Monkey Puzzle
There was a giant monkey puzzle tree near where I lived.
In a light-hearted way, my mother told me that if you talked while underneath it, you would turn into a monkey, or go mad, or something similar.
She then went on to say (as this story had evidently been passed down over the generations) that there used to be a monkey puzzle tre near where she lived as an infant, and that she always worried that thinking to yourself constituted talking.
Of course, these nuggets of information became muddled up in my young brain, and I thought that she had actually stated that if I was anything more than brain-dead while in the vicinity of the tree, I would become a monkey, fly up into the tree and stay there, puzzled and gibbering, for the rest of my life.

I also used to have an insane fear that my parents were trying to poison me - anything that looked slightly out of place in my food I wouldn't touch, in case it was a biohazard.

Ah, good times.
( Albert the Mildly Deranged purveyors of nothing much since a year or two ago, Sat 17 Jan 2004, 23:07, Reply)