Your inner child
let her out!
‘What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits’. Yep, I’m quoting Jung on a Tuesday lunchtime.
At the weekend I read an interview with Ben Pentreath (if you like interiors you might want to pre-order his new book). At the end of it, he says: “My friend George Saumaurez Smith has got a great line: ‘You are as an adult who you were as a child.’ We often think we can reinvent ourselves in life, but I’m interested in exactly the same things I was at eight as I am at 53 — furniture, interiors, painting, colours, old buildings and old places.”
It’s true of all of us, I think, but that eight-year-old self gets so buried by life stuff that you have to make a conscious effort to get her back.
My child self liked writing stories, drawing, creating sitting rooms (never whole houses) for my dolls in old wooden wine crates, making scrapbooks, finding a corner to read in for hours, making collages (partly because the glue smelled of marzipan), the Arctic and its peoples (I was obsessed by igloos and to a lesser extent sealskin clothing), Astérix, snails (because they carried their home with them everywhere - one for my therapist), spies, detectives and anything related to espionage, playing chess, the Alps (because of Heidi), beaches (less because of the sand and water than because of the wild feeling of standing at the edge of an entire country), shipwrecks, pirates and Life At Sea generally, cooking, big dogs (pet wolves!), little dogs (mini wolves!), paintings featuring domestic interiors, especially Dutch and Flemish ones (this was in Brussels, so there were a lot of them about), places where the streets were made out of water (we went to Bruges all the time).
I won’t go on, but you get the idea: with the exception of snails - I still admire the house business, but I am too furious with them eating my flowers to really like them anymore - these are all things I still love and think about all the time. I can’t post endlessly about shipwrecks or igloos, but loads of those other childhood interests turn up in this newsletter: the books (including about spying), the dogs, the dolls’ sitting rooms which become posts about interiors, the paintings that appear every other Sunday, and I’ve been having such a nice time making collages digitally. Look, here’s autumn:
Here’s what I think about the whole business of that childhood part of you receding and receding until it’s almost vanished (it seems to come back in extreme old age, which I find both intensely disturbing and mildly comforting).
If you are a person who, for whatever reasons, had to shorten their childhood in order to accommodate the perplexing behaviours of adults, then you have probably almost completely lost touch with the child you once were. And the child you once were is you. Like, core you.