Whenever I am supposed to dig deep and find something interesting and unique about myself, I almost always find myself heading back to my childhood.
I had what most people see as a weird (or at best (worst?) interesting) childhood. My parents were (ageing? I usually put ageing in there, but they weren’t exactly old when I was little, so maybe that’s the wrong adjective) hippies. They smoked pot. They were vegetarian (well, technically, my dad wasn’t, but he lived a vegetarian life at home and occasionally indulged in a bacon roll when out and about and not in our presence). They wore home-made or second-hand clothes (because they liked to, but possibly also because they had to, as we were definitely poor). They had travelled quite a bit. They both went to art college (they met there, in fact). They spent some time living in a caravan on a farm in a kind of semi-communal set-up. They didn’t really have careers, just made money how they could at any point in time, though my dad spent most of his life building and my mum found a calling in tutoring children in care and/or with a variety learning challenges.
I was home-schooled for much of primary school. My choice – I hated school because I was very ahead and the teachers did nothing with that, other than making me sit quietly and silently when I had finished my work, often half an hour or more before everyone else in the class. I was given a number of options - one was to go to the local Steiner school (I visited it and hated it immediately because all the kids were doing was making baskets and they weren’t happy that I could read already), go to a smaller school in a nearby village (neither of them appealed and neither of them was offering the academic challenge that I wanted) and home education. I imagine, though am not positive, that they would have offered private school if it were within their means - the Steiner school was private, but they had ways you could pay in kind and they would have done building and knitting work to pay for me. I chose home education because I got to write my own curriculum – and make my own timetable. I spent a few years soaking up information, most of which was early secondary school level. I especially loved maths, languages and history. My parents made sure I had plenty of opportunities for socialisation and physical exercise - I went to swimming, gymnastics and trampolining classes, and my mum and her best friend set up a drama class which I went to. I also took music lessons with friends of the family and had some group sessions with some other home educated families from the area.
And my mum took me on loads of adventures, from local trips to museums, to hitchhiking round Europe to attend Esperanto congresses. And then we lived in Spain for a year when I was ten, which was a huge adventure and I learnt to speak Spanish fluently, at least with the vocabulary I used going to a Spanish school – I had no idea how to say lettuce or chickpeas in Spanish, as my dad did all the grocery shopping while we were there, though I did know how to say milk (una bolsa de leche, por favor - milk came in bags not bottles) and to ask for ten copies (diez copias, por favor) at the photocopying shop at the bottom of our apartment building. When there I went with my parents to bars and listened to live music and played cards and juego del occo with other kids or grown-ups who didn’t mind playing games. We had friends with a house in the mountains and would sometimes go out there for a weekend. I sometimes got to go with my mum to the English classes she was teaching and see very fancy houses. We spent Christmas in a friend’s parents’ villa and had freshly picked oranges for Christmas breakfast. We stole a bottle of Cava from a bar on New Year’s Eve (because everyone was in the back celebrating and it was just sat on the bar - we would have paid for it otherwise, I’m assured!) and then slept in a tent on the beach while my parents and their friend drank the Cava. And many other little adventures within the whole big adventure of living somewhere else for a year as a kid.
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