My babysitter was a witch!
I grew up with some really really weird people. Mind you, it was a radical lesbian marxist household, so I suppose that goes with the territory. Some of my "parents'" strange friends would babysit me - there was the lady up the road whose son, although twice my age (I was 4, he was 8) insisted he was my boyfriend. There was the ex policewoman who once peeled apples, threw away the apples and made us eat the peel. The best though, was the white witch.

A vicar's daughter, I'm not sure how she'd become a witch, but she was part of a sisterhood and everything. When I was three, she'd tried to teach me tarot cards, but I was far too interested in the pretty skelleton pictures to pay much attention. She had crystal balls in her room, a really cool pyramidal one (for chanelling energy) and a whole load of strange things.

She was also a fitness freak and a strict vegetarian - her kitchen smelt of the 70s, and we made soup and added ingredients from large jars on shelves stuffed with all kinds of odd labelled things I couldn't read.

One day, many years later, I found out she'd died. Over exertion they said (that's what too much exercise does to the over 60s), and in her will she'd written that she wanted all her friends to come to her house and take a small trinket that reminded them of her. All the rest went to the sisterhood. I was about 9. Entering the room, I saw the crystal balls. 'No', they said 'Those have already been reserved by the sisterhood...' I took a small sheep I used to play with, a coiled sea shell and an old silver brooch I remembered.

After that, I used to use it in exams, hoping it'd bring me luck. It might have made a difference had I revised better - by the time I was 14 I gave up, polished the brooch, and then left the pretty shiny thing in a print tray in my room. Nothing extraordinary happened.
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Thu 20 Apr 2006, 21:14, Reply)