This week’s Flickr meme is to pick things or events you remember from each year of your life – #1 through 12? it could be anything: who your best friend was when you were 6; your pet when you were 10; a teacher when you were 12; your favourite toy at age 3 — you get to come up with the item for each of the numbers … or just use random years here and there with the big highlights of your life! Here’s my selection up to the age of 12 (but not one per year, I don’t remember that much that well, and not in order).

1. Being stung on the big toe by a bee when I was about 6. I trod on it in the garden; it hurt; and my mother told me off for walking about in bare feet — didn’t do any good ‘cos I still do!
2. Summer holidays camping at nudist club when I would have been about 9-10.
3. Staying in my grandmother’s flat in Canterbury for summer holiday; guess I was about 6.
4. Finding abandoned duckling (aged 6) …
5. … and releasing it a year later as a handsome Mallard drake. We didn’t have a single slug in the garden that year! My grandmother (she of the flat in Canterbury) hated the duck ‘cos it nibbled at your ankles when you walked down the garden — which I thought was really funny. But then I thought my grandmother was a sour old bag: she was but at least I now understand why.
6. Derek Part who was my best friend when I was 10 or 11. His brother (who was 16) was drowned swimming in one of the local gravel pits. His mother kept a boarding kennels for dogs down next to the piggery. They moved to Liverpool soon after this.
7. Seeing Cliff Richard’s film Summer Holiday as soon as it was released in 1963 (I was 12). Cliff was a local boy (real name Harry Webb); The Shadows used to practice in the boy’s club which backed onto my primary school playing field.
8. Going to my primary school’s football trials at 10 or 11 … and failing miserably.
9. Fresh bread delivered by the bakers roundsman when I was about 4. I always wanted the crust — buttered! At first I think he had an electric hand-cart but later one of these Morris vans, only red. Oh and the bakers was Hill’s.
10. Getting concentrated orange juice & cod liver oil from the welfare clinic when I would have been 1 or 2; I guess this was just before rationing finished.
11. Going to Cub camp at Whitsun half-term when I was 11, and my parents coming out to tell me I’d got into Grammar School.
12. Smelly. dirty suburban steam trains to London; they finished when I was about 8 or 9 and were replaced by first by boring diesel and then even more boring electric trains.

As always the photographs are not mine (except #2 which is from my photostream) so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

1. Bee Sting!, 2. Mother & Son, 3. Canterbury, Weavers, 4. The duckling, 5. Mallard Drake on Ice, 6. Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Dungerness, Kent, 7. Cliff Richard, 8. How to penetrate the defense?, 9. HCVS London to Brighton 2009 – 1955 Morris J Type Van, 10. Wartime Rationing, 11. mega080024, 12. PADDINGTON STATION 1940

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys