Into the pensieve.

It's been a weird weekend. I was back home at my parents' and somehow every little thing, person, activity and instance seemed to be shouting at me to remember, to look back into my childhood.

There was the annual big jumble sale stretching all over our neighbourhood right outside our front door, and, naturally, I bumped into people I once used to know left, right and centre. And even without those people, those rows and rows of stalls packed with stuff that makes up other people's pasts to me always give off a whiff of melancholy - all those discarded children's clothes, skates, books, abandoned dolls and teddy bears, those countless, inevitably short-lived "hip" toys, record players, first-generation mobile phones, one-hit-wonder CDs, ski suits, schoolbags, unspeakably ugly raffle prizes... - you can assemble whole lives just by looking at the displays.

Then that same evening the people from our street, 16 houses in all, were celebrating the 30th anniversary of their being neighbours (think beer tent and barbecue) and I think I can safely say that's been the strangest social event I have attended in a long, long time. One of the neighbours had prepared a slide show featuring the highlights of three decades which, after a few pictures of the houses being built, seemed to be one long string of weddings, birthdays, silver weddings, neighbourhood outings and more birthdays. Which was nice (in a sliiightly boring way), but at the same time I couldn't help but look around me and, by way of a quick head-count, realize how quite a few of those appearing in the happy pictures are no longer around to see them...

And of course there is only so much small talk you can think of with people who have "known" you all your life, but whom you haven't spoken to in 11 years, and even then it was mostly a "Hello there!" called across the street.

Thankfully some others of the "kids generation" were at the party as well, and it was actually great fun to catch up with those I had last spoken to when we still knocked at each other's doors to ask "Will ... come out and play?" If I was to paint just one picture of my childhood it would probably be of us dozen or so children playing dodgeball and hide and seek in the street on a summer evening.

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Apart from all that, a lot of piano playing and singing for me lately. Amongst others, this one. If anyone happens to know of a playback version of that...? My mother loves it and there's her 60th birthday party looming in a few weeks' time. Not quite sure I can master both the singing and accompaniment until then...

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