

So. Definitely not a snail then, because the eggs are not big enough, or shiny enough and anyway, snails bury them in the earth. Not a spider, because their eggs come in neat little cocoons glued with Araldite-like efficiency to crevices and mouldings.

I thought. And the solution I came up with was the only one that seemed remotely likely. See what you think.

One of the many moths that flutter in of an evening when the windows are open and the lights are on had got caught short. I could imagine it fluttering around the lounge searching for a suitable plant to lay its eggs on, and Not Finding Anything because I don’t think they do orchids or prayer plants. The poor little thing must’ve got weaker and weaker and more and more tired and finally thought ‘Fuck it, I’ll just drop them here and they can take their chance!’

To support my theory, I cite two pieces of evidence.

1) Moths have various ways of distributing their eggs - in clusters, rings, lines or even (bizarrely) dropped from the air while on the wing.

2) There was a large moth hanging disconsolately from one of my curtains - a Common Rustic, I think. Or it might be a Cabbage Moth. Either way, she looked pissed, but did agree to pose for a photo.

So here’s the question, what should I do now? Should I leave the eggs there and see what hatches? Should I carefully remove them and put them in some rough grass - that being what Common Rustic caterpillars like to eat? Or a mix of brassicas and grasses in case it’s a Cabbage Moth? Or should I just vacuum them up and get rid of them? Common Rustics and Cabbage Moths both being, well, common.

Other, more creative, suggestions are welcome, but will not necessarily be acted upon.