Welcome to this week’s Bite Size Memoir,

This project is designed to help anyone record and share some personal memoir in small manageable bites. For anyone new to my blog, I post a prompt every week. There are some constraints to keep it small to encourage you to keep the task manageable and fun (with a reminder of the rules at the bottom of this post). The variety of experience we share each week is becoming a wonderful glimpse into other’s lives as well as a good exercise in making every word count, to cram detail into mere morsels.

If you want to catch up on how it started, please read here. If you have your own blog and want to participate, please feel free to incorporate links to and from your post to encourage readers to blog hop. There’s growing bunch of stalwarts rising to the challenge regularly, but please feel free to dip in and out as a prompt grabs you and time allows.

This week

Following calls for an emotional break after reliving Childhood Illness, I’ve had my thinking head on, racking my brains for a totally neutral and fun topic for this weeks’ Bite Size Memoir. After the past weeks, I’m beginning to doubt there is such a thing – I’m just playing Russian Roulette waiting to see which one of you has the ‘bad’ memory that goes with the prompt!

Worzel Gummidge – a scarecrow character from a series of children’s books by Barbara Euphan Todd, played by Jon Pertwee in the 1979-1981 ITV series. Wurzel could change his head for different occasions – one of them was his ‘thinking head’.
Worzel Gummidge – a scarecrow character from a series of children’s books by Barbara Euphan Todd, played by Jon Pertwee in the 1979-1981 ITV series. Worzel could change his head for different occasions – one of them was his ‘thinking head’.

I went through family photos to see what themes sparked a consistent joy and almost immediately came up with ‘Dressing Up’. Max has just secured the part of Oberon in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream for the UK’s Shakespeare’s School’s Festival and looking back, it’s easy now to see how early his dramatic tendencies were on show – I can’t resist including a few early photographs at the bottom of this post. You may wish to do the same in your own posts although to manage my time compiling your submissions I beg to only include one per player, so please indicate which one you’d like if you have more than one!

‘Dressing Up’ is not however, meant to constrain you to childhood, so please go with what pops into your head. It can encompass anything and anyone you’ve been directly involved with, from parading around in Mum’s high heels when you were little, to top hats and tails for a day at the races – and if you’ve ever seen it – the parading of the Ladies at a race meet (grim..)

Regulars know, I usually start everyone off with examples of 10 x “I remember..” statements as well as 150 words of prose (I have yet to attempt the poetry, which for me would require a considerable amount of extra time!)

Due to other commitments, my time is more limited this week and I’m rushing this post out without either example for the first time.

I’m curious to see whether this helps or hinders your recall, anyway – I certainly find reading other’s pieces, sparks memories I didn’t find during the exercise. Comments on this are very welcome. If you’re new here and want some examples of the different formats have a look at earlier posts by clicking the tag #BiteSizeMemoir left of this post.

Meanwhile, some photographic clues of the likely route I’ll follow including Max aged 9 as Dick Whittington with his first leading lady..

 

One of millions of Spidermen
One of millions of Spidermen

 

Star of David
Star of David
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Cat in the Hat
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Sinbad
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Dick Whittington and his Cat