My cousin Maria
was 6 months older than me, and so when we were tiny her word was complete gospel.

Among the things she convinced me of were that she had a magic carpet which of course only worked with your eyes closed, and that when we flew on it we had to take pencil crayons for the stars to eat.

When she was 4, she told me she went to stay with her gran in Scotland, and as everyone knows, the snow in Scotland can be about 6 feet deep. Anyway, she was cold, but she knew that if you dug down into the show and made a little cave, you would be really warm. So in the middle of the night she dug an entire cave out, and then dragged her bed and most of the contents of her bedroom into the cave and spent a happily snug night in there.

She also convinced me when they had moved up to Scotland that their house was infested with vicious red squirrels, which caused havoc by chewing through wires and scurrying about after dark. I was so terrified by this that I couldn't sleep unless I was on the top bunk with the ladder kicked away and I had completely cocooned myself in the duvet. Her brother apparently slept with a baseball bat under his bed in case of a midnight squirrel attack. I think I was probably about 13 or 14 before I realised this was all nonsense, and they moved when I was about 6.

The worst one though was when I was a very naive 10 year old, about to go through the very exciting topic at school of sex education. In England we'd be in the same school year, but since she moved to Scotland she was the year above me, and had done the topic some months previously.

She managed to convince me that her younger brother (who would have been 6 or 7 at the time) had started his periods, but he had a rare medical condition which meant that the blood went up inside him and didn't come out.

The best part of all this was it worked so well because I was terrified of her parents and never would have thought to question her far superior knowledge of the world. I dread to think what she convinced me of that I just don't remember.
(Marmite Omelette ...but I feel better having screamed, don't you?, Fri 22 Aug 2008, 15:08, Reply)