The way you looked at objects when you were a kid

[Pingers]

Recently my 7 year old came out of school with a little rubber he had got in the shape of a dog's head (he really liked it and called it a 'doggy rubber' and I felt happy that in a world run by bastards and murderers a 7 year old can be happy about a doggy rubber). I noticed that the way he looked at it and connected with it was quite different to how I look at objects. To me it was just dog-shaped rubber but to him it was obviously more and I felt some memory of what it's like as a child and how objects seem different when you're a kid.

I was thinking about this yesterday and took a good look at his toothbrush. When I looked, there was quite a lot going on there in terms of pattern and design, but I'd only ever seen it as the blue and red one. I bet he knows every detail of that toothbrush. I don't know when I stopped really seeing everyday objects but I think it was decades ago. I'm not sure if it means anything, but when I started looking at things like he does, it did make me feel like I'd been missing something. My life just a blur of moving from one thing to the next without really paying attention.

[im barry bethel]

Like your toothbrush I always used to look at things and wonder how they were put together, why something stayed clicked shut or turning the dial on the car vents altered the air flow or the magic of a mechanical pencil. Probably started with the light in the fridge, the more mundane the more I would be fascinated, never mind a rocket going to the moon I wanna know why you can shut the wardrobe door so far then it jumps out your hand and does the last two inches itself, never left me really though I can pick something up in a shop and just stare at the bloody thing trying to decipher how the ball bearing got inside.

[gilbertharding]

Oh wow.

I remember when I was a little kid the concrete path beside the house which led to the garden formed a large part of my world... my toy cars would race along it, and go-karts... of course I was so much closer to the ground then. I knew every inch of that concrete. The cracks in it, the parts where the people who made it spilled some water, washing away the cement to expose the aggregate, and the bristle marks where they'd left the broom after they'd swept up, and the smooth patch where someone had had to dig it up and repair it...

Until August my Mum and Dad still lived there, and I'd forgotten all about it. Everything else in the house and garden has changed in the 40 years since those few yards of concrete loomed so large in my imagination.

In a few months my brother and sister and I are selling that house so we have money to pay for my Dad's care. This summer I took what will probably be my last chance to really look at that path, to see if all the things I remembered had any meaning, or could make me feel anything.

Of course it meant nothing, and I felt only embarrassment.

[hummingofevil]

I've recently been living back in my childhood home for few weeks and I've bedn thinking about this a lot. Things that are so deeply ingrained into my memory that only I know of care about and things that I held/hold highly.

Big one for me is walking around home town (Wrexhan in my case).  Familiarising myself with streets, street names and areas that I've long forgotten but still remember tiny details about. The weirdest one I think is knowing where all the dropped curbs are from years of riding bikes around the streets.

Also find it fascinating how we establish very specific routes for journeys taking a cut across this piece of grass or walking slightly too far along to next street to use a short-cut that just about cancel each other out. I don't think I'm alone in having different routes for the same journey depending on which direction you are going. By definition they can't both be quickest route so why did it become so ingrained that that is the right way.

Also love comparing how long or difficult journeys are in comparison to childhood. I will happily walk an 5 mile trip now but that same 10 min car journey as a child felt like days. Also inclines that are barely there I remember as huge hills from having to put a bit of graft on the BMX when I was 8.

—
I also used to stare at artex (I've literally never seen that word written down in my life before typing it - Artex) walls for ages. The lumps would eventually turn into craters as a trick of the eye like the flipping cube and used to love that.

[hummingofevil]

We all saw cars as faces yeah? Headlamps as eyes, the grill/bonnet as nose and number plate as teeth. I always wondered what cars were thinking as they each had personality and found it really weird seeing new cars in adverts or car shows that didn't have  number plates because they didn't have their face.

I decided once that if i was going to go on Mathew Kelky's You Bet my skill would be to recognise the make and model of cars only from the aurora from their headlights.

