Well, folks, I got nothin’ here. Seriously, I’m having to rack up so many blog posts in advance, so that I can go on holiday and still get paid, that there is absolutely nothing else going on my life right now. And so it is that I have once again opened up The News Book and am allowing my six-year-old self to write today’s post.  If only I had known at the time that I would one day end up doing this, I could have quit right there and saved my parents that expensive university education they gave me. But anyway!

This post is one I call simply “pants”:

pants post

The text reads:

“Tuesday 22nd February

I went to the Doctors for a check up he was a nice Doctor he sed that I was growing up when I came out of the Doctors my mum got me some new pantes I was needing them I am good at panting picturs of my mummy and daddy I can paint a dog”

Still having that old “punctuation is for sissies” issue, then, eh?

What’s interesting about this, though, isn’t the fact that I spoke fluent LOLCat as a child, or, indeed, that I suddenly remembered that “paint” has an “i” in it, right in the final moments of the “story”, having referred to my new paints as “pants” throughout. No, what’s interesting about this one is the fact that I chose to illustrate the exciting tale of my new “pants” with a “pictur” of my bedroom, which apparently contained a large, caged beast:

Amber and the Beast

Now, if you’ve read Part Two of this series, in which Rusty gets a frite and Snoopy does the toylet in the cichon, you’re probably thinking this beast is either Snoopy or Rusty, those bad, toylet-doing dogs, right?

But no. I gave no explanation of the presence of The Beast in this image, but if memory serves, this would be Coco. My hamster. He was a big ‘un, wasn’t he? Roughly the size of a small bear, I’d say.

I have absolutely no explanation for the … thing… I’m holding in my hand, mind you. Absolutely none. The juxtaposition of beast-in-giant-cage and me with… thing… is actually quite disturbing, though. I really hope PETA don’t read this…

P.S. Note, too, that I drew my own “star” on the pictur. Just, you know, in case the teacher forgot…

When I was a child, my parents would occasionally find themselves looking after two dogs. The dogs in question were brothers: Snoopy belonged to my mum’s parents and Rusty belonged to my dad’s parents, and if both sets of grandparents decided to take holidays at the same time, the dogs would come to us. This was, of course, a very great thrill for me, although not so much for my parents, who knew that every visit with the dogs would end with me writing this kind of thing in my News Book:

It didn’t scan too well, but the text reads:

Thursday 29th September

We are looking after to dogs for a week. One is called Snoopy and one is called Rusty. One day Rusty pumped. he go such a fright that he jumped up and ran away to the other side of the living room. When Rusty eats he gets his bowl all over the floor.

Once you know that “pumped” = “farted” you will perhaps be able to understand the trepidation with which my mum and dad approached each parents evening, knowing that this is the kind of thing I would’ve spent the term writing about.

Incidentally, Snoopy wasn’t exactly Mr Perfectpants either:

Thursday 16th November

I went to my granns on Sunday my grann has got a dog cold snoopy he is funy he can oppen the living room door when I was at my granns he was bad he dun the toylet in the cichon I get my tea at my granns I have sanwiches and biscuts and we play with snoopy

What I don’t mention in the text, but what is painfully apparent from the accompanying image, is that Snoopy didn’t just do the toylet in the cichon, he clearly dun it on the washing machine. (Now we know where Rubin gets that from!) And that my mum apparently had to lie on her belly to clean it up. Also pictured: my “grann”, who, like me, had hair the approximate colour of a post box. She’s presumably cooking up the sanwiches and biscuts, while I just stand there thinking, “I’m SO going to write about this on the Internet one day!”

Here are the dogs in question, apparently being strangled by me, and both thinking, “Oh God, please don’t let her write about us in her News Book…”

Rusty & Snoopy

Snoopy and me

I’d imagine most of the people reading this probably think I’ve only been using the written word as a means of embarrassing myself in public for as long as I’ve had access to the Internet.

How I wish that were true.

Actually, I’ve been embarrassing myself in public since I learned to write, and as proof of that, today I present to you Forever Amber: The Early Years. Yes, way back in the mists of time my school required its young students to keep what they called a “News Book” but which was actually just a personal journal – an early “blog”, if you will. Every few days we would write an entry in our “News Book/Early Blog” detailing what had been happening in our lives,  and every single time I would write something so toe-curlingly embarrassing my parents would have to call the school and make excuses for me. I’m not joking.

Witness, for instance, an entry I wrote when I was six, concerning a movie my parents had borrowed from a friend of theirs which turned out to have a little “surprise” on the end of the tape (in those days we used video cassettes, as well as writing things on “paper” rather than on the Internet. Quaint!) …

The full text reads:

“Monday 9th May

I have got a video and I have seen star wars four times and I have seen Bugsy malone twelve and a half times Jennifer has taped Bugsy Malone aswell one night when my mum and dad were watching a film on the video when it was finished a blue moovy came on my mum and dad did not like it and my mum was frightened to get another tape ancase there was another blue moovy on it”

Just in case my parents’ apparent porn consumption* required further clarification, of course, I provided a handy illustration of the events outlined above,  in case the school weren’t clear on whether or not they should be calling social services about this:

Luckily when the teacher asked me what a “blue moovy” was, I was quickly able to clarify that it is a “moovy” in which everything is coloured blue. Obviously. And when my parents visited the school for parents evening that term, they were able to further clarify (at their own insistence, I have to add – the teacher by this point thought it was hilarious)  that this “blue movie” had been as much of a surprise to them as it probably had been to my teacher, and that although the illustration suggests that I had been present during the screening of the infamous moovy (it almost feels like you’re there now, doesn’t it, so masterful was my command of the blue crayon…), I had, in fact, only found out about it because I overheard my mum telling my gran the story. Which I faithfully committed to writing in what I now think of as the very first version of this here blog, a document I spent most of Saturday re-reading and laughing until I cried.

In the years that followed, you’ll be glad to know that I learned how to punctuate a little better. I never did learn to stop embarrassing myself in public, though…

* My mum says she will ground me if I don’t explain that they had borrowed a film someone had recorded from the TV, had watched it, and when it ended, had discovered that it had apparently been recorded over the top of something a little more adult than the film they had borrowed. She would also probably like me to clarify that my parents DID try to teach me that there are some things in life you just don’t share, but given that I’ve already told the Internet all about my knickers and how I keep on dyeing them grey, it doesn’t look like that lesson sunk in particularly well…