"A fun craft activity for kids!"
Back in the eighties, Marks and Spencers sold books and one of these was Snail Painting for Children. It suggested growing snails in a back garden and, once they are large enough, adorning their shells with paint or glitter. The book contained photographs of the decorated creatures. If you search for this book, on google or on etsy, it's not there, as if it has tumbled out of history. But I remember flicking through it in the shop, and my mother saying we couldn't afford to buy it. I know it existed and I have to choose between me being wrong or the universe being wrong. But I have reservations about other memories. A lesson in primary school, where we staged a seance. Children being herded into the back of a broken-down white lorry. A magician's body in an alley, the week after he performed at a friend's birthday, which the adults didn't seem to care about. The scout hut disco where one of the songs was just whoops and howling. Mysteries in my life that I cannot solve.
Background
I actually have one of the memories listed in the story above. It makes no sense, and must be false, but I’ve had it for years and it feels as real as any of the others. But there are also things that definitely happened which I find hard to believe - particularly around the cruelty and evil that I encountered at boarding school. Hopefully, this story comes across as something more than portraying a personal Mandela effect. If not, this story might look like cheating, a list story grouping a series of strange images.
I’ve read accounts of fairy abductions in fiction and non-fiction1, and a lot of these seem reminiscent of childhood memories - the same haziness around time, the separation from clear reality. It’s a connection that I want to explore further.
Recommendations
I've spoken before about my love of Buck 65's records. I recently discovered that he released an autobiography in 2015, Wicked and Weird.
I'm a big fan of music biographies, but they tend to spend too much time on unremarkable childhoods. This is the opposite - Buck 65 (aka Richard Terfry) is a born storyteller. The details of his childhood are exaggerated into tall tales. Buck 65 puts in a disclaimer at the start about how "[my] imagination remains more reliable than my memory".
Buck 65's story is one of grace and sadness. It's clear that his love for baseball is far stronger than his love for music, and that he would rather have made a career of that. But neither music or baseball brings him joy. When he finds true love, he is ultimately disappointed by it.
More recently, Buck 65 has spoken of his dissatisfaction with the music he made in the early noughties, some of my favourite records. Even if the new material is not quite what I want, I love reading his writing about them. It’s great to see someone in later life taking such pride in their craft. Buck 65's Substack is well worth following.
I loved seeing someone embellish their life this way. If you're going to write a biography, why not make it interesting rather than accurate?
The best book on fairies - and one of the best books I’ve read - is A Trojan Feast by Joshua Cutchin, which surveys interactions with fairies, aliens and sasquatches that involve food. It’s a deeply weird and wonderful book - particularly the bit around UFOs making fake diners. It’s also where I first learned about Joe Simonton and the alien pancakes.