[buzby]

Like your toothbrush I always used to look at things and wonder how they were put together, why something stayed clicked shut or turning the dial on the car vents altered the air flow or the magic of a mechanical pencil. Probably started with the light in the fridge, the more mundane the more I would be fascinated, never mind a rocket going to the moon I wanna know why you can shut the wardrobe door so far then it jumps out your hand and does the last two inches itself, never left me really though I can pick something up in a shop and just stare at the bloody thing trying to decipher how the ball bearing got inside.

Ditto. For as long as I can remember whenever I've encountered a new object my brain almost subconsciously starts working out how it's assembled, to the point where I end up with an 'exploded diagram' mental image of the thing in question. I reckon my dad had the same thing - he could fix almost anything (which was a necessity, as we didn't have 2 shillings to rub together), though his speciality was clock and watch repairs, despite leaving school at 14 and never having worked in the trade. As a kid he gave me my own set of tools and  kept me supplied with clocks, dead electrical kit (TVs and radios were always a highlight) and broken toys he'd picked up cheap to take apart (and more importantly put back together) and would sit and explain to me how the things worked.

[amnesiac]

I had a real thing about dimensions/ ratios, like I wouldn't play with toy cars that weren't the same scale, a big toy car and a small toy car together for me were like a tear in the fabric of space/time.

[VaginaSimpson]

Yes! Meditation can take you back to that place. It's being very present and studying the shape, the colour etc until these things become intense and almost consuming. Even sweet wrappers were magical. I suspect some people still live like this. Life can be beautiful.

[non capisco]

We all saw cars as faces yeah? Headlamps as eyes, the grill/bonnet as nose and number plate as teeth. I always wondered what cars were thinking as they each had personality and found it really weird seeing new cars in adverts or car shows that didn't have  number plates because they didn't have their face.

I was obsessed with electricity pylons when I was a kid and definitely saw them as anthropomorphic with faces.

First horizontal line eyes, second nose, third mouth. And he's wearing a little hat.


Look at this bald bastard


A bunch of LEGENDS walking home after an all night rave


I had complicated ranking systems worked out based on the rarity of the type of pylon and even assigned some of them primitive back stories. There was an unusually squat, fat looking pylon in the middle of a field in Betsham surrounded by other various types of pylon which really reminded me of Jabba The Hutt's palace. There was even an abandoned half-built excuse for a pylon next to the fat one which was obviously its version of Salacious Crumb.

This lanky git near Dartford was of course 'the king of the Pylons', due to its height and little crown-like thing.

[Buelligan]

[tag]...the way the objects gazed into thee[/tag]

[a duncandisorderly]

this is my new favourite thread.

[hummingofevil]

I was obsessed with electricity pylons when I was a kid and definitely saw them as anthropomorphic with faces.

First horizontal line eyes, second nose, third mouth. And he's wearing a little hat.


Look at this bald bastard


A bunch of LEGENDS walking home after an all night rave


I had complicated ranking systems worked out based on the rarity of the type of pylon and even assigned some of them primitive back stories. There was an unusually squat, fat looking pylon in the middle of a field in Betsham surrounded by other various types of pylon which really reminded me of Jabba The Hutt's palace. There was even an abandoned half-built excuse for a pylon next to the fat one which was obviously its version of Salacious Crumb.

This lanky git near Dartford was of course 'the king of the Pylons', due to its height and little crown-like thing.

I child I worked was a bit obsessed with pylons too and it took me ages but he eventually explained that he thought they were decorations with no useful function. That is so lovely and uncynical on a number of levels and just wish it were true. Like idea of how cool it would be for human beings to invent fighter planes that can do mad flips and loops at 1000mph just because we can and not for all the horrible war and murder stuff.

[a duncandisorderly]

how cool it would be for human beings to invent fighter planes that can do mad flips and loops at 1000mph just because we can and not for all the horrible war and murder stuff.

I read the story of peenemunde recently; it struck me that there may be something a little 'well, they would say that, wouldn't they?' about the rocket scientists' version of things, but still, until they were themselves bombed several times by the allies, they didn't really seem to be fixated on delivering death so much as scientific advancement.

[The Boston Crab]

Masterpiece of a thread.

Buzby, that was delightful and explains so much about you! I'm envious of and massively respect your knowledge.

Non capisco, one of my favourite posts in ages :)

[Emma Raducanu]

Is there a point where people lose their imagination and therefore cease to see what's around them? After a long hard day, if we're both tired, my wife and I will just chill the fuck out with wine, slouch on the sofa, watch a bit of TV, have a bath - non of which involves using the brain! Meanwhile, our daughter will be here, there and everywhere, playing and playing. She'll do jigsaws, set up dominos, create a house out of cushions - whatever - just constantly active, always playing.

30 years ago, we'd go on holiday in the caravan. Seperated from all our things back at home, I can remember my brother playing with pegs as if they were toy figures. I know the pegs were as fun to play with as his toys because he'd play with them all day if it was raining.

[The Boston Crab]

I can tell you one object I still haven't got bored of playing with!



The Nintendo Switch because it has a steady stream of excellent video game releases.

[DoesNotFollow]

Is there a point where people lose their imagination and therefore cease to see what's around them?

I think it's at least partly about allowing yourself to be bored (as a kid you've kind of got no choice). Spend a week or two in a caravan again away from all your stuff and I'm sure you'd start really noticing things again.

[Pingers]

^ This reminds me of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. It's a partly autobiographical account of a summer spent on a tiny island, a skerry, in the Gulf of Finland, where Jansson built a summer house. The island is so small it takes 4 and a half minutes to walk around it. In such a tiny space, the summer visitors to the island become intimately familiar with places and objects. The book is written from the point of view of a child, but Jansson had clearly retained those impressions in adulthood. I love this passage:

She turned on her side and put her arm over her head. Between the arm of her sweater, her hat, and the white reeds, she could see a triangle of sky, sea and sand - quite a small triangle. There was a blade of grass in the sand beside her, and between its sawtoothed leaves it held a piece of seabird down. She carefully observed the construction of this piece of down - the taut white rib in the middle, surrounded by the down itself, which was pale brown and lighter than the air and then darker and shiny towards the tip, which ended in a tiny but spirited curve. The down moved in a draught of air too slight for her to feel. She noted that the blade of grass and the down were at precisely the right distance for her eyes. She wondered if the down had caught on the grass now, in the spring, maybe during the night, or if it had been there all winter. She saw the conical depression in the sand at the foot of the blade of grass and the wisp of seaweed that had twined around the stem. Right next to it lay a piece of bark. If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools. The scrap of bark was beautiful and dramatic. It rested above its shadown on a single point of contact, and the grains of sand were coarse, clean, almost grey in the morning light, and the sky was completely clear, as was the sea.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Ahhhh, I love that book.

I've never lost my fascination with Warhammer type fantasy figures, the sheer attention to detail and skill that goes into the best-painted ones. Weirdly, I'm almost more into the bases on some of them than the figures themselves, the effort that goes into producing tiny boulders and clumps of grass and other bits of scenery from this non-existent pseudo-medieval world.

[Gregory Torso]

This is a wonderful thread.

The stuff non capisco wrote about pylons is great, and I think I saw them in a very similar way as a child, like big sculptures or skeletons, these big wire frame easter island heads with electricity flowing between them, keeping our world going.

I had a thing with trees, too, like I imagined they moved in a cycle that was too slow for us to see, used their branches to communicate in kind of semaphore. I'd always try to see the very top leaf of a tree when we drove past, or imagine how far the roots went under the ground, maybe the tree dies before it can even realise its functions of locomotion because it lives at such a slow speed.


I have a terrible understanding of anything electrical or mechanical still now, can't imagine how something is put together, perhaps exact opposite of Buzy above, but I have always had a very good sense of direction and spacial awareness, because I always focus on things other people don't seem to notice: the buzzing light tube on a street sign, a fissure in lumpy tarmac, a tangle of wiring spaghetiing out of the back of a high up box on a wall (don't ask me what it does, that box, but I take note of its pattern of wires). I could spend a day walking around a city seeing the small things in corners.

[Gregory Torso]

Also, looking at things and thinking about the processes behind them, how they got there.

Ever look at an apple in a supermarket and get really depressed thinking about how someone nurtured a tree, and someone picked the apple, and someone sorted it as being one of the best of its kind, and another person packaged it up with care so it wouldn't bruise, and someone set it out in a shop in a display to make it look more desirable, and now you're holding it and all you're going to do later is take a bite out of it and throw it at a donkey in Skegness.

[Brundle-Fly]

It was water with me. I'd spend hours in the kitchen filling up the stainless steel sink to the very brim and float Tupperware pots in it. I liked to look at the meniscus of water in various clear glass receptacles, especially test tubes. I was and still am, my most content being underwater. I was that kid who pretended to be a corpse in the swimming pool. I loved any toys that were marine in nature with blue and green packaging.

ie


A blue translucent water pistol would be a thing of beauty to me.

[Dex Sawash]

Family trips were almost always day+ drives. Can't hear the radio from the back, windows down and only 1 speaker up in the dash. Stare out open window at



for hours.

[a duncandisorderly]

Family trips were almost always day+ drives. Can't hear the radio from the back, windows down and only 1 speaker up in the dash. Stare out open window at



for hours.

that's magnificent. glen campbell vibes.

[hummingofevil]

Also, looking at things and thinking about the processes behind them, how they got there.

Ever look at an apple in a supermarket and get really depressed thinking about how someone nurtured a tree, and someone picked the apple, and someone sorted it as being one of the best of its kind, and another person packaged it up with care so it wouldn't bruise, and someone set it out in a shop in a display to make it look more desirable, and now you're holding it and all you're going to do later is take a bite out of it and throw it at a donkey in Skegness.

I do this with supermarket sandwiches when they get chucked at end of the day. Get genuine feelings of sympathy towards the concept of Egg Salad.

[Icehaven]

I used to have quite a thing about there being 'secret worlds' in/under/behind things like clouds, rivers, ponds, treetops and so on, populated by magical creatures. I got the notion mostly from a variety of kid's books and films like The Water Babies, Narnia, The Magic Faraway Tree etc., but I could never quite picture what they looked like or how they worked, other than being similar to the films/books adjusted to fit whatever environment I was in (I had a better imagination as a child than I do now but it still wasn't very visual, more conceptual). I'd think if I did certain things or stayed there long enough I'd somehow be able to enter their world, but I never quite managed it. Similarly I'd see distant clouds on the horizon and almost convince myself they were hills or mountains (only really works when you live somewhere flat like the West Midlands where they definitely aren't).
And of course I thought there were little tiny bands inside stereo speakers.

[Large Noise]

I used to have quite a thing about there being 'secret worlds' in/under/behind things like clouds, rivers, ponds, treetops and so on, populated by magical creatures.

I did this too, sans the magical creatures. Though for me it was always stuff like hidden alleyways or tunnels behind walls and fences, like secret shortcuts. When I was about 5 there were prints of A Cafe Terrace at Night by Van Gogh and Water Lily Pond by Monet hanging on our living room wall and I thought both scenes were round the corner from my house.

[amnesiac]

A blue translucent water pistol would be a thing of beauty to me.

I really think this must be universal because I remember basically wanting to eat a translucent blue water pistol because they are so beautiful. I read about this phenomena recently

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-want-to-bite-cute-things-like-adorable-newborn-babies/

The article is focussed on wanting to bite babies but it works for translucent blue water pistols too.

[Brundle-Fly]

I really think this must be universal because I remember basically wanting to eat a translucent blue water pistol because they are so beautiful. I read about this phenomena recently

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-want-to-bite-cute-things-like-adorable-newborn-babies/

The article is focussed on wanting to bite babies but it works for translucent blue water pistols too.

There used to be those rubber translucent stubbly bicycle handles I always want to bite on.

[willpurry]

I was really into telegraph poles, especially